Using witchcraft, by Elizabeth Kay
I’ve never liked the use of magic as a convenience, and I’ve always wanted it to have some sort of structure and to be as believable as possible. When I decided that I wanted to write a story about an alternative world, I tried to think of the most magical place I had ever visited. This was Monteverde, up in the cloud forest in Costa Rica in Central America . There really is a study centre there, and a hummingbird garden, and it’s beautiful. And the Continental Divide really is marked out, so that you can stand with a foot on either side. When I remembered that, it got me thinking that it would be a good place to cross from one world to another – but there was a problem. If everyone who straddled The Divide ended up in the other world, thousands of people would have disappeared. There had to be another factor – a pause of some sort. But choosing an arbitrary number of seconds seemed very artificial, so I chose staying still for the length of a heartbeat, which gave me th...