In The Lime Twig I took two very young people and made them very old.
It's hard to tell whether the ship or airplane - they're all the same, I'm convinced - is male or female; it may shift back and forth.
My father's parents were Irish. Only a year before my father died, he and I went back to Ireland for a week to look at the old homestead.
When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.