Cancer diagnoses are double-trouble – you get a clear warning sign that death is coming. Soon as someone goes on hospice care, the great big pocketwatch is made visible and you see that you don't have many hours left before it winds down.

And I thought, what a horrible thing. To know that. On the one hand, great, yes, you have time to say goodbye and make peace, but on the other hand, it offers uncomfortable foresight.

Here the fiction writer's brain does all those cruel leaps and cackling pirouettes – it would be terrible in a way to possess that foresight in a very real, psychic sense. To see how others were going to die.

So, I wrote this document called Poor-Miriam.doc and it was about this girl who could see how someone was going to die just by touching them. The trick was, Miriam could see the death, yes, but she did not have all the details and she could seemingly do nothing to stop it.

Then I paired that with another totally-unrelated document I'd written that introduced the two killers of this piece: Frankie and Harriet. It was a meaningless exercise in writing character, just an attempt to put these two odd and ill-fitting assassins together and see what happened. Though, as it turns out, not too meaningless at all.

Because from there, the story exploded in my head. Miriam and her psychic ability and these two killers and then all the characters and plotty bits in-between. What ended up was fairly different from how I started, but it's in this weird confluence of things that the story's origins lurk.

Frankie and Harriet started life as character studies? How often do you do exercises like that? Is that something useful for a writer? How often have things that have been filed away like this proved useful for other projects?

I take a lot of random notes. If I get a character or a story idea – or hell, even a story title – I'll write it down. Is it useful? Sure. I have a brain like a sieve, so I can't count on my own mind to remember something I thought about three years ago. Or three weeks ago. Or even three minutes ago. Who are you again? How did you get inside my book? CALL THE ROBOT POLICE.

Within these pages, nobody can hear you scream, Mr. Wendig! Times like this I wish I had a moustache to twirl.

Oooh. Sorry. See? Something wrong with my upstairs. Got moonbats in my moon belfry, I suspect. And twirling mustaches is overrated. The new thing is angrily grabbing fistfuls of beard and screaming. Get on board.

Point is, this little mental dumping ground has proved useful more than once. Most of my short stories come out of this space where I stitch together random and once-unrelated elements.

One of the great things about Blackbirds is the strength of the characters, even the minor ones. Miriam really strikes me as a complex, multifaceted personality. As a man, did writing a female lead present any particular challenges, or were there certain things you wanted to include, as well as things you wanted to avoid? Did you consciously plan Blackbirds to have a female lead, or was that what the story required?