Peter: I definitely wasn’t thinking about that. Tolkien’s sequence was all about magic, illusions, a reshaping of the water. I was looking for where you’d hide real unicorns.

Connor: I know that the Red Bull was directly inspired by the painting that Marcial Rodriquez gave you when you were a teenager. But what about the other characters we meet in Haggard’s castle, like the talking skull and the cat?

Peter: The cat, honest to God, happened to be asleep on my desk when I got to that point. I just wrote her in, although I changed her gender. If she hadn’t been on my desk I’m quite sure there would be no cat in the story at all. And the “wine that drinks itself” riddle the cat tells Molly is one of those bits I mentioned where I just made stuff up, hoping I’d be able to solve it later…which I always did, though I was usually as surprised as anyone by the answers. The riddle finally came together when the whole family traveled to Albuquerque to spend Christmas with Enid’s parents. They had a grandfather clock in their house, and I remember sitting and staring at it for a long time, almost hypnotized, until an image came to me of Amalthea and her friends passing through the clock. As for that whole business about when the clock strikes the right time, that comes from something that happened to me when I was six or seven years old. I was on the subway with my father. It was very crowded and loud, and we couldn’t hold a conversation, so I was just thinking. And suddenly I understood something, or it seemed to me that I did, which was that New Year’s Day was entirely arbitrary. It didn’t have to be January 1st. There would still be the same number of days in a year no matter when you started, so you could pick your own New Year’s Day if you wanted to. When I realized that I leaned forward and shouted, to my father, over the rumble of the train, “Happy New Year!” And my father, being my father, just smiled at me and said “Happy New Year” right back.

Connor: You say the book was a nightmare to write. Do you remember finishing it?

Peter: Vividly. I have a couple of friends who still live in Santa Cruz, Jim Houston and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, who are both excellent writers. They are probably best known for Farewell to Manzanar, which is about Jeanne’s experience of the Japanese-American internment camps in World War II. Back then Jim had just finished the manuscript of his second novel, and had given it to me to read. My own writing had not been going well. I was frankly close to giving up on The Last Unicorn again, even though I had a contract for it from Viking by that point, and I knew that if I read Jim’s book I was going to be completely paralyzed. So I put the manuscript up on a shelf and used it to bribe myself into continuing. “You can read this when you’re done, and not a moment before.” I remember finishing the last sentence of the first draft on an unbearably hot night, then coming out of the back bedroom and announcing to my wife and kids “All right, it’s done. I’m finished. I’ll read you the last chapter later, but right now I’m taking a shower.” Then I showered, put on a bathrobe, and immediately picked up Jim’s manuscript.