My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

The life I should be living had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy.

I'm a fantasy writer. I don't do SF. This is important to me. If you're not clear on what genre you're in, everything gets muddled, and it's hard to know which rules you're breaking.

It's wonderful to play around with fantasy, because there are an amazing number of as-yet-unbroken rules out there.

More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.

I feel that's one of the central questions of fantasy. What did we lose when we entered the 20th and 21st century, and how can we mourn what we lost, and what can we replace it with? We're still asking those questions in an urgent way.

The truth doesn't always make a good story, does it?