Too many things! My latest interests include medieval longstaff practice, miniature painting, and learning to play the mandolin. I also spend a lot of time travelling. All these things eventually feed into my writing; for instance the idea for 'The Netsuke' came out of a visit to the British Museum's Asiatic antiquities section.

In common with many other writers, I suspect that I also spend far too much time on the internet. Not always productively!

I remember the book I wrote it in; a school exercise book with a bright red cardboard cover (embossed to make it look like leather, but we weren't fooled). It was a rambling history of a far continent... and it rambled, and it rambled, and I never finished it.

Goodness knows.

First: gathering of ideas. I have a huge pile of notebooks, and a massive file in my Nexus 7. They come from anywhere: experience, things seen from the top of a bus, non-fiction books, newspapers, gossip, dreams.

Just occasionally an idea will have me write a story straight away. More often it's a process of fitting together a number of germinating ideas over time, a bit like adding ingredients to a casserole...

I tend to draft the story out in one fell swoop, as a very rough outline. It gets added to later. Then... well, then the hard bit begins.

Couldn't possibly begin to answer this. But a few favourites.

James Joyce - Ulysses. Couldn't get on with it as a student. Read it this year and finally got on Joyce's wavelength. He's like a magpie, collecting bits and pieces - advertising copy, nursery rhymes, academic jargon, rough vernacular - and there's a wicked sense of humour. Plus, he gets cats absolutely right.

Iain M Banks - difficult to choose one book. Player of Games? Use of Weapons? Feersum Enjinn, with its wonderfully wrong English? Probably, for me, it's Against A Dark Background, for the wonderful anti-heroine, Sharrow. A real woman with a real story. And some lovely dark humour (well, as always in Banks).

Shakespeare - Hamlet. Wonderful contrast of poetry ("the firmament ...fretted with golden fire") and the meaninglessness of even a Prince of Denmark's everyday life.

Ursula K Le Guin - the Earthsea trilogy. I read this first at the age of nine and I've loved Earthsea ever since. Real magic: Ged and the names of things, and the wonderful goats of Gont. Impressively real.

Mary Renault - The Persian Boy. A tie for my historical fiction niche with Rosemary Sutcliffe's Eagle of the Ninth. Both took me to a world distant in time but immensely present in the fiction. Since then nothing except Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall has made the same impression.

All kinds. Non-fiction, particularly travel books and history; poetry (very much enjoy haiku, Issa's are always worth reading); SF and fantasy; and quite a lot of classic and literary fiction.

I also haunt the 50p shelves of secondhand booksellers. You never know what you're going to find! It may be a quick boomerang to the charity shop - or it may be a terrific read - but at 50p it's always worth taking a risk.

Google Nexus 7. Preferably in bed, and with at least one cat nuzzled up somewhere close.

One word. Messy.

A married trio decide to set out on a sex-tourism vorage across the universe. It's SF, obviously.

The greatest joy, I have to say, is hitting the 'publish' button.
First of all because it means the daily grind of getting that book out is over.
And secondly because it means now I can start writing something else.

I have a number of possibilities. There's one idea based on a biography of Tchaikowsky that I read a while back, and which talked about gay milieus in nineteenth century Europe. That could be interesting. And another idea which sprang to mind when I read about Nadezhda Durova, the first female officer in the Russian cavalry, who fought in the Napoleonic wars as Alexander Durov.

My breakfast.