I'm a big fan of Japanese fiction. In general, I'm attracted to works that present new and interesting perspectives on people's diverse experience of life.

It's a small white desk looking out on the front garden, where there is a big old Leptospermum bush, a row of Nandinas, a mauve-flowering Westringia, and a bird bath loved by Australian magpies and pied currawongs.

I grew up in Australia, but the biggest influence on my writing has been living in and experiencing various countries and cultures including the US, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste and Japan. I've also travelled to about 45 other countries in the Pacific, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America.

I wrote song lyrics when I was a teenager, and produced far too many articles and book chapters when I was an academic. I started writing fiction in 2004, and guide books for Nagano in 2011.

My latest book is a collection of short stories that I've written in the last five years. It's a confabulation of science fiction, humor, horror and ghost stories, mainly set in Australia and Japan.

When I lived in Japan, it was very difficult to communicate with Japanese publishing houses, let alone convince them of the merits of my work. Besides, I imagined that the Nagano guide books would only have small print runs, so it made sense to self-publish on platforms such as Smashwords.

I learned a great deal about Indie publishing from working with Smashwords. The Style Guide is a treasure trove.

When it comes to fiction, the most fun is seeing how the plot develops. I usually have a general notion in my mind, and sometimes the story goes down that path, and sometimes it takes on a life of its own and ends up in a completely different place. As for non-fiction, I get a great deal of satisfaction out of research, and a big thrill from seeing all the parts come together in the final product.

It's great to write a book that give some one else pleasure, and if even one of my books has done that, then I'm happy and grateful to the readers.

Haruki Murakami, Amy Tan, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, Irene Nemirovsky, Lian Hearn, Douglas Adams, Mieko Kawakami, and Banana Yoshimoto.

First think, then write!

I have many favourite books but a few that spring to mind are: Haruki Murakami's 'Kafka on the Shore', because it has a scene where thousands of fish fall out of the sky for no reason; Mieko Kawakami's 'Breasts and Eggs' because it thoroughly disrupted the Japanese male fiction writer universe and was hated by arch conservatives; Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things' - so deliciously written you can almost taste the mango chutney; Amy Tan's 'The Kitchen God's Wife' - one of the best of the diasporic Chinese novels; and Douglas Adams' 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' series - still one of the funniest set of books I've read.