I'd been writing for as long as I could remember, but once I read Otherworld, I'd stopped writing original stories to focus on fan fiction. It was such a rich, exciting world that I couldn't think of writing anything else.

Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.