I grew up in a different world, on several continents.

I was born in New York City, grew up in London, spent my teenaged years in the American South and my adult life before I left the U.S. in Washington D.C. and New York. My childhood in particular was also spent in a literary world that I do not think exists anymore, certainly not as it used to, in New York and London.

I knew I would be a "writer" - I was trained and educated to be one. And I always have been. This is just my first book project that has gotten to this point and is now published and accessible. It is a great feeling.

Now that I live in Germany, I have also found that this has had a great influence on my writing. Maybe this is just a phase, just the light, just the food, just the beer, but I think it is a combination of things.

I do know that living in different places has also given me the confidence to write about not only locations, but new ideas and concepts in the language of a local if not with a familiarity that comes with having that experience. All artists and creative people are, to some extent, permanent tourists of the soul if not the unknown.

I do remember the first story I ever read although my childhood was filled with books (both my parents were writers including of children's books). But the first book I ever consciously sat down and read by myself that was not a "children's book" was "The Hobbit." It made a huge impact on me - not just the story itself, but also the story of how it came to be published and the impact of that paperback on the book business of the day.

I started writing as a kid. My first "book" was written and illustrated at the age of five - all about the ancient Egyptians. In my house, writing a book, being written about (in a book or in the press) or having your name in the dedication was kind of an "expected" thing.

I also kept a diary during my teenaged years.

I have been a professional writer for many years, including for TV and for "news" of different sorts, but this is my first published book. I am finding that EBook publishing is a great process. As a writer it connects you even more viscerally to your audience.

The easy answer is that the story is in the book. The events of last year were amazing from a reform perspective, as much as there is still a long way to go. That said, this is a book (if not a series) long in the making. I had many friends when I was in college and through my early twenties certainly who died of AIDS. Seven years ago, I also got very sick, and the only thing that made an impact on the neurological movement disorder that I developed at age 40, was medical marijuana. I was referred through a federal trial. I told myself if I survived the experience (and I almost died several times) I was going to write about it.

Last year, in addition to the amazing events of the year, I was also hired to cover the industry. That was the final push to do the book. I wrote it in about six months.

There are a couple of things. The first is that it is very easy to get your work out there via EBook. The second is that if you are willing to become involved in the process actively, it is certainly a sure route to publication than "traditional" publishing. As a kid, I watched the book production process from behind the scenes - and from the relatively privileged position of the child of "major" writers at one point - so I got a real insider's perspective at a certain point in time.

There were agents and publishers who played a different role than they do today and this is also changing - but in the past this was also more of a gate-keeping role just because of the price of the actual physical printing and distribution of books. There was a long lag between actually producing the book and getting it published. Compensation of course was a different proposition, as was promotion.

And of course, I have always written. If EBook publishing was around in the form it is today at really any time in the past, I would have gone this route before.

That is a funny question. I used to read these kinds of interviews as a kid thinking that nobody I knew (including the writers and creative people who were related to me) could really explain the "how" or the "why" of the creative process.

Some of the most interesting interviews with authors I have ever read are to understand what the triggering process is for creativity every day.

The first, most important thing certainly for me and others without a trust fund, is to make the time. The second is to set up a space conducive to writing. Music always helps. The third is to have something to write about.

And then just write.

There are some days when the writing is hard, but right now I think perhaps I am kind of in a creative period where writing is easy and comes fast. That may change, but it is also, I think the experience of not only having 25 years plus as a professional writer but now the freedom to find an audience. This is also true of my current paid journalism work. Plus this is a subject I know alot about, and the story is just kind of "there" for me.

It is a great feeling, I have no idea if it will last, but right now when I sit down to write in the morning, there is always something decent at the end of the day to show for it.

The last piece of this is that I am also working with a professional editor and journalist in his own right, which is a very nice working arrangement. It is critical at some point in externalizing a world that you have in your head to have that filter (at least for me) between something like this and the outside world. Particularly on a long writing piece.

The situation which I have with Abul - "Green's" editor - that is evolving as we work, is that it becomes almost a writing "conversation" as it were in the final stages of the book.

It is not the only time I have had this kind of working relationship, but it is always present in work I consider my best.

I had a professional design it for me.

At this point, anything that is written in German. I am learning another language in my late forties, so I read constantly and not always "for pleasure" at the time, although down the road it gives me great pride to understand words, concepts and the world around me better every day as a result.

It is a different kind of "reading for pleasure" definition, but I think that counts. I read street signs, bus advertisements, and the occasional children's book.

I am also working my way though German Asterix. It is great because even in German, the character and place names are equally funny.

The one I have with me. Smart phones are great for reading just about anything particularly because you can adjust text size so easily.

I know I sound disrespectful of the printed book sometimes (I am not). I grew up with them and understand the visceral pleasure of holding a printed book.

There is still a place for both.

