“Choose Your Own Adventure” by Kat Howard will be appearing in Prime’s forthcoming Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2012 edited by Paula Guran. Wendy Wagner interviews her on the story.

Each section of this story touches on a setting or situation really vital to the fantasy genre. It reads like an exploration of what fantasy really means to its readers. What pushed or inspired you to use these topics?

This story started, as many wonderful things do, via Twitter. I said that I was stuck on my current WIP, and so I was going to put on some music and dance around my office, and when I came back to my desk, someone would have written the next bit for me. When I looked back at the computer everyone had responded with “rocks fall, everyone dies.” (Okay, one person said “bombs fall,” but you get the point.) I laughed, and offered co-author credit for the brilliant endings, but then I started thinking about all the sort of things we know we’re not supposed to do in our writing, like end a story with “and then I woke up,” or write an Adam and Eve story, or start a work of fantasy in an inn, either because these elements have become overdone, or because they’re seen as cheating the reader. And I thought, what if you shoved all of those things in one story? How could you write it in a way that worked, and took them seriously?

I am still sad that I couldn’t actually make “rocks fall, everyone dies” work.

More: Read the rest of the interview here!