I am lethal with money. In 2003, fifteen grand in debt, I decided to give up my job and write a novel. Also, now I have a bit of money ...
If I found myself in a Fahrenheit 451 world, I would be the fool running around grabbing as many books as I could until my arms were full and I ...
The first book I ever loved was The Rocket Ship Saboteurs by John Townsend. It’s not a great book – I’ve tracked it down since – but it was my ...
Jerusalem. It’s a city I lived in from 1994-2009, the bulk of my adult life. It was really the first place I chose to be home, rather than having that ...
was saving the earnings from my paper round to buy hardback volumes of The Lord of the Rings. They’d changed the jackets by the ...
If I’m honest, the characters I most readily relate to are the ones who worry too much, or are ill-equipped to deal with the subtleties of human interaction. The first ...
More like Z-list celebrity. My most memorable encounter is meeting a reader in Germany who went on to become, like, an online stalker, sending me loads of emails. I was ...
I read about red-haired, freckled Anne soon after my family and I immigrated to the US. Although Anne was very different from me in many ways, I ...
Who could fail to fall in love with Holly Golightly? (Not the obtainable Holly from the movie, but Truman Capote’s unobtainable Holly.) And I fall in love with just about ...
I should say Manchester , because that’s where I’m from. But I must betray my roots and ostracise myself forever more and ...
I’d like to be able to control and influence the minds of other people, and thereby influencing their actions. You WILL buy my books. Yes you will. Multiple ...
Apart from the Blue Pirate, I’ve had literary crushes on Mr. Rochester and also Steerpike from Gormenghast (which is pretty wrong, as he’s a psychopathic murderer, but he’s also the ...
Enid Blyton’s Shadow the Sheepdog was quite a special one because it’s the first “big” book I read all by myself. It was a bright yellow hardback and I remember ...
I wasn’t keen on screenwriting—it’s a kind of institutionalised emotional abuse. I didn’t much enjoy doing brochure copy either, although sometimes it was fun—lingerie copy was a ...
Keep going. The only way to get better is to keep writing. And if you submit a story and it gets rejected, try again. If you submit a story and ...
Listening to Bon Jovi in the shower.
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: Being terrified of a pantomime pirate and shouting at him to leave the good guys alone. An early precursor for not being able to distinguish between fiction and ...
Before I could use a pen to form words, I “wrote” in pictures; and once I could write, I did. I think I consciously knew writing was the thing when ...
It would be something faded by the Californian sun of the early-eighties, most probably.
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When I found out about Roald Dahl’s hut.
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