It’s so ironic that you’ll hear people talk in one breath about how women are better at writing fantasy and men are better at science fiction, and in the next breath talk about how of course men write better epic fantasy, and women really only write that “girly” fantasy. There are some folks who’d squeeze us out entirely if they could.

We knew that we were going to have the fairy tale world as a backdrop in Puss in Boots, we wanted to make sure we didn’t end up just parodying them. We wanted to take the original stories and put a new spin on them.

My initial thought on the series was I wanted to write about a woman dating a vampire. But to make them less frightening, to give them a reason for being out, I had to develop a theory that would let them look less vicious.

Morgan’s first foray into fantasy began with The Steel Remains, a contemporary and violent take on the genre where a privileged yet savage soldier, Ringil Eskiath, finds himself in exile due to his sexuality.

One of the things that bothers me about a lot of fantasy is that the worlds are strangely static, like we invent all sorts of contrived circumstances to keep them from progressing naturally, because we want stories of a certain type.

I can say with complete sincerity that I am not a group of human individuals working to produce my annual output. I cannot comment on the possibility of my actually being an alien hive-intelligence here to conquer your world.

Jacqueline Carey exploded onto the fantasy scene in 2001 with the publication of Kushiel’s Dart. Readers responded enthusiastically to Carey’s edgy mixture of intrigue, adventure, and eroticism.

We try to treat the pandas and Po with the utmost emotional respect, but that’s based on the fact that they are people we care about as opposed to whether they’re pandas or not.