Twickenham, near the Thames, West London. As a small child I spent much of my time with my grandparents, Eric and Edie. On work days, Eric cycled off to Teddington Library, where he was the maintenance man. One of his responsibilities was to stoke the furnace of the boiler. Quite often he would bring back books that his employers had culled from the shelves and consigned to the flames. He put a greater value on them, and gave them to me. Even though I couldn't read some of them - an outdated encyclopedia, say - I treasured the pictures. Edie worked at the Twickenham Library, a proud Edwardian building with columns and pediments that, to me, declared the importance of books by housing them in a palace. Three times a week, at 7 a.m., she would unlock the huge double doors and let us in. We had the place to ourselves. While she cleaned the vast expanse of parquet floors and polished the solid oak shelves and desks, I would be assigned a chair and my choice of book. Any book! For an hour and a half the shelves were all mine, and I could climb the rolling ladder and make my own discoveries.
How does this early experience influence my writing today? I find that one of the pleasures of writing anything – books, emails – is conducting the research. I'm always fascinated by it, and always distracted. And that's my excuse for not being as productive as I'd like to be.

My initial attempt at writing for adults was at art school, writing copy for a series of ads for Alcoholics Anonymous. That led to a job in an ad agency, which led to a career of creating TV ads in Europe and the US. Cameras, cars, soup, chocolate, beer, airlines, radios, wine, TVs; people in my business are knowledgeable about many things, but experts in none.

A writer, Harry, asks himself "Why is Macbeth known as the 'unlucky play'?" He surmises that it's because Shakespeare stole the plot from another playwright, and the aggrieved playwright sabotaged the first production, thus spawning its reputation. So Harry writes a manuscript and posts it on a website that promises discovery by an agent. But the manuscript gets ripped off and made into a movie. The irony!
The novel starts with the first two chapters of Harry's manuscript, then cuts to the contemporary but unconventional 'whodunnit', wherein Harry seeks revenge and the villains receive their just desserts.

Impatience. Rejection by agents and publishers doesn't have to have the same effect as it did a decade ago. With the internet, and outlets like Smashwords, one can publish to the ether. And I can see my book in print for the cost of my time designing it plus a few dollars for paper and postage.

Success? I'm afraid I'm a long way from being 'successful', at least in terms of sales. But from a personal satisfaction point of view, I'd say that Smashwords enables me to put my work out in the world and see how readers react to it. And it does so in a way that's virtually pain free.

I find doing the research enjoyable. If I manage to get the background facts right, I hope readers will be able to immerse themselves in the world I've created without being distracted by anachronisms and inaccuracies.
The other source of fun is in solving the puzzles that I put in my own way. For instance: How should I start this sentence, considering the one that's gone before it? Would X really respond to Y in that way, at that moment? Is that word the right word to use in that setting? Does it scan? Does it make me smile? It takes me a lot of effort to get to the end of each chapter, and I get a kick out of giving myself permission to move on to the next.

I'm not a facebooker or tweeter, and I don't blog, so I have no fans that I'm aware of. But if that ever changes, I'll get back to you.

My next project is a novella, a story of an incident that takes place in a hill station in India, in 1934, as recalled by a 10-year-old boy. The incident is neither felonious nor scandalous, only public and embarrassing. But it's a part of my father's story, and one I feel interested in enough to explore.

No real, top of the heap favorite. Mood plays a role in what I enjoy from one week to the next.
But, in no particular order, and excluding any of the classic and ancient...
Richard Ford. William Boyd. Cormac McCarthy. Peter Ackroyd. P.D. James. Graham Greene. Evelyn Waugh. Bernhard Schlink. Meg Rosoff. James Salter. P.G.Wodehouse. H.E.Bates. Madeleine Miller. Hillary Mantel. Edward Hoagland. Carl Hiassen. And plenty more whose names aren't in front of me right now.

Seeing if my Smashwords sales have increased overnight.

Mainly blogs and newsletters. But I confess I still get most of my books from the local library. Such a great resource.

I was five or six at the time, and it might have been based on one of Enid Blyton's tales about Noddy and Big Ears. I had only three of the books, and Dad had read them to me countless times. After I pestered him into telling me a NEW story, he made one up. I remember I scrawled a few words on a page and added a couple of bizarre stick figures as a reminder to him of where he'd left off.

Arbitrary, undisciplined, and spontaneous.

I do it myself. Probably not the best idea, but I enjoy the process.

This bloody internet thing. It's addictive, I tell you. Must get the camera / fishing rod / hiking boots out again.