Just as the best way to judge an adult is by his or her record collection, the best way to judge a pub is by the albums on its jukebox.
— Ned Beauman
I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.
I'm reasonably good at talking onstage, but actually holding court in a pub is all to do with power dynamics which I don't think has anything to do with fiction.
I don't have a day job, so I read any time of day.
I always save a huge book for a flight, because then you read it at both airports and on the plane and by the time you get home you're a quarter of the way through and it doesn't feel so unmanageable any more.
I was always determined that one way or another I would force a book on the world, even if I had to resort to writing one about a tabby cat who solves mysteries.
I would love to learn how to air kiss non-awkwardly.
There's never a bad time to put earplugs in. They're the kind of thing you can reject as a bit lame, but somebody told me to do start wearing earplugs and it turned out to be great advice.
I read 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford again every so often.
Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.
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.
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.
