I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.

I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.

I had tears coming out of my eyes. And it was the characters that got me there.

I had an idea for a story about a young woman who was living with people who were different, not just superficially different - such as hair colour, or eye colour, or skin colour - but different in some significant way.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.