Black Tank follows a grieving former infrastructure specialist whose routine stop at an RV dump station spirals into a reckoning with his wife’s death, a buried professional failure, and the limits of keeping guilt contained. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The original idea actually came to me while my wife and I were camping. I was emptying the black tank on our RV and thought it would make an interesting setting for a story. My mind tends to wander when I’m doing mundane things I’ve done a thousand times, and emptying the black tank is certainly one of those things. I started thinking about what kind of story could take place entirely at a dump station, and from there the idea gradually became Gary and the forty minutes that make up BLACK TANK.

How did you develop Gary’s highly technical voice without letting the engineering language distance readers from his emotions?

The technical language works because it is Gary’s emotional language. He understands the world through systems, measurements, procedures, and tolerances, so I didn’t want to separate that part of him from his grief. The more emotional something becomes, the more he retreats into technical language because that is where he feels in control. It gave me a way to reveal what he is feeling without having him explain it directly. 

Were the maintenance tips between chapters part of the book’s structure from the beginning, or did they emerge as you developed Gary’s character?

The maintenance tips came out of the outlining process. Once I had the story arc mapped out, I created the tips to accompany it. Each one is framed as a technical principle about maintaining and managing systems, but it also reflects where Gary is in the story and what is happening to him at that particular point.

The tips became an important part of the structure because Gary approaches nearly everything in his life as a system that can be monitored and managed. As the story progresses, the maintenance tips move alongside his arc, and the principles he relies on professionally begin to describe what is happening to him personally. The language of systems and maintenance becomes another way of telling Gary’s story.

What did you want the final gesture involving Claire’s camp chair to suggest about Gary’s ability to move forward?

For me, the camp chair represents the difference between observing a life and actually inhabiting it. Gary has spent four years moving through the world without really being present in it. Claire was the opposite. She could simply sit somewhere, experience it, and allow a moment to exist without needing to measure or manage it.

The final gesture isn’t meant to suggest that Gary is suddenly healed or that his grief and guilt are resolved. It is much smaller than that. He is finally willing to stop managing the moment and be present in it. Taking out Claire’s chair is his first real movement toward living with what happened instead of continuing to build procedures around it. That distinction is established earlier when Gary realizes that knowing the light as Claire knew it would require the camp chair, sitting down, the willingness to be inside the moment rather than observing it.

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