Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
[0:10] My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author, but I also run the activities that our centre does. And today I am joined by a friend of the centre, who is also one of our tutors, but today she is here wearing her hat as an author so hello yes virtual hat hello lucy strange now lucy press you'd like to just tell us the headlines of who you are and uh you can also hold up your book because for those of you who are watching this on um youtube we can do a kind of yeah coordinated thing yeah yeah okay book cover so do look it up if you're listening to this on the audio but it's a book called the The Island at the Edge of Night. So, Lucy, how did you get into this business of writing fantasy?
[1:03] Well, I don't think I'd pass the test of true fantasy, Julia, because my stories are all set in the real world, but we have elements of fantasy.
[1:15] That is fantasy. I'm sorry to burst a bubble. It is. Fantasy is a spectrum. so obviously you know we can all say something with like spells and wizards and dragon but there of books which have a fantastical element anything absolutely real verges into it is fantasy is it sort of the magical realism end of fantasy yeah yeah yeah that kind of place so i um, Well, I started writing, my books are primarily for younger readers, so they're sort of age nine and up. My first book is this one, The Secret of Nightingale, that came out in 2016 with a publisher called Chicken House in the UK, Scholastic in the US.
[2:00] And what I wanted to do is I wanted to create stories that kind of had a classic children's literature feeling to them, but that were much more kind of page-turny and that bit more sort of suited to modern young readers.
[2:18] And the fantastical element has just sort of found its way into every story that I write. And stories for me just don't, I suppose, don't feel magical enough or special enough without something, something kind of eerie and supernatural kind of simmering away somewhere or kind of seeping through um somehow so that's that's kind of how it's happened there's a lot of gothic influence in my books as well um so they they i sort of i i play with elements of the gothic and and fantasy to varying degrees in the different stories um my most fantasy i suppose is this one and Sisters of the Lost Marsh um which came out a couple of years ago um and in this one it does it does feel more like a fantastical world yeah I think if we go through our archive I think we talked about that particular book then yeah at the time yeah so when all of us have like gateway drug authors to our addiction to reading did you have that's probably a strange way of explaining it but it does feel like you get hooked as a reader. Yeah.
[3:28] Did you have any favourite authors as you were growing up or maybe people who have inspired you to make you want to do this now as a grown-up? Well, I was always a bookworm and I think, I mean, I can remember various, various books that hooked me in. Yeah.
[3:47] Actually, initially, audiobooks were something that really, really connected with me. And I think it's because I used to listen to them over and over again. I just sort of absorbed, I assimilated them. And I think it's partly through that. So I had Alice in Wonderland I used to listen to on audiobook. I had Jane Asher narrating that one. And The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett, that I think um and it's not it's not fantasy but there are there are definitely elements of the gothic there are suggestions of supernatural about it and nature is presented as magical in it as well I think so I think it's um yeah I think there's a huge amount of influence from that story um in all my I think you cut my cut my my um my books open like like cakes I think you'd probably find you'd find the secret garden there somewhere in all of them that's actually we probably should do an episode on francis hodgson burnett because she was my favorite author.
[4:54] As a as a little girl and it's you're right it's that feeling that the world is magical even though it's ordinary so there is a secret garden hidden behind the wall to which you find the key and And there is diamond mines in the case of Little Princess. But also somebody climbs in and decorates your bedroom with these wonderful Indian tapestries whilst you're the Cinderella working in your old school. It's got this blend of, oh, this could be played absolutely straightforward. This happens in real life. But there's always this air of fairy tale to it. So that's where you're coming from in a way. it's that natural magic. Yeah, I think so. Also, I think.
[5:42] The Princess and the Goblin by Donald, which is probably the most... I did read Narnia as well, I did love Narnia, but for me there was something about The Princess and the Goblin, and the whole Christian analogy totally passed me by. But I remember really feeling the significance so there's a like there's a silver thread that guides them through the story and takes them out of the darkest places there's this extraordinary theme with um this sort of i suppose like the archetype of a of a mentor slash wizardy kind of character who who's her great great grandmother, who possibly does or possibly doesn't exist up in the turret of this castle and there's this deep bath that she puts her into and she sort of sinks into this.
[6:29] Like she's kind of floating in in sort of the night sky and it's just um something of that has.
[6:36] Stayed with me all my life um and.
