The picture is colored smoke, posted by def110 on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

I started out by reversing the premise of the original myth, in which a woman called Pandora opens a box containing hope. Perhaps, I thought, this should be about Pandora putting hope into a box – at which point it occurred to me that Hope is also a woman’s name. But who actually was Pandora? A bit of research (okay, fine, some frenzied cribbing from Wikipedia) revealed her to be a more ambiguous figure than I had appreciated.

The version of the Pandora myth that most of us recognise today – a meddlesome girl releases a flock of demonic ills to plague humanity — is due to Hesiod, and seems to be a misogynist revision of an earlier tale in which Pandora is a mother-goddess figure, rather than a foolish mortal girl. (The myth’s evolution and symbolism is actually pretty convoluted: see here if you’re interested.) I wanted my protagonist’s history to be shaped by that of her mythic archetype, and I decided to make her fertility the crux of her story.

So that the character and the action. But I didn’t have the theme yet. That came from the title of the particular piece I had chosen. was called The Cotard Delusion – pictured in a terrible camphone-through-glass picture above. What’s that? Here’s Wikipedia again:

The Cotard delusion or Cotard’s syndrome or Walking Corpse Syndrome, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which people hold a delusional belief that they are dead (either figuratively or literally), do not exist, are putrefying, or have lost their blood or internal organs. Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality.

The relevance is presumably obvious. (If not, I really have #failed.) Character, action, theme: go. The rest came naturally from the ingredients of the box…