Goodreads asked Aaron Rath:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Aaron Rath In a dream. There's a visual effect history shows use, where if they only have a still photograph but want to make it seem more interesting, while the narrator talks they slowly zoom in or out, or pan across the image. In my dream, I saw images of characters from old computer games I used to play, displayed in this History Channel style, having absurd but hilarious conversations with each other. By the time I woke up I only remembered a few of the highlights, but I wrote those down and then sat on it for a few years while the story fermented.

One of those conversations actually made it into the final draft as the item-identification scene in Baltok's Shoppe.

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