Theodora Goss not only has a cool name, she’s the creator of some glorious prose. Her fiction includes the wonderful creation of Miss Emily Gray (whom I find vaguely sinister in a pleasing way) in her collection In the Forest of Forgetting. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Fantasy Magazine – to name but a few. She co-edited Interfictions with Delia Sherman in 2007 (Small Beer Press), which was on the Tiptree Honor list in 2008. She is also a poet and an academic, lecturing at and undertaking a PhD in English literature at Boston University, and she has published Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. She also extols the virtues of the Azuki Cream.
1. Miss Emily Gray came from …
… my imagination. I had this image in my mind of some things rolling down a road, sort of blown by the wind. Some leaves, maybe bits of horsehair, those fluffy milkweed seeds, plain old dust, the sorts of things you find on a country road. And I imagined them coalescing and rising up, in a small whirlwind. Then there she was, Miss Emily Gray. Ready to make mischief.
2. If I didn’t write I would …
… jump off a bridge, probably.
3. What are the five essentials of any story?
Nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and commas.
4. What’s the worst bit of feedback you’ve ever had? Either in the sense of it being utter crap OR being so annoyingly awfully true that you wanted to eat your own head in annoyance?
The worst bit of feedback, the most useless and annoying thing to hear in a critique, is “I don’t like this kind of story.” How’s that going to help me?
5. Donuts or danishes?
Danishes, but actually I would rather go for something like an Azuki Cream (puff pastry filled with red bean paste and whipped cream, decadent).
For more, go here. 
Oh and see her cool post on monsters.