[6:39] For me I think that that was that was um quite a sort of seminal fantasy moment for me as well with with the literature it's hard to pin them down isn't it did you ever read any Charles Kingsley because one of the books I was very influenced by was the water babies which i realized now was in a um abbreviated version i think they must have cut out quite a lot of the moralizing but a lot of it that has not dated well yeah but it had some wonderful pictures with it by mabel lucy atwell i think her name was and again it has this heavy handed um sort of christian moralism going on in it but that totally didn't matter it was a that this boy could transform himself into a water baby and live under the water I was taking like literally he goes it's not baptism or anything it's he he literally goes and lives under the water like yeah yeah me too actually it's very funny that you mentioned that I should just say for anyone watching that we didn't we didn't actually plan this but I've got I write I also write these little books for Barrington Stoke these um a short dyslexia friendly children's books and i've got in june i've got a book coming out julia called the river spirit which is uh which is inspired by charles kingley's water babies and it's about a chimney it's based on also the true story of a chimney sweep in victorian england george brewster but i've taken so we've got tom as the little boy the chimney sweep in it and we've.
[8:07] Got instead of ellie the girl he meets we've got l who's a who's like a water nymph water spirit and it's kind of it's a sad story told I hope in a in a magical and hopeful way but yeah do you have now this is what I really remember from that but Mrs Do As You Would Be Done By and Mrs Done By As You Did I don't I don't have those characters they are they are wonderful and but very my little boy's listening to um the audiobook of Magic Faraway Tree at the moment and Enid Blyton owed a lot to those sorts of we get those sorts of names in Enid Blyton, don't we? Those kind of stories, those sort of characters who were there to teach us a lesson. There's a fair bit of that, but not in my book. No, no, no. I mean, we're talking Victorians had their own market, their own understanding of how you write for children. They did them and we do ours. So.
[9:06] Would you just tell us briefly how you got your first deal? And then I was going to suggest that you, because you've got, is it six books now, six big novels, something like that? Five big ones. Five big ones. I'm going to ask you to identify, without explaining too much, I'm going to ask you a question about the book. Before we get on to the island, your previous ones about there, so quite mysterious for people. I'm going to ask you questions about the books and your relationship with them. So it would make people want to go away and read them okay that's good to me yeah otherwise we tell them too much they'll think oh no I know what's going on in that and then but now we can do this little teaser okay how did you get that first deal you're obviously not that older person you're a young mother young young mother I'm actually quite an old mother I'm quite a late I left it a bit late but um I yeah so actually I wasn't a very conventional way in and I don't know if that is or isn't encouraging for other people but um I would hope that it is so I um was teaching I was a full-time English teacher when I started writing um and I started playing with this idea I think because I'd been a bookworm all my life because I'd studied English and I was teaching literature I think I had very sort of high standards of what of what you know good writing was. And so when I dabbled over the years, I was never pleased with it. I always felt it was awful.
[10:34] And it wasn't really my late thirties that I started thinking, maybe I can have another go at this. Maybe I feel a bit more confident about what I want to do and how I want to write.
[10:44] And so I was, yeah, I was teaching. I started writing. And what I did is I entered some chapters of writing into a competition at a literature festival.
[10:54] And it was through that that a literary agent judged the competition, Luigi Bonomi, who's now my agent. He helped me to develop the first full manuscript of The Secret of Nightingale Woods, which was at the time called Moth and the Nightingale. And he sold it to Chicken House.
[11:13] And Chicken House, I think, just bought one, just bought that. And then they bought another two and then they bought another two. And I've just signed with them for another three so um so it's it all just yeah it it just sort of happened I never um went through that had to went through that process of submit submitting um manuscripts to agents um because it because it happened in a slightly different a slightly different way but I do recommend competitions there are some wonderful competitions including the um Oxford Centre for Fantasy's own competition um with Pushkin but there are some there are some um other lovely competitions chicken house runs a competition with the times and it can just be a way to get your work in front of the right people i think and i think i think it can be it can be a different way in a different path rather than what i know can be a really disheartening process but you also have some kind of uh actor training don't you because you do your own audiobooks and others yeah i do so i so after um university i went to drama school went to oxford school of drama and um on their postgraduate course I was there for a year and I worked as an actor I say worked I didn't work much.
