Fear is a fire to temper courage and resolve. Use it so.

A world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and explore.

After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly.

Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones.