Respect the young and chastise your elders. It's about time the world was set aright.

I usually focus on the whole group of characters in any given work-in-progress, and as a result they become particularly dear to me as I delve into their innermost motivations and live out their lives.

In the kingdom of glass everything is transparent, and there is no place to hide a dark heart.

Fantasy, at its best, is balm for the soul. But it is faulty logic to assume that balm is necessarily mind-numbing anesthesia.

I was nurtured on Greek Mythology and the classical epics. I lived and breathed Homer. Other mythologies - the Russian, the Norse, the Persian, the Indian, Egyptian, etc. - all came later. First and foremost were the Greeks, and they were all living in my head as though I were Zeus and they were a clamoring Chorus of Athenas.

A related recurring theme is the exploration of how we take for granted the things in our immediate environment that are common and ordinary. Existential blindness, of sorts.

Fantasy plunders the well of our deepest selves for existent truth instead of creating new truths out of the illusory fabric of recent events or the flow of society.