Clare Byrne

Well, well done, Paddy Donnelly, who illustrated it.

Paddy is your collaborator and friend.

What happens when your characters look nothing like the characters in your mind?

Well...

Tough, really, I suppose, if you're the writer.

Sometimes when I read a book that I love and then it appears on screen in a movie or a TV series, I can't watch it for that reason.

Because the lead character is a big star who looks nothing like the person who I imagined in my mind and it doesn't agree with me.

But that doesn't happen, you're saying, when it comes to illustrations.

I was coming close to the wind.

But you made up the rest and you pretended it was based in legend.

Because sometimes we can have these stories that we hear at home and we think everybody else in the country knows the story, but they don't.

I had a situation one time I was telling colleagues about, you know how people will say they get trapped in a field after dark and they can't leave the field or find the gate until the sun rises.

Not one person.

had heard of this before.

I'm seeing the producer's face.

She's never heard of it.

I've heard of it.

It was the fairies.

Yeah, but I do remember when I heard that story, and I heard it so many times growing up, I always wondered what the person was doing in the field.

Like, they'd be walking the road home from the pub and they'd end up in this very well-known field that was very well-known to them.