I sense people expect something to show for ten years. But I do feel like it is dense. Some of my own favorite books are slim, but there's a lot of weight and power in them.

It's so exciting when a book catches traction you didn't even expect (or completely did expect!), and so frustrating when a book never quite catches the traction you know it deserves. But either way it doesn't change the book, it doesn't change how much I love that book, or how thrilled I am to be publishing it.

I'm not entirely sure what a historical novel absolutely has to be, but you don't want a reader who loves a very traditional historical novel to go in with the expectation that this is going to deliver the same kind of reading experience. I think what's contemporary about my book has something to do with how condensed things are.

There was a stage inside it and a crank on the outside that would rotate something, like a tiny tree carved of cork, onto the stage, and then the thousands of little mirrors would multiply that one tree so that the viewer would see an infinite forest instead.

Back then, when I had that original idea to write about the seventeenth century, the whole thing was set in 1666. I was thinking of Margaret near the end of her life, and that was the voice I heard for her.

It's all just so fraught when you're writing and then going through the editorial process. It feels like this shape-shifting thing. When it's done, and you can't change a single word, it's a totally different thing. I was surprised by what that thing was.

I can be a fairly hands-on editor, and when I'm editing someone I feel intensely invested in that writer and her work. I love helping to shape a book, and I feel very privileged to get to do that with writers I'm excited about. I think doing that work for the past six years has changed me, and it better prepared me for the questions and suggestions.