Goodreads asked Manfred:

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

Manfred Well, the idea for Magic Mirabelle and the Riddle of Night Opium first came to me not long after my son Tristan was born. I was suffering a severe lack of inspiration in my writing at the time but a few months after he was born I got the idea for the story - about a 12 year old girl, her mother and the new Baby who comes into the house and helps rekindle the spark of Magic inside her. I am not Mirabelle of course but that scenario is very close to how things were at the time. I was also reading lots of classic Fairytales and Fantasy stories during that time - Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Mopsa the Fairy, HC Andersen and Grimm's Fairytales - So the idea of a girl who lived in a world of books is also partly based on my own experiences..

Around the time I was writing Mirabelle I was also reading some pretty deep books, such as Jung's Psychology of Alchemy, Arthur Waite's The Hermetic Museum, Israel Regardie's The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic and of course The Chymical Wedding of Christian R. So the Hermetic influences make it different from other Fairytales - which is why I call it MM and the Riddle of Night Opium - A FAIRYTALE IN THE GOLDMAKING TRADITION. Mirabelle is a young Witch and several of the main characters - the Wizard Night Opium, the Father of Wishes and the wicked Lady Nightshadow herself - are all dabbling in the ancient art of Goldmaking and busily searching for the mystery of the occultum lapidem, the Hidden Stone or the Philosopher's Stone.

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