Shades of Magic is second world fantasy, but also portal fantasy. What drew you to portal fantasy specifically?

Well I write a lot about doors, in all of my books. The lines between things like good and evil, hero and villain, human and monster, they’re these metaphorical doors. And every now and then I get to write about literal doors, but I get to do that in portal fantasy. I knew I wanted to write a love letter to Harry Potter, I had been wanting to write one my entire career. And the thing that made Harry Potter so unique as a portal fantasy was that you wanted to go to Hogwarts. There's a reason it captivated us. It’s the kind of escape where you want to inhabit the world.

It’s really nice to obviously want to be friends with characters, but I think it's even more powerful when you want to inhabit the world. And so I wanted to write a love letter to a world that I imagined would be fun to live in, with magic, and I wanted to give nods to Avatar: The Last Airbender because I absolutely love it and I thought, how cool would it be to do elemental magic in this place. I wanted to turn the tables a little bit on portal fantasy and rather than write about one very different place or multiple very different places and have to create a lot of work for the reader, I thought it might be more visually intuitive if you take one place that has really strong visual details like the Thames River and scrub it of all its markers and then rebuild on the same template. Then, what I'm asking readers to do is not memorize four different worlds, I'm asking them ‘keep this one image in your mind.’ If you can imagine one place, you can imagine everything in this world.

I used to get really daunted by fantasy because it seemed inaccessible in a lot of ways. Like with Tolkien you basically had to memorize a fictional language. And maps don't excite me in books, they stress me out. And so I wanted to write fantasy, but I didn’t want to write fantasy that only felt accessible to fantasy readers. Because I was a hard sell on fantasy; I got drawn in through that door in very specific ways. Really what I wanted to do was create a fantasy series that was a great bridge point for readers who didn't know if they liked fantasy. I wanted to be sitting on that threshold and be able to show people ‘here, let this be an introduction to fantasy and then you can decide if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole.’ But I just wanted to make it accessible.

I think when it comes to fantasy and all reading, accessibility is a good thing. And coming from the academic sphere accessibility gets downtrodden. And I just don’t prescribe to that. I think the most powerful literature is that which is transportive. So that’s what I wanted to do.