"Hi Ksenia! I wanted to say that I've recently read 2 of your books, Rosehead and Irkadura. They were both so beautiful and I'll definitely be reading all the rest of your books! But I wanted to ask, you said that it was very hard writing Irkadura and you felt so sad while writing it. So why did you carry on even when the book was such a struggle and you didn't enjoy yourself?"

Here is my answer, darling.

In order to get at that nagging pain that's been gnawing on your insides, you have to look for it, find it, drag it out into the light (and it will scream and kick at you doing it), see it for what it is and then finally let it go. Writing books does it for me. It's not easy and it would be easier to simply forget about it and shove it deep down, but the problem is, instead of spending all of my energy on doing what I want, a part of me would be keeping that ugly thing restrained deep inside me. And so if I didn't write it out, I'd be walking through life half-alive, and that would've been a real nightmare. And I actually did do that, before I started writing.