Step 1) Take an hour and create a one-sentence summary of your novel.

Hmm....so what is my book about? Well originally it was as stated on YouWriteOn:

A lonely, ugly Victorian boy covets a lovely fairy girl. But that was just what the opening was about.

So what was the original inspiration?

It's a bit cloudy now, but the story grew out of a Neil Gaiman story called "Calliope" where Richard Madoc, a one-book writer (suffering the dreaded Block), trades a Bezoar with Erasmus Fry in return for a captured Muse ("Calliope"). The Muse is female and nubile.

Erasmus Fry tells him, "they say one ought to woo her kind, but I found force most efficacious..."

Well I won't tell you the story in case you ever read it (don't want to spoil it), but after raping Calliope, it occurs to Madoc that "the old man might have cheated him: given him a real girl. That he, Madoc, might possibly have done something wrong, even criminal..."

It was two things that intrigued me...the sexual thrill in the idea of capturing a beautiful creature and the twisted idea that if she was a Muse, and therefore not actually a person, then rape was all right.

Out of that grew Tommy Grimes capturing a Fairy. But the real story is about rape, power and, at heart, what is right and what is wrong.

And it's about how people learn the difference, if they ever do. Isn't that what all stories are about?

And a once sentence summary of the story? How about:

A man returns from the South Seas to seek a Fairy he captured as a Youth.

There's a whole lot of story questions to be answered there.