This is the point being missed by readers who lament Liquor's lack of hot sex scenes, probably because they aren't old enough to understand that a passionate relationship could be about anything other than sex.

My mother is an office manager, my father a professor of economics and financial planner.

I'd much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.

If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.

It was like discovering that your innermost fires and terrors, the things you believed no one else could fathom, were in fact the basis of a recognized philosophy. Some part of you felt intimately invaded, threatened; some other part fell to its knees and sobbed in gratitude that it was no longer alone.