I want my fiction to feel real most of the time, so it makes sense to pay attention to life and to how people work.

The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

Don't write poems to make girls like you, because it will not make them like you but it will give them something to quote back at you later in life.

Are You Seeing Me? is written powerfully with both the heart and the head, and neither gives an inch. It's funny, moving and hugely insightful. Darren Groth puts the reader into the heads of Perry and Justine in a way that feels so true and so revealing that I think I've come away with a greater capacity for empathy. I didn't know a book could do that. We all need to spend some time inside this story.

One of the things that makes characters real is details. Life offers a lot of details. You just have to choose and use them wisely. When you give them to fictional people and a fictional story, their purpose and their meaning changes, so it's best to see the version in the book as fiction entirely, wherever it started out.

Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen has been the Queensland premier the whole time we've been in Australia, and the state is a national joke for having a Deep North government thats said to resemble governments of a generation or more ago in some parts of the US Deep South - governments that always talk about getting things done and never talk about rights.

I'm a plotter. A thinker, a note-maker, a mapper and a flow-charter. I'm up for using any device that will teach me more about the people I'm writing about and their story.