Rather like my long suffering Tommo, I spent some time plodding through a hostile landscape.

   When I first tried to write this book. Tommo had a double and the plot was overcomplicated and didn't quite work. So, taking my cue from Tommo's stoicism, I started again almost at the beginning, giving a larger role to the mysterious and beautiful Vevena and simplifying and stream lining the plot until I was happy. Maybe poor, struggling Tommo was a metaphor for the writer, toiling through mud, hoping that somehow some magic would rescue us both.

I was originally inspired by a family holiday to Southern Ireland in which the landscape, the people we met and the peculiar weather we experienced combined to give us an off beat, but strangely magical holiday. I wanted a little of the flavour of that time and place to inform the narrative, though I must emphasise that we saw no children tortured in cellars and no human- faced birds; though we did see a dead dolphin, an elephant in a hedgerow and a herd of cows galloping across a deserted beach...