Waves of Light and Darkness is a short story collection centered on themes of grief, desire, family, duty, and fear. Why was this an important book to share with readers?

I do not view this book as a message I needed to deliver, but rather as an investigation I needed to conduct. I did not write these stories to teach the reader something important, but to explore a specific question: How do we construct meaning when the lights, literal or metaphorical, go out?

The collection is an experiment in the observer effect. I wanted to look at how we survive the indifference of the universe through stubborn, necessary acts of human connection. If the book is important, it is only because it asks us to look at the labor required to truly see one another through the dark.

The collection frequently moves from social realism into moments where reality seems to bend. What attracts you to that blend?

I am drawn to that instability because strict realism often fails to capture how life actually feels during a crisis. Grief, trauma, and intense desire have a way of warping our perception; they make the ordinary world feel dreamlike or fractured.

By blurring the edges of reality, I can map the interiority of my characters more accurately. I am not interested in just recording the physical world; I want to show how a character’s emotional state literally reshapes the reality they inhabit. That bending is not fantasy; it is the psychological truth of being human.

What does the short story form allow you to do that a novel wouldn’t?

A novel can be, although not necessarily, a long journey with a single destination. A short story collection is like walking down a hallway and opening thirty different doors. The short story form allows for intensity without the obligation of a neat resolution.

It liberates me to explore the same theme, like the fragility of memory or the physics of loss, from dozens of different angles, ages, and backgrounds. In a novel, like my Entanglement-Quantum and Otherwise, you normally have to sustain one reality; in a collection, I can pivot from a domestic dinner to a cosmic mystery in the span of a few pages, creating a mosaic that feels larger than the sum of its parts.

But then, a third possibility, which I have explored and will soon publish, is a novel-in-stories. It is still a collection of short stories or novellas, but they tie together with one or more obvious common threads and symbols. I have titled this yet-to-be-published novel-in-stories, The Dying Cat.

Which story changed the most from the first draft to the final version?

I have no idea. It is not something that I track. I spend hours and days revising each story in minute detail. No story ends up close to the first draft since I work with concepts and ideas, which then are honed into stories and polished.

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