Margaret Cavendish was one of the people who came up in the course. That was when I started thinking about her as a character for a book, but my idea….

I was trying to focus on Margaret's trajectory as an artist, as a woman and an artist. Hopefully Cavendish experts won't be angry at me for anything ….

The reason the middle section switches to third person is, well, this is middle age. This is the part in her life where she loses track of something ….

I had all these sparkles I'd collected and wanted to work in, but when I originally started writing it and it was originally this novel about all the….

I sense people expect something to show for ten years. But I do feel like it is dense. Some of my own favorite books are slim, but there's a lot of w….

Back then, when I had that original idea to write about the seventeenth century, the whole thing was set in 1666. I was thinking of Margaret near the….

It's interesting, editing can be so immersive for me that I've noticed that the authors I edit have a pretty profound effect on how I hear language f….

I can be a fairly hands-on editor, and when I'm editing someone I feel intensely invested in that writer and her work. I love helping to shape a book….

It's all just so fraught when you're writing and then going through the editorial process. It feels like this shape-shifting thing. When it's done, a….

I suppose also that watching marketing and publicity stuff play out from behind the scenes, making those plans and seeing each piece fall into place ….

I was obsessed with the scientific instruments people were building and all the weird experiments they were doing. I did actually wind up working in ….

There was a stage inside it and a crank on the outside that would rotate something, like a tiny tree carved of cork, onto the stage, and then the tho….

So it was this multi-perspective, multi-character book, and it went through all of these different manifestations. I'm not sure there was a single mo….

But when I realized it was actually going to be this portrait of the artist, birth to death, I had to then discover who Margaret as a young woman wou….

The way I've talked about my research process is that it was like magpies. I was just sort of moving through all these books and when something shiny….

I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Mar….

It's so exciting when a book catches traction you didn't even expect (or completely did expect!), and so frustrating when a book never quite catches ….

As a publisher what you are trying to build is a long life for a book, to help it find its readers in many different ways, whether or not it made thi….

Finding the form was really a very dynamic process. I went through a lot of shifting, trying to get it right. Because the writing took place over suc….

I'm not entirely sure what a historical novel absolutely has to be, but you don't want a reader who loves a very traditional historical novel to go i….

I was sad to see some of them go. Like a magic lantern that would project images on walls and people would travel the countryside with these magic la….