The Youngling follows the narratives of a young woman orphaned as a girl, a runaway indentured servant, and a priest–three people whose paths are destined to cross. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I’d been playing around with a short story about a young demon girl who gets kidnapped by a circus of evil clowns. A strange place to start, and I never really did anything with it. However, there was something about writing a fantasy that I really liked. I took a small part of that story and started plotting out an idea where all the demons and mythical creatures had hidden themselves away in a kind of Shangri La to escape human eyes.

Initially this story was aimed at a much younger audience, but the more I wrote it the more serious it became. The Demon girl was replaced by a much older version, and in this slightly more mature version of the story, I decided to add more character narratives so that I could tell it from multiple perspectives.

Were the characters’ backstories something you always had in mind, or did they develop as you were writing?

For each character I always had a basic idea of what their back story was, and then let myself explore that while I was writing. I knew which story points and notes that I wanted to reach for each character, which made it fun to put them through a situation, and surprise myself with the results. I like leaving plenty of room for creativity in my story plans as sometimes that’s when the best things happen.

An example of this is Seth – originally, he first appeared in the second book of the series. I had a scene where all the characters sat round a fire and talked of how they came to be there. Seth started speaking, and I couldn’t make him stop. Eventually I realised I needed to start his story from the first book, and really explore his journey. I ended up redrafting the entire series so that I could include him from the beginning.

How did you balance magic and its use throughout the story to keep it believable?

At heart I’m a very practical and logical person. I found that I needed to be able to believe in the magic myself, so everything needed to be grounded in some kind of logic. If it didn’t seem real to me, then I realised it would never seem real to my readers.

I placed the Midgarden timeline to be about a thousand years after the last significant magical event, which meant magic could be considered a thing of the past to the residents of that realm. Although magic and the manipulation of ‘mana’ plays a much bigger part in the rest of the series, I wanted a very light touch in this novel. That way I hoped it would have more of an impact when something magical does happen.

Can you give us a little insight into the next installment in this series?

‘The Falling’ is much darker than the first book in the series.

We continue to follow Synesthesia on her journey, but now she is in a much more hostile world, and things soon take a very bad turn for her.

Luckily, she finds friends: some new and some old. But unfortunately, now she also has an enemy too – a rather smoky looking one who is trying to find her.

There is a lot more action, a lot more magic, and a lot more at stake.

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