Goodreads asked Frances Evelyn:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Frances Evelyn I started writing The Changeling Tree, had a break from it, expanded it, put it away for several years and then rewrote it again. I think it would be fair to call that process either organic or chaotic, depending on whether or not you enjoy it.
Although Black Annis was always going to be part of the story, the book focussed primarily on the human characters to begin with, and Annis didn't have much of a back-story. She was just Black Annis of Leicester legend (as told to me by a neighbour). Carrick came along later and only when he was already established as a character did I decide to include the Faerie challenge and the scenes at court.
Time-travel presented its own challenges, because I needed to seed story-lines, character traits and plot details in the first book that aren't expanded until later on in the series. For that reason, The Changeling Tree kept evolving as I wrote the other four books.
At the heart of it all, I wanted to write a book about loss and coming to terms with loss. I don't want to include spoilers, so I'm going to leave that comment as it is for the moment.

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