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

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

When we tell stories about things that are important - love, fear, beauty - we change the way people think about the world. Writers are, or should be, truth-tellers even when the stories themselves are fantasy.

In the Forest of Forgetting do you remember any romances? All the relationships in those stories are dark and twisted - people fall in love, but they really shouldn't have. There's even a story about a marriage, but it focuses on a woman who marries a bear!

If readers like The Thorn and the Blossom, which I would call literary fantasy, I think they would like books such as Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love, Catherynne Valente's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, and Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen.

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!

It's appropriate to have magic in a love story, because magic is a sort of metaphor for what love feels like? When we fall in love, the world feels magical to us. It becomes an enchanted place.