Maria Lewis

That's kind of my bag, and I...

use settings that people recognize with twists.

I guess you could say there are nightclubs set in Berlin that are, you know, run by werewolves who kind of like set up their own multi-ethnic, multinational pack.

And there are secret alchemist bars where you need to know passwords to be able to get in.

There are places that are run by wombat shapeshifters in Australia.

There's all sorts of things.

But I love that idea of,

looking at things that you see every day or looking at things that you think you know, and doing a little bit of a twist on that, doing a little bit of a remix on that.

I can pretty much find anything interesting, no matter what it is.

I can find some angle or some way that hooks me in.

And I love being in a physical place and being inspired by that place.

That's

oftentimes why my books are set in locations like Dundee in Scotland or, you know, Berlin in Germany, Newtown in Sydney, the books hop to all different locations, Boss Castle in Cornwall, like very specific places, but places that people feel like they know, but

I feel personally like I can show them something they haven't seen before, show them an element that they haven't seen before.

I mean, anyone who's walked the streets of Berlin and how cool that city is and how multicultural and how modern and how historical, like although those things seem contradictory, but they're all sort of meshed into one in a city like that.

And the same way in Sydney and the Wailing Woman, that becomes a whole different type of city.

for a lot of people, like taking things that exist, that exist like St.

James Station in Sydney and subverting it and twisting it and taking people a little bit deeper.

So it's using real life historical elements and taking it in a different direction.

That's one of my favorite things to do as somebody who writes within the genre of urban fantasy, but it's also something that I love to read as somebody who really enjoys consuming urban fantasy from different authors.