I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can’t be like any other author’s really.

Photos represent primarily a seductive but deleterious short cut.

It was relatively easy to write 'The Cave of Lost Souls', though, because it came to me one night in a dream. I remember waking up and having this idea for a complete story - from start to finish - in my head, so I jotted it down, then later began writing the thing.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.

My most intimate secrets? Well, if I told you those they wouldn't be secrets now, would they? Seriously though I don't have too many secrets. I'm a very open and honest person, sometimes too honest for my own good.

The joy of painting lies precisely in the challenge of memory and the challenge of translation from the lived experience to the two-dimensional or three-dimensional symbol.