Nevertheless, my first marriage lasted nine years and my second is at fifteen and counting. I'm about as romantic as a brick, always have been. I like sex fine, though I seem to be wired to only be attracted to men, and only men I know. I don't deserve any points for getting it right, because really that aspect of Mori is just me when I was fifteen, and the thoughts she has about that sex-and-love stuff are very much my thoughts about it at that age. I think the answer is very much the same as when I'm asked about her disabilities. (view spoiler) [Oh that is a hard question. The thing that makes them real is that she's absolutely matter of fact about them - they're real to her, they're a real problem, the same as her family or the girls in school. (Hard to do, but interesting.) And she's given them names from Tolkien and mythology. Then so many people write fantasy where True Names are important, so I thought well, she's going to call them fairies, what do they call themselves - how about if I do completely against that and they don't use names? Or even nouns? That's interesting. She knows she doesn't really know what they are, she knows they're something, and she has known them since she was a child and she's using a childish word.

And I wanted a child's understanding of that the fairies were - that's why they're deliberately called fairies and not elves or fae or faerie or any of these more sophisticated terms. There is in fact some pull towards the Celtic things in there - the Halloween section - but I wanted to avoid that as much as I could. And I didn't want to use the Celtic stuff that would have been natural to the landscape I was writing about, partly because I've done it before (_The King's Peace_ uses Celtic mythology) and partly because it has been so overdone by everyone in the world that it feels cliched. So I wanted to have magic that was non-falsifiable, and had plausible deniability. When I read urban fantasy I generally find it hard to suspend my disbelief - if these things really existed and behaved that way, I'd have to be stupid to have missed them. When I read urban fantasy I …more As with a lot of my writing, the reason I chose to do this comes from problems I have with the way other people do things. Jo Walton As with a lot of my writing, the reason I chose to do this comes from problems I have with the way other people do things.

Among Others by Jo Walton