Una Verdandi’s brain is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. It’s too easy to get lost in all those long, dark corridors and shadowy crevices; better to have a picnic on the lawn, take a few photos, and move on before dusk. The ghosts and demons that appear after dark make terrible playmates but wonderful muses.

When Una is not exorcising her muses into a Word document, she is probably painting in watercolour, embroidering something, or pondering the meaning of life. (Just kidding—life is meaningless.) To pay the bills, she works as a professional editor, helping other fiction authors mold their demons into a marketable form or tidying up legalese and financial babble for her corporate clients.

Una lives in cozy apartment in Toronto with a very vocal tabby cat and at most one potted plant. She would like to have more greenery, but the only thing she can successfully grow is her to-be-read pile, and in any case, her beloved fur baby eats every living thing within reach when she’s not looking. She has concluded that she should just get more cats and be done with it.