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.

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.

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.

Having said that, I'm a huge Jack Nicholson fan because he just goes nuts in everything he does. Having Jack in his heyday would also be a dream come true.

As for goals, I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end.

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.