I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.

Mystery, investigation, false leads, solution - we associate that structure with genre fiction, but it exists in our real lives, too. There's no reason why literary fiction shouldn't be able to acknowledge that and make it fresh.

I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day.

The simile has to match the tone of its surroundings and has to be like a little joke. Writing a simile that isn't funny on some level is quite hard.

I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick.

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.