If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.

In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that 'realistic' literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons.

Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.

Well,' the Goddess said, 'your heart didn't heal straight the last time it broke. So we'll break it again and reset it so it heals straight this time.

Fairy Tales always have a happy ending.' That depends... on whether you are Rumpelstiltskin or the Queen.

It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.