[12:27] I looked for work as an actor. I did a few bits and bobs and then pretty soon after that I did my English teacher training and became an English teacher. But it turns out that it was all worthwhile because life takes us on these wiggly paths and nothing's ever wasted.
[12:49] Well for a start actually I think the acting helps with my writing because a lot of the time I write in the first person and i i'm very i get very very immersed when i'm writing and i'm always testing things on myself and thinking about how it feels physically and what's going on in my body and and all of this sort of thing um and making myself cry and and so on which is embarrassing when writing on trains but never mind um i'm pulling all the faces um but yeah so um after the first book was published nightingale would they said oh we've sold the audio book rights.
[13:24] Um do you want to have any involvement in who's reading it and I said well could I read it please and they said oh not sure writers often aren't the best people which is fair enough to narrate their own books um but they let me audition so I had to record an audition tape me reading a chapter of the book and then and then I I was allowed to do it which is really nice um and so I now do I know I do the audio books for um for my own books and I do the US audio books as well which are always slightly different but we and we record them separately which is interesting and they've done quite they've done quite well in the US I don't know why I think it's the British who can say but they've done quite well in the US so I was just shortlisted for the audio of this year's audio awards in in LA a lot alongside Michelle Obama and Patrick Stewart oh no which was awesome I didn't win but neither did Patrick Stewart or Michelle Obama so I'm in I'm in good company, but yeah. And on the strength of that, I've been asked to start narrating other people's audio books. I've just narrated Angharad Walker's brilliant.
[14:31] Dark dystopian fantasy and once upon a fever which was which is really good highly recommended, an interesting sidelight i didn't know about the michelle obama near miss so we're now going to do our quick fire round where i'm going to ask you some questions i want you to answer with the title of a book okay so the first is which book was most difficult to write.
[14:58] The latest one so it's been a long time coming the island at the edge of night uh yeah okay which of your books is the most quirky quirky quirky i'm gonna go with i'm gonna go with this is the most quirky largely because of the narrative the narrative voice in it is very different and has a the whole the whole book has a slightly different feeling to it so that's sisters of the lost marsh is the most quirky yeah okay and the last one I'm going to ask is which book is most like you which book is most like me um okay probably probably my first one the secret of nightingale wood is probably I think for a lot of people find that I mean there's nothing in it that's happened to me it's no not not like that but there's probably a lot there There was a lot of my heart in that first one. And I wrote it when I was living abroad. So when I was teaching in the Middle East and I was really, really homesick. And I think that possibly partly part of the reason why I started writing is sort of a way of dealing with all of that.
[16:12] And so although it's not about homesickness, but there's a real sense of kind of loss and nostalgia that's in there.
[16:17] So it feels it does feel like one of my most personal ones. So I hope that's tempting people to go in and look at them through those lenses so tell us about your latest book the island at the edge of night okay so yeah so this is just it's fresh it's fresh out it's virtually still warm from the printing press um the island at edge of night so it is um a sort of gothic mystery story set on a remote Scottish island um it's a fictitious Scottish island but inspired by real places which we can talk about a bit later Our main character is called Faye Fitzgerald, and she is sent away to a sinister boarding school, the remote Scottish island. And she is told that, along with the other children, there are only about six other children there, she is told that she has been sent to this school because she has done something. But the problem is she can't remember what it is she's supposed to have done, because she has blanked out everything that happened on the terrible night of the storm.
[17:20] So the wicked thing she has done has sort of disappeared into the past. So I read it with great enjoyment. It's a wonderful book. But I was also very struck by how it feels like being in a really powerful nightmare. It's a nightmarish world where you are powerless. Things happen to you and around you. And I suppose for Faye, our main character, though, of course, there is a moment where where it shifts, where she's able to take more agency. But certainly for the first chapters, it's that feeling, which lots of us have as children, of course, and in nightmares, where we're on this, it's like we're going down a ski run and there's no stop. We're just going and we're being forced in a direction.
[18:09] So when you're writing those passages, do you find yourself caught up in the book? Can actually have to surface from time to time and say actually real life is still going on outside the door I'm not stuck in this nightmare really a bit a bit yeah I do think interesting that you talk about powerlessness because I think to some degree it is there in all my stories for young readers it's something that I that I think is is particularly pertinent to the age group that I write for I think when when you're um when you're that age when you're sort of well you know know, 11, 10, 11, 12. And you, you're, you know, you're, you're a fully formed person really. And you're kind of straining towards having this autonomy and this control over your own life. And, and yet grownups are still completely in charge of you.
