Then, when I wrote The Night Country, I included a couple more tales, including “Ilsa Waits.” In the novel the story is told through the mouth of Ilsa herself, which was such a fun writing exercise, especially when I got to go back and write it again from the perspective of a storyteller. I sat down and wrote “The Door That Wasn’t There.” It was so fun and people ended up having a great response to it. Originally, The Hazel Wood included only a truncated version of “Alice-Three-Times,” but when my agent set out to sell it, she felt I should write one more tale. As a writer, you always want to find that balance of giving glimpses of the culture, but not so much that the reader’s imagination doesn’t fill in the gaps. One of my favorite things as a reader is invented culture. It was a very daunting idea because, in The Hazel Wood, the book of stories is not only a cult collection of fairy tales, it’s an actual magical object it has world-dissolving capabilities. When I was first working on The Hazel Wood, I knew that I wanted to weave in glimpses of the tales, but I never anticipated sitting down to actually write them. How did you come to write this companion work, and at what point did these stories take shape outside of the novels?
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