A forever story

Her early life experience and such memories surely exerted an influence on the creation of her fairy stories, she says.

"Since childhood, I have had a lot of questions about the world and loved everything around me. The arduous travels somehow gave me a tender heart with much sympathy and compassion," she says.

Good with words, Long aspired to become a writer after graduation from junior middle school. She did not start creating fairy stories until 2008, when she was working on an adaptation of Peter Pan and she realized that she, too, could write fairy stories.

She often started writing a story without thinking too much about the outline and plot. For example, she created Zhouzhoubabade Chengshi because her 5-year-old nephew always laughed when he heard the word zhouzhoubaba (literally meaning "crumpled"). As she went on writing, more ideas came to her so that she would usually finish a story in one day and spend time revising it.

Apart from the tales, particularly impressive are the illustrations by Liaw.