apologies if something like this has been asked before and i don't remember, but when you were writing growing pains, was there anything in particular that inspired you to make human-monster hybrid growth and development the way it is? (being born looking like a regular human and then undergoing a painful metamorphosis into a monster body) or did you come up with that one independently and think it would be narratively interesting? (if so... yeah, good job, you're right, it was)
It was definitely at least in part because I thought it'd be narratively interesting! But largely, it was for practical purposes for the story. It was a solution I thought could be compelling for a chain of questions I had to ask myself:
Why did Susie move to Hometown when she did? -> Her parents' marriage fell apart when it was discovered her mom had had an affair with a monster
Why was this not discovered until she was a teenager? -> She did not look like a monster until she was a teenager
Why? -> Because half-human, half-monsters undergo a specific puberty wherein they change
But, we learned in later chapters that Susie moved to Hometown when she did because she was already being moved around a lot. I definitely still believe Susie is half-human, but if I were to write her backstory now, I'd write it differently based on the new information we have. At the very least, there's definitely no transformation aspect involved.
