What was your inspiration for Half Bad and the trilogy (written and unwritten)?

Sally Green This sounds a simple question but really it's terribly complicated and difficult if not impossible to analyse the inspiration for a story. I think lots of things came together and then more things come and add to that and some of them had to get chucked out in the end but they still fed into the story.

For a slightly clearer answer my starting point was the 3 gifts that you receive on your birthday - I imagined someone was given 3 gifts and they would signify something. Then I had to think what the something was and I thought that they would become a witch and the story built from there.

Other things that fed into are numerous but the Hamlet quote 'there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so' was key. I interpret this in Half Bad to say that that there is no right or wrong side - Nathan is bad from Jessica's point of view and Jessica is evil from Nathan's pov. I know little about witches and did no research so had to base the story on the little I knew - there are Black and White Witches and White witches would be expected to be good and Black Witches would be expected to be bad - so of course it seemed obvious to play around with those expectations.

Then there's the Hunters - I wanted them to be female and wanted the female witches to have strong powers and a higher status than the males. Probably cos I'm a woman.

All the locations are based on places that are real though I may have adapted some to be slightly different for the story. I was doing a lot of walking in Wales when I was writing HALF BAD so Wales was inspirational but also the sandstone trail in Cheshire.

And probably most importantly the character of Nathan was vital. I knew as soon as I got into his head and wrote from his pov that it felt good. I knew that it worked that he was half Black Witch and half White Witch and his voice was clear in my head - not sure what the inspiration for that was except that he's my flawed hero.

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