[18:55] And I remember that feeling of powerlessness so, so powerfully, so vividly. And that comes through in the stories, definitely. And the nightmarish feeling is absolutely right. And I hadn't actually chosen that word for it, but it's perfect. And that is exactly what Faye is experiencing in the early chapters of this story.
[19:16] This feeling of just being carried along in this kind of this sort of hellish, dark wave into this unknown world. World um and coupled with the feeling that somehow it's all her fault I think yeah and and that's that's part of it as well um and it's quite intense um it to write it's quite intense right and that part of in fact there's a very there's a very personal reason why the story took me a long time um and that's because my my dear dad died suddenly soon after I started writing it um and there's a father-daughter relationship that's at the heart of the story and um and that I think coupled with with what you're talking about the intensity the intense atmosphere of the story I think made it very hard to write for quite a long time I found it very hard to work on this story and that's that's why and why it ended up taking so long I think um but but I I also think that through working through Faye's story and finding her hope and her happiness at the end, I believe all children's books should have hope and happiness in their conclusions.
[20:27] It was a wonderful process to do. But in those early stages, I don't know if this is a common thing, I should probably talk to a therapist about it at some point, but I wanted to write comedy. I didn't want to write something something dark and heavy I wanted to write comedy and to write something really light light and silly which is what I ended up doing and then coming back to this story when I felt ready yeah, Yeah, I think that there is a really important function of writing that many of our listeners probably already know or will discover, which is it does help you put a frame around an experience. You might not be writing directly at the experience, loss, grief, breakdown of a relationship, but you can kind of transplant it somewhere else and write about it and exorcise some of the emotions. You don't get rid of them because those emotions are integral to your life and your character, but it does help deal deal with it in a way and process it yes yes just to sort of to explore it in quite a gentle slightly detached way I think yeah that's very British yeah no I think that probably most people around the world I think would would find that helpful so you're notable in your style to have a very it's a I'm sure it's a wonderful audio book I haven't actually listened to um is it out already as an audio well i don't think the audio book is out yet for this one.
[21:54] It begs to be read aloud so would you like to read us a little short passage and then perhaps we could talk about your sort of more poetic approach to writing and how it feels to you um when you're actually sitting there at your computer how you sound out the words to yourself, yeah lovely yeah i'll read you i'll read you the prologue not all stories have a prologue not all stories need a pro but this one needed one um so here we go the house was all in darkness and the storm was still raging outside just as it had been when i'd gone to bed a few hours before but i wasn't in my bed now i was standing at the top of the stairs with no memory of how i had got there had i been sleepwalking i was in my nightdress and the floorboards were as cold as glass beneath my bare feet.
[22:41] Aunt Christina? Father? I called, but there was no reply. Lightning flashed, sudden and blinding white. I gripped the banister to steady myself, to steady my heart. Thunder crashed above the city, and rain hammered on the roof and windows, pounding a pulse in my brain, frightened and furious. Was it the storm that had woken me? Or was it something else? I made my way down the stairs, and out of the kitchen door, into the walled garden. I remember the wind and rain striking hard, making me gasp. Fallen leaves slimed wet between my toes and my nightdress clung heavy and cold. I remember going past father's collection of plants, all battered and cowering. I remember crawling through the hole in the broken fence into the graveyard. I remember seeing the old yew tree, a ragged silhouette against the storm-lit sky. And then? And then the memory shatters, like a mirror. All I have are a handful of splinters, flashes of that night that come and go like lightning, a metal blade gleaming wet, a hacking splitting sound that makes me go cold inside, a scream so piercing it still buzzes deep in my bones. After that night there was nothing, just weeks of stifling dark, the city rain relentless on my bedroom window, day-long dreams left me shaking with terror, those dark shards of memory and the faintest echo of a voice murmuring in horror what have you done faye oh what have you done you wicked child.
