I was inspired to write Endling when one of my daughters came across the word “endling”, which is not officially in most dictionaries yet. It refers to the last animal or the last member of a species of subspecies. It was a quite a while ago, there was a fascinating article about it. I think it was in the New Yorker, talking about the evolution of the word, but it’s still not being used to often, and when I heard it, I thought, “Wow, that’s so poignant. The very last member of a species. What would that be like?”
And we’re in the middle of what many people call the sixth great extinction, apparently almost exclusively manmade. And we’re losing species and an unprecedented rate, and I wanted to write about it. I wanted to do it though in a way that would free me up to tell an interesting story, and fantasy was the way to do it.