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

I see so many talented writers who have difficulties with that. And if you don't believe it's important, you won't put in the work you need to.

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!

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.

Understanding what is going on in the world today inspires me in a negative sense because there's so much about it that I don't like - political stupidity, environmental degradation, etc. And that makes me want to change it, to make a difference in the world.

It's very difficult to put in the work unless you believe that what you're doing is significant in some way.

What writers do - everything comes from inside, from experiences of the world that we have digested. And then we turn it into silk, or stories.