[24:08] There we go it's not all as dark as that i'll just say but it does sum up the nightmarish quality because that is a kind of nightmare that um yeah so i'm listening to that for people who are interested in their own writing which many of the listeners are is i noticed that this is getting quite granular here but when you're evoking little moments or little passages you're using the same consonant sounds uh there's a thing about the pulse and pounding pole founding a pole yes and there was another collection of frightened and furious yeah so it's this is more of a poetic technique so if people are looking to um make their raise up their writing to a new level and find a more sort of beautiful treatment of language have you got any tips how you might want to go about that what do you do I think it's hearing it I think it's it's I think it's hearing it and when I do a lot of talks in schools and I talk about I talk about why audio books are so wonderful and that it and because we get to hear we get to hear the sounds of the words and the rhythms and the patterns and the sentences because authors sculpt them you know we craft our our sentences don't we and sometimes only it's only really through hearing it aloud that you can hear that that crafting and that sculpting and I think I hear my sentences aloud as I write.
[25:34] Um uh I hear it in my head and I um and I do I quite often I will say things out loud as I'm writing as well but um I think it's I do think um it's important to get a balance because I think I can get a bit indulgent with my with my purple prose at times and I think it has it needs to have its moment and and I think when I um as I write more and as I get more experienced as a writer I think I'm aware of where we where there's room where there's breathing space in the story for us to have that little bit of kind of lyrical building of atmosphere and um and then where actually we need to be much much more um much much more more sharp and um uh and just just allow the the plot to move on.
[26:21] Without being encumbered by by that kind of um kind of language play um so it is about balance as well i think yeah i think it's like it's like calorie intake you have to sort of go for fine fine amounts but not like 5 000 calorie intake on a page it's got to be much more diet yeah my first book my editor said um you're allowed one simile on this page lucy once one simile i was like okay yeah oh yeah we have to we you know we we can all be indulgent as writers um but uh and it's i don't know sometimes that's part of if that's what it takes to get you through a first draft you just enjoy the language of it you know then then it has its role to play in that i think obviously it's very.
[27:07] Important we think about it from the reader's perspective and what the reader needs at any given point in the story.
[27:13] So, Lucy, you also are one of our tutors on our courses that we run. And we've been doing those for a few years now, which is how I've got to know you, really. And I always learn something from you and the other tutors every time, even though I hear roughly the same presentation. It's always something which I take away. And one of my favorite take-homes that you've said over the years is how you create a mood board. And then that same mood board has been used to influence your covers which if people look them up they're beautifully illustrated covers with a definite mood about them so what is a mood board and how does that process go that ends up being reflected in your cover so it's essentially it's just a collage I think I believe very much that we need to take time we need to take time to allow
[28:08] stories to be ready, to be written. I think one of the mistakes that we make all too often is to rush in, to rush into the writing before the story is ready, before we've got enough ingredients in it, before it's got, before it's, you know, it needs to stand on its own two feet, doesn't it? It needs to have that sense of like an energy of its own.
[28:28] And so we do our research and we do our reading and we do our daydreaming and we do our planning and playing with ideas and some character to work and all of that sort of thing and as part of that process um i gather a lot of images, and i don't i i'm i suppose i'm quite a visual person but i find that it just it sort of nourishes my imagination for for the world that i'm creating that and the story that i'm working on um so i i guess a lot of photography but particularly artwork um particularly paintings and i find that um.
[29:03] Generally, because I base my settings on real-world places, the artwork is very often of those real-world settings, real-world places. And I find that having those places already interpreted by an artist, having that layer of artistic interpretation there, gives me something. It feeds into the creative process in a really, really exciting way. Way um so what I what so what I have lots of images images from research these um artworks and and various things and I create a collage and I call it my mood board um and with it I'm trying to evoke um not just physically physical elements of the story but also a sense of tone and atmosphere and what it feels like to be in in the world of my story um it makes me think about what I want the icons of my story to be, what I want those key elements of the story to be, that will stay with the reader. It makes me think about the aesthetic of the story, if particular colours are going to be important.
[30:09] And it changes, it develops as I'm working on the book. And then in one of the later stages, I will send my mood boards to my publisher and they pass it on to the designer and the artist who are working on the book cover.
[30:25] And it, it, it sometimes, but not always seems to have some influence sometimes more literally. So in my, um.
