I Want A Simple, Ordinary Life .

Within Days They'd Formed An Unholy Alliance With A Foppish Young French Vampire In The Garden District Who Had Implausibly Golden Hair And A Streak Of Ruthlessness As Wide As The Mississippi

I Wanted To Know How Humans Came Up With A View Of The World That Had So Little Magic In It. I Needed To Understand How They Convinced Themselves That Magic Wasn’t Important.

I Saw The Logic That They Used, And The Death Of A Thousand Cuts As Experimental Scientists Slowly Chipped Away At The Belief That The World Was An Inexplicably Powerful, Magical Place. Ultimately They Failed, Though. The Magic Never Really Went Away. It Waited, Quietly, For People To Return To It When They Found The Science Wanting.

I'd Studied 16th Century Science And Magic. I Thought It Was Strange That People Were Interested In The Same Kinds Of Things My Research Was About. The More I Thought About It, The More Intriguing It Became And Pretty Soon I Was Writing A Novel About A Reluctant Witch And A 1500-year-old Vampire.

Sorry, We've Got Ghosts.