Car by Car: A Guest Post by Samantha Sotto Yambao

The author of Water Moon returns with a fantastical story of self-discovery. All aboard the Elsewhere Express, a glimmering train that scoops up passengers who have lost their way and sends them on a dream-like journey of purpose and hope. Read on for an exclusive essay from Samantha Sotto Yambao on writing The Elsewhere Express.

Every train, no matter how full, is empty. At least, that’s what it looked like when I scanned the faces of the passengers packed inside a train car on the Tokyo Metro.

Whether they were staring at their phones or into space, everyone seemed to have gone somewhere far beyond the tracks. A question popped into my head: if the passengers weren’t on the train, where did they go? A “train of thought” with carriages made out of daydreams, ideas, passing thoughts, and songs, pulled into the station in my mind.

More questions waved at me from the train’s windows. What kept people anchored to their seats? What would happen if thoughts traveled too far? Could thoughts get lost? What if they never came back? I knew, at that moment, that I had no choice but to hop aboard this magical train and see where it would take me.

I wrote The Elsewhere Express in the time between finishing my edits for Water Moon and anxiously waiting for its release. Water Moon was supposed to be my fifth and final book, but it wound up taking my writing journey in a whole new direction. Writing The Elsewhere Express helped me process the runaway train of emotions inside me, allowing me to explore my relationship with my feelings and thoughts by examining their nature and power, and figuring out their role in finding my way.

I built The Elsewhere Express car by car, trying to capture how different kinds of thoughts behaved and affected us, and what a train car made out of a specific type of thought might look like and how it could function. Given the type and weight of baggage that I knew my characters would bring aboard the train, I strove to craft cars that made them re-evaluate everything they chose to carry with them. I also wanted to create a world that allowed me to work through themes that people, including myself, would rather not sit with for a very long time, much less the length of a train ride – a magical backdrop that invited you to look around and linger while logic told you to turn away. The train running in an endless loop became a metaphor for the trap of our own thoughts and a vehicle for examining what might happen if we, rather than our grief, worries, and doubts, took charge of the engine.