Inspiration is a funny thing.

Since Modern Magic came out, friends have asked me where the ideas for its magical world and eccentric characters began.

Some of them have been quietly forming in the back of my mind for years. Take the parallels between mages and city lawyers: a thought experiment that kept me entertained in my windowless junior office, wondering what it would be like to cast spells instead of drafting contracts. The conclusion? Probably just as tedious. Human beings have a remarkable propensity to make even the magical mundane.

Other ideas were born from conversations. The facilities troll, Ump, was invented by me and my husband one night as an alternative to the usual, fiendishly impossible-to-operate office photocopier. The Tower’s architectural oddities came from chats with my brother, a civil engineer with first-hand experience of buildings that refuse to behave.

Then there are the ideas that arrive fully formed, as if waiting to be written down. Bob the tiger padded into my life in a dream, wandering through an old flat, brushing past the kitchen unit and staring at me with his baleful yellow eyes. I woke utterly convinced he was real. And sometimes, on the morning drive to work, half-dreaming, half-planning the day, a sudden image flashes up like the answer to a riddle: a giant water serpent crashing into someone’s chest, altering their future forever (that story is still to come…).

But my favourite kind of inspiration is the kind that has been with me all along. Something familiar, suddenly seen in a new light. The ancient tree in the Tower is exactly that. It is based on the magnificent horse chestnut that has stood at the edge of my grandparents’ farm for centuries. My mother swore Henry VIII almost certainly rode past it (probably…). I can still picture the moment you round the corner and see its towering shape, and the glistening conkers that fall each autumn, smooth and brown and hard, glinting from the silky white interior of their spiky yellow-green shells. Those childhood memories wove themselves, without me even noticing, into the roots of the tree in the Tower.

For me, that is real magic: something deeply personal, waiting just beyond memory, ready to remind you how wonderful the world can feel, even when you are encased in steel and glass, staring blankly at a screen.

So if you have already met the tree, the tiger, or the troll in Modern Magic, I hope you will enjoy knowing a little about where they came from. As for me, the next story is already stirring. New futures, new faces, and plenty more chaos creeping out from those stolen moments and half-remembered thoughts, ready to be written…