Every Character Starts with a Stolen Detail

Real People, Cosmic Fiction, and the Wellness Spa from Hell

28 February 2026 ~ 3 min read

Writers steal. We do it constantly, usually without meaning to, and almost never in a way the victim would recognize. A gesture. A phrase someone uses without thinking. The way a person makes you feel when you walk through a door. These tiny, stolen details are where characters come from—not from whole people, but from fragments of people that lodge in your brain and refuse to leave until you give them a story.

The Cosmos Answers, the final book of The Cosmic Janitor Trilogy, is full of these thefts. And some of the best ones came from a wellness studio in Los Angeles where I go for cryo and contrast therapy.

If you’ve spent any time in LA’s wellness world, you know the scene: cryo chambers, isolation pods, IV drips, and someone handing you a beverage with ingredients you can’t pronounce and a name like “Liquid Sunrise” or “Inner Radiance.” I’d been going regularly for a while when I realized I was collecting details without meaning to. The studio became the Eternal Wellness Spa—the place where, in the trilogy, the Devil’s sister Serenity spends four million years in mandatory tranquility as punishment for starting the War in Heaven.

But the characters came from the people, not the place.

There’s a woman who greets you when you walk in. Every single time, no matter what kind of day it is, she radiates genuine warmth—not the performative LA version, the real thing. She has this habit of simply saying “love” when something delights her. Not “I love that”—just the word, by itself, like a one-word blessing. That quality—the ability to make a person feel welcome before they’ve even sat down—l named her Makayla, the Aloha spirit of the Eternal Wellness Spa. In the novel, Makayla’s warmth isn’t just personality; it’s a force. When reality is fracturing and cosmic chaos is spilling through the doors, she’s still there, still radiating calm, still meaning it. I needed a character who could make even Hell’s refugees feel like they’d come to the right place. The stolen detail gave me exactly that.

Then there’s a pair of women—two peas in a pod—who escort clients back to the cryo chambers and isolation pods. They’re talkers, in the best sense. Chatty, warm, genuinely curious about the people they’re guiding into sub-zero temperatures. And they’re always offering you something to drink—tea, water, whatever they’ve got. That detail—the cheerful offer of a beverage while leading you somewhere slightly terrifying—clicked into place the moment I needed it. I named them Emi and Dani, who in the novel escort people through levels of cosmic chaos with exactly that same unflappable friendliness and always, always have a drink to offer. The beverages got considerably weirder in fiction, of course. When you’re serving refreshments in Hell’s cafeteria, “water or tea?” becomes “Rat Pack Regret”—a drink that makes the Devil involuntarily sing Sinatra. Los Angeles wellness culture has its share of bizarre concoctions; I just took the concept to its logical, infernal conclusion. 

None of these characters are the real people who inspired them. That’s the magic of fiction—a stolen detail is just a seed. What grows from it belongs to the story.

But I’ll admit, every time I walk into that studio and hear “love” from across the room, I smile a little wider than I probably should. The character knows where she came from, even if the person doesn’t.

— Liam