Art inspires me. Looking at art in a museum, listening to music, reading the works of other writers.

I'm used to writing fairy tales that can be somewhat dark, and the truth is that in fairy tales, romances are always problematic. They may end happily ever after, but someone's getting pushed into an oven or has blood in her shoe.

The Thorn and The Blossom can be read from either side - you can choose whether to read it from Brendan's or Evelyn's perspective first, and each one will give you a different sense of what happens in the story.

The format of the book was the idea of my wonderful editor, Stephen Segal. Stephen and I had worked together before, on projects for the Interstitial Arts Foundation, and when he got the idea for an accordion-style book, he called and asked if I could write the story for it. I told him that I would love to try! And I knew it had to be a love story, because that's the sort of story you really want to hear from both perspectives. I mean, imagine if Pride and Prejudice were told from Darcy's perspective as well as Elizabeth's. It would be quite a different story!

The appeal of writing a romance was that I'd never written one before the The Thorn and The Blossom.

If you look at the natural world, really look at it, it's always magical.

I'm working on a poetry collection for Papaveria Press . It fills me with trepidation - poetry is something I'm much more self-conscious about than prose.