Some thoughts on RED QUEEN: in ALICE, Alice and Hatcher have to confront their (completely horrible) pasts in order to survive in a very dangerous world. In RED QUEEN, I’m exploring what happens after you’ve been through something that traumatic. What interested me was how they survived, how they learned to deal with what had happened to them, and how they become whole people again – not putting it behind them, necessarily, but learning how to incorporate what’s happened into their new, changed selves. Of course there is still darkness and danger, but RED QUEEN is not nearly as dark as ALICE. It also draws more from fairy tale inspiration than the original Alice books, although Carroll remains a strong influence.