Goodreads asked Patricia C. Wrede:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Patricia C. Wrede Sometimes, the idea for a book hits like a bolt of lightning - it's obvious when and where it struck. Other times, the idea for a book grows slowly, like a pebble knocking loose another pebble and then a rock and another rock, until there's a whole huge avalanche. When that happens, you can't really trace back to the initial pebble that started the whole thing.

The current book is the latter sort. I had an idea that I'd been messing with for years ... decades actually, about a girl from our world who had a job to do in an alternate fantasy world. There were a lot of different possible jobs over the years, and eventually it crossed paths with a different long-term idea I'd had about the heir to the throne coming back to take over and not being at all like what her people expected.

Ideas are actually the easy part of writing. They're all over the place; all you have to do is look at real life and then ask "Why did that happen?" or "What if...?"

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