Sometimes you have to follow your uncommon sense.

The book itself [The Thorn and The Blossom] is bound accordion-style: it has no spine, so it can open in either direction, and it's in a slipcase.

I worry very much that people won't like it, or will think it's simply silly. But I have a post-it note above my desk that says "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" And if I weren't afraid, I would do a poetry collection.

The only thing worth thinking about, when I write a story, is whether I like it, whether I want to write it, whether it excites me.

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!

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!

I would tell myself to get more sleep! Believe it or not, I wrote the book while finishing my PhD in English literature. It was wonderful to get away from doing literary scholarship by writing this mythical love story. I think so much of my own love for books and scholarship comes through in The Thorn and the Blossom.