Queenie Mab is one of my favourite characters. The idea of the lawless prison is a bit of a cliché, of course, but I needed her to have had a difficult past. She is so cheerful and light-hearted on the outside that the people around her can sometimes not see the force of character within that allowed her not just to survive it but to survive it on her own terms.

This all started from me wondering why most spaceships in films were always painted boring colours, which lead to the idea of a ship painted in stripes and everything developed from there. I did not want to go down the route of a poor/struggling/criminal captain, so went for the opposite instead and Jared was born. ‘Sevenpence’s son’, by the way, is a twist on the line from an old children’s game: ‘ sixpence married sevenpence’s daughter’.

The lead character, Hester, is perhaps my most ruthless heroine. She’s part of the Resistance, but has discovered that it is less about heroics than making hard decisions, and doing things she never thought she would do.

I have created a number of different terra-formed worlds in my novels, usually just as a convenient backdrop to the story, but in ‘Sleeping Fleshless’ I wanted a world where the process was not quite complete, to contrast life within the sealed habitation steads with the wild weather on the outside.

I have a soft spot for Surah, and this is one of my early novels. The theme of a normal person with extraordinary powers has always interested me, and comes up again in other of my novels. Here I also wanted to explore the idea that the way she presented her image to the world was not a reflection of her true self.