It's always the case for writers that when there are limitations, you have the opportunity for your creativity really to blossom and to become deeper and fuller and to move in directions that you wouldn't have discovered on your own.

I was working on the book, but in a very subterranean kind of a fashion. And I think that giving yourself permission to respect that, without being lazy and not doing work when you could be doing work and just don't feel like it - that's a different balance that can be complicated to strike.

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.

Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.

Trying to talk through and figure out new answers really helps me figure out more about what I'm doing - and what we're all doing.

I feel that there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into fantasy and there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into pessimism, but that, in fact, the novel as it has developed should, if it's functioning correctly, have equipped you as the reader to make your own decision about where you want to go with that, about where you're going to fall on that continuum. So, the novel is taking you directly up to the point that you have to choose, and it's letting you do that.