I divide my time between homes in Arizona and England, six months a year in each place.

The first job I was offered was as an editorial assistant. I think it was the best thing for me, in terms of being a storyteller by nature, to have spent years being an editor because I learned so much from it.

When I started in the business, there was a thing called adult fantasy, but nobody quite knew what it was, and most publishers didn't have an adult fantasy list. They had science fiction lists, which they stuck a little bit of fantasy into.

We''re all misfits here,” he says, almost proudly. “That's why I started this squat, after all. For people like us, who don't fit in anywhere else. Halfies and homos and hopeless romantics, the outcast and outrageous and terminally weird. That's where art comes from, Jimmy, my friend. From our weirdnesses and our differences, from our manic fixations, our obsessions, our passions. From all those wild and wacky things that make each of us unique.

I have a great respect for the academics who are working with the source material. My hat's off to them.

Why are so many of us enspelled by myths and folk stories in this modern age? Why do we continue to tell the same old tales, over and over again? I think it's because these stories are not just fantasy. They're about real life. We've all encountered wicked wolves, found fairy godmothers, and faced trial by fire. We've all set off into unknown woods at one point in life or another. We've all had to learn to tell friend from foe and to be kind to crones by the side of the road. . . .

Fairy tales were not my escape from reality as a child; rather, they were my reality -- for mine was a world in which good and evil were not abstract concepts, and like fairy-tale heroines, no magic would save me unless I had the wit and heart and courage to use it widely.