Project The Happy Ones

I'm so glad I get to live in a world where there are Octobers, aren't you? 🍂🍁

You take the torch, touch the magic and pass it on.

You don't try and write something big and important. You try to write something good.

Take the gift that Ursula Le Guin gave you in the Earthsea books. Write your book. Pass it on.

When I wrote Stardust I wanted to pay my own homage to writers I loved, like Hope Mirrlees, like Jack Vance, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, like James Branch Cabell, like Lord Dunsany. And I filled my fountain pen, because, I decided, the book I wanted to write tasted like a pen sort of a book, so I bought and filled the first fountain pen I'd had since my school days, and started to write. I wasn't trying to write an important book. I was trying to write a book that would keep people reading and give Charles Vess, who would be illustrating it, lots of wonderful things to draw.

One of my favourite things about Stardust and Sandman is that Susanna Clarke read them and decided that she wanted to do that, and felt the books had given her permission to write what needed to be written.