I have a Kindle. Have I just promoted Kindle? There must be other e-reading devices and I am sure they are first rate. I will endorse them wholeheartedly if the manufacturers started sending them to me for inspection.

I am perfectly ignorant of marketing. Perhaps I have been marketing for years without realising it.

My desk is my lap.

I am not from anywhere in particular and I have only just started to grow up. Being an adult has much to recommend it: objectivity, fewer emotional tangles and countless opportunities to acquire vast amounts of debt.

Though the midwife that delivered me commented on my native wit and sagacity, I did not start writing in earnest until I reached the giddy heights of primary school. As a youth, my handwriting and spelling were so wayward that until I was about 10 years old, I was only allowed to write in pencil. To this day, I cannot look upon a pencil without experiencing a twang of shame.

My latest story tries to create opportunities for poetic writing in prose, and for the embedding of simple Christian symbolism. I have found that it is important to face up to technique in writing. There's a lot of rhythm in the prose, and repetition of key words, which create little eddies of variation. I am a musician by training and I am no hurry to forget everything that music has taught me. But at the end of the day, these are all apprentice pieces: I'm still trying to learn to write a good sentence and follow it by several more good sentences.

In the day job I am an academic, so I am used to writing a certain kind of very disciplined prose, not that I do it particularly well. But it must be said, it is a rather joyless occupation, without humour or invention. Academics have to defend their writing so vigorously that many good ideas get put in the bin. I wanted to write fiction to make full use of the language and of my imagination. The English language is an extraordinary instrument and it seems tragic that we don't take it as far as it can go.

I don't have any success.

A good sentence.

If I have any, I just hope they too are looking for the art of writing.

A comic novella, the philosophical mémoires of a teenager, Reg Ridgeway, who is being detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure at Packett Street Comprehensive School, Stoke on Trent.

Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, Edward Thomas, Walter Pater, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Thomas Aquinas.

Breakfast.

Trying to work and looking after children.

Immensely slow. Draft and redraft and then write 19 more drafts. It's all about learning technique.

The Psalms of David.