In 2011, I did an internship in Seven Dials, a junction in London where seven roads come together. I'd given up on writing after multiple rejections for my first novel, and I was starting to consider a career in publishing instead, but Seven Dials gave me such a strong idea for a setting that I couldn't resist picking up my pen again.

I often look at places and kind of mentally convert them to fantasy versions of themselves.

People question what I thought of Oxford. Students used to talk about the 'Oxford bubble' because the place can make you feel cut off from the rest of the world. I would forget there were places like London that were not centred round libraries and essays.

My silver cord - the link between my body and my spirit - was extremely sensitive. It was what allowed me to sense dreamscapes at a distance. It could also snap me back into my skin.

Nowadays people's visual imagination is so much more sophisticated, so much more developed, particularly in young people, that now you can make an image which just slightly suggests something, they can make of it what they will.

For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.

For so long, we had to write to pay a bill, we had to write in many instances where maybe you weren't even inspired to write because it was your job. That's how passion, creativity, and love gets killed.

My first exposure to TV, film, theater, the idea of what acting was, is I was a little kid, and my mom's best friend was a local casting director in Cambridge, Mass. Her name was Patty Collinge.