People tend to associate fairies with princesses, but they couldn't be more different. Princesses have dynastic and domestic pressures, and they get parked on glass hills. Fairies don't have families. They don't clean or cook. They sip nectar from flowers and dance by the light of the moon.

I tried for years to get an agent because I was told you needed an agent. The agent-hunting process was grim indeed.

When I was 4 years old, I woke up in the middle of the night and told my parents there was a witch crying outside in the boxwood bushes. I didn't know who she was or why she was crying, but I was terribly upset.

I became fascinated by marionettes, which I first saw in Venice. They were so haunted and so alive. You walked by them, and you could feel their presence, with their beady eyes just fixed on you.

I'm like a crockpot on low heat. My mind constantly comes up with ideas, but I abandon a lot of them after a week or two. It's the ones that keep coming to me, that keep picking up flavors, that haunt me, those are the ones that wind up getting written.

Sometimes I feel like an impostor, and I have to remind myself, 'You are able to do this.' I look at the books on the shelf that have my name on them to remind myself I have done it before and, likely, I can do it again.