J.E. Purazzi (JEP): Sure! The original idea was just going to be a short story for Wattpad, something to try to gain an audience for my fantasy project before I really knew good marketing practices. My first glimmer of the idea was focused on the virtual reality and was about a kid (a blend of Menrva and Cowl back then) in a subterranean city, escaping through Virtual Reality only to find out that the game they were playing was real. As I worked on the concept, hammering out the plot holes and applying existing science, I ended up sticking with the one image of the climax in the second book and wrote the first draft of Malfunction in about a month.
One of the ideas that carried through all the drafts was that of human beings being reduced to objects in order to provide safety and pleasure to others, a concept that I think is really relevant to the issues of modern-day slavery and human trafficking.
