For someone who is starting out on developing their critical skills, just being aware of its existence is great: it can make the difference between trying to write a story around a cliche or an original idea, and better still, studying it can eventually clue you in on how to breathe new life into tired tropes.

Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.

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

My agent is based in New York. And due to a historic accident, my publishing track is primarily American - I'm sold into the UK almost as a foreign import! So I'm quite out of touch with what's going on in UK publishing.

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface.

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.