I’ve been thinking about the pendulum of history a lot lately; that process of revolution, backlash, correction, and overcorrection, and the way you can see it within a family as much as you can within a nation. This story began to develop for me when I was thinking about the relationship between science and magic, and how folks like to pretend they’re separate things.

The story was very much inspired by me turning fifty and the realization that I was (at least in some ways) at the midpoint of my life. When I conceived the story, it had a far more downbeat ending, but stories are created in the writing, not in the planning. The ending came as a pleasant surprise to me, even more so given my personal circumstances at the time . . .

Vrath is inspired by a famous character from the Indian epic Mahabharata, which was the starting point and inspiration for a part of Upon a Burning Throne. I was going to write him pretty much as he appears in the novel, which is as a strong supporting character. But I wanted to know more about him than I found in the Mahabharata or any other source.

It will come as no surprise that beginning as a child, I loved wolves. I had a couple of picture books about wolves and I also got Very Upset when they were cast as the bad guys in so many things. Some early influential reads were The Changeling Prince by Vivian Vande Velde; Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George; I read White Fang at way too young an age.

The Bolton Strid is a real place that really exists and I really want to go there, except for the part where I am a fairly clumsy person and I would very shortly be swept away forever, and my friends would miss me. So the story started with the Strid.