Seanan McGuire

Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' wound up teaching me another, accidental lesson: that sometimes you're so excited to keep going down the road you're on, you drive right past your destination.

I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble!

In the long run, I think I like 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' better as a television series, because it had so much more time and room and space to grow.

Watching 'Doctor Who' in the United States meant I was always behind the times - PBS didn't get new episodes until two years after they ran, and I was aware of the show's cancellation before the characters themselves knew, at least in my corner of the world.

By the time 'Buffy' finished its Bay Area theatrical run - including a two-month stint at the dollar theater - I had seen the movie well over three dozen times. I was in love.

Like all children, I spent a lot of time looking for idols.

There is a list of things I'm not allowed to discuss at the dinner table! I am extraordinarily passionate about the Black Death, which is not something most people are into.

Process does matter; you need a process. What it is is up to no one but you. But if you can't sit down, write once upon a time, and go through however many hundred thousand words to get to happily ever after, you're never going to get anywhere.

I was that kid with the glasses and the hungry expression who haunted every library book sale and used bookstore in town: the one who always has a book in one hand and is reaching for the next book with the other. There's one in every town.

Most of my early work was done on typewriter. And the only way to iterate drafts was to re-type it.

I do a lot of urban fantasy, which is modern-day cities, but you've got magic, you've got fairies running around, or cryptozoological creatures running around, and I'm pulling very heavily on my background as a folklore major and having done some animation work and all of that, and I'm pulling from the modern fairy tale narrative.

Out of all of the Spider-People, including Peter Parker, Gwen Stacy has the most over-developed sense of responsibility.