[30:34] My my gothic ghost story the ghost of goss water we have this this dark gothic mansion here and it is that is very very much an interpretation of the of the the gothic mansion that i had on my mood board so it has that very practical purpose as well but it that feeds into the design of the book and the colors i need so this is this the artist for this um helen crawford white she's fantastic british artist and this one is a an artist i hadn't worked before katie hickey and she's wonderful um so as as some people are listening to this uh lucy's the latest book the island at the edge of the night which is a mixture of blue a sort of yeah purple orange kind of red sunset colors really sort of a pinky foil yeah on it as well yeah um and um and that the colors very much came came through from um from my mood board for that one um so it had that practical purpose too and then when I'm working on the story um and editing and I have my mood board as as like my wallpaper or my laptop or have it beside me and and I find it I just find it helps me to be consistent I suppose I think you know as as writers and particularly before before writers get published uh the time we have to write um is often very limited isn't it yeah I often feel like I spend if I've got you know only a couple of hours in the day.
[31:58] To actually write, I often spend, I feel like I spend a lot of that time just getting in the zone, just getting there, getting to the right point. And I do find things like mood boards and mood music really just help me with that process, help me to get into exactly the right zone, the right tone with my writing.
[32:18] That's brilliant. So thank you for that. So I always sort of conclude with guests with asking them something about where in all the fantasy world is the best place for something. And as we've got the island at the edge of night, which to be honest, is a kind of mixed bag of a place to go. It might be quite nice by the end of the novel, but certainly not at the beginning. But where would you say is the best island in all the fantasy worlds to go? Oh, that's a good one. Actually, I hadn't mentioned the Scottish islands that inspired this book, but it is largely inspired by the Hebrides Islands, the setting for this one, Isle of Skye, St Kilda and so on.
[32:55] I think islands themselves are so magical as settings, I think, because they can be their own little world and they can have, I suppose, the darkness and the light. They can have all sorts of secrets, can't they, islands? Um so fantastic other fantasy island i suppose neverland neverland springs to mind yes that's true its own its own magical fantasy island that has both heroic and villainous and magical and and so on um what would you pick what would you what would be one of your fantasy islands well i've thought of two um so i was thinking about remembering the maps of ursci which was the Ursula Le Guin story where they're sailing through the islands but I can't remember I'm just thinking I can't remember much about the actual islands I've just remembered the map so probably, not that one then but then the Dawn Treader the Voyage of the Dawn Treader which has a.
[33:57] Just one thought each island is different each has an adventure it's very like
[34:01] Odysseus I'm sure that was in the back of C.S. Lewis's mind um that idea of each each island moves you further along in the plot and the story and is distinctly flavored so maybe I would say an island in that ocean that is the voyage of the dawn treader would be my favorite yeah there's a lovely lovely book that came out by nicholas bowling a few years ago song of the far isles which is also inspired by this by the scottish um western isles um but and it but it's fantasy and it's the most magical, story um in which music is like that everyone has sort of a musical instrument that's connected to their soul and it's just and it's kind of music that that keeps the these islands alive um and it's there's kind of pirates and stuff as well and it's british that's a wonderful one song And then Treasure Island, of course, but Treasure Island, I suppose, is purported in the real world, isn't it? So sort of, ish, ish. Yeah, Robinson Crusoe is not terribly magical. No, no. The Gallipers Travels also has islands, which is like the granddaddy of the fantasy voyage story. Yeah. Do you have a fantasy tip to share with us? This could be something you've read or watched recently, or just a tip for anybody who's writing.
[35:22] I think fantasy tip.
[35:25] Well, in terms of a book, I would recommend the book I just mentioned, Once Upon a Fever, and Harold Walker, and there's a sequel that's just come out, A Cure Ever After. In terms of a writing tip, I think it would be almost like an anti-fantasy sort of a writing tip in a way, and that although you might be creating a fantastical world with fantastical characters and magical things going on.
[35:54] That it needs to feel convincing. It needs to feel completely real and your reader needs to be able to connect with it. And so I think that would probably be my tip and finding ways to make it feel real, perhaps through characterisation and making sure your characters are really three-dimensional their responses are convincing, and then everything feels very kind of visceral and powerfully, emotionally and physically it feels convincing. And the settings, I think, I think settings can help with that as well, perhaps using real world settings and allowing them to become your fantasy setting and give it that authenticity that I think we need in order to help readers just to connect with the fantasy world. Thank you, Lucy. That's a whole bundle of tips there, which I'm sure people will find very helpful. So thank you very much for joining us and thank you everyone for listening.
Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast, brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe, wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide. [MUSIC PLAYING]
