We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

Writers block: when I get it, it's because my subconscious spotted that I'd make a huge structural mistake in constructing a novel before my conscious mind became aware of it, and threw on the brakes. So I've learned not to sweat it: take two days off, then back up a chapter, read through, and try to work out why I'm suddenly uneasy about continuing.

I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.

I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.

What I'm hoping for is something that goes much, much further than the conservative enablers of dog-eat-dog capitalism putting on a puppet show of cleaning house. But that's probably not going to happen just yet.

Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.