The only drawbacks I have found to digital reading, really, are when I want to read in the bath tub. Then e-readers - all of them, are kind of a hazard.

The sequel to "Green" is already underway. I also have a couple of other projects I have been working on for some time. Writing is a fluid process, at least for me and right now.

The important thing, I think, is focus if not knowing the beginning, middle and end of what you want to write about.

When I was a kid there was an incredible pressure to say that I had read all my parent's books (certainly my mother's), or to sound cultured with the quotes I could drop from The Canon.

To be honest, I do not have any "favorite" authors per se. Rather I enjoy writers who make me think, transport me to another world, and of course, make me laugh.

The two people, for good and for bad, who influenced my core "internal writer" as it were, are absolutely my parents. My mother was an incredibly talented illustrator more than a writer. My maternal great grandmother is still the acknowledged master storyteller in my mother's family - via the oral tradition. My father was also an amazing storyteller more than this kind of writer. I remember the stories he told us at bedtime still.

My mother, of the two, was a midlist author and "famous" certainly in a more conventional sense because of this. But as a creative "book creator" she also had a "time" where her world was fascinating and all encompassing from a visual perspective as well as a world I could create inside my head with the words (which were all my father's).

That said, the last children's book she ever did that touched me was "The Green Man." It was the end, in my opinion, of her professional career as a world class professional. On all fronts. It was also the end of my childhood on a visceral one.

My father was the person who literally shaped my inner writer's eye if not discipline and inspired me to write from a young age. And still does. That is an influence that grew with time, even though we were separated when I was 13. I remember the first time he sat me down to write a serious book. It was the hardest thing I had ever had to face (I was about 8) and still is in some ways. But it was my father who created the "writer" in me. Starting with his most intimidating marching orders. "Just do it."

I remember reading an interview Eve Arnold OBE gave once about him, (his first wife) - a rare one, where she said that he was a harsh teacher. He pushed her. And he pushed me. It is easy but it is hard. You have to sit down, put words to paper or computer and just believe that you are a writer. After a lot of practice, you will be. I know. I am 47 and this is my first "book."

I lost my dad at a young age (another book) but those influences have absolutely shaped me over the years as I have honed my skills and focus as a writer.

Writing a book, in the traditional sense that we know it and "Green" certainly is, is still very hard, although in the last decade, that skill has really begun to unlock in me. In my twenties, I did a great deal of writing for TV, particularly as an investigative journalist. That was intensive training as well as intense, and the most like the writing voice and style of this book.

There are other writers who have influenced my writing, my perspective, my voice, my approach. Too many to list here.

This might seem like a strange question, one I have rarely seen asked, and when it has been, never answered in a way that strikes as true.

A book is a way, at least for me, for a person to capture the time, attention and imagination of another person in a way that is still unique to the medium.

When I am writing, and I have the ability to type very fast, so I can literally dictate to myself in the rawest writing stages, at a speed close to regular (English) speech, I do create a kind of mental "room" or space as it were as I begin to tell each piece of the story.

In writing "Green" it was also a process that was made super easy by the framing of the narrative - month by month. I had a palette of time and events, as it were, to tell a story about periods of time. It works, and I knew it at the time.

When, in the past, or even now, I am writing something that does not "work" or is not a fully hatched idea (yet), I have learned to just let it flow and do what I need to,put it aside, and I will come back to it again. I know this can be frustrating for younger writers, in particular, or ones that have not crossed a certain point in their careers. It has taken me a long time to get here, but it did happen.

Right now, it feels really great to have finished the project and to have another person (a professional editor) go through and weed out the less than fabulous. A real book is never "just" the work of one person. I have never met a writer (and I have met quite a few) who managed that.

It is pretty cool to see this book go on sale. Great feeling.

That is a hard question to answer because of where I grew up and how. I met people whose work I read on a regular basis. There were family "loyalty" tests too. My parents always hated Maurice Sendak, in part just because of the professional rivalry created by the phenomenal success of my mom's first big medal win ("A Story, A Story"). Her book was the one in 1971 that knocked "In The Night Kitchen" out of the Caldecott Gold as it were.

In my house, you were not trained to be a professional athlete, you were trained to be a professional intellectual, and the "Olympics" we were trained for were slightly different, but the medals just as prestigious and fiercely fought for. As a "known" artist, I still have huge ground to cover, just in terms of accomplishment, even if you do not count the long list of "medals" etc. that have come out of the last generation of my family for their creative and or entrepreneurial accomplishments.

The Sendak "War" was the longest running rivalry if not negative influence I can remember, although it was mostly funny and we had all of Sendak's books. Even professional rivalries did not create a censorship in my house. You just had to defend what you read if it was "questionable." And there was nothing really that was. My mom's books were censored often in the South. Those were real issues in my house.

Russell Hoban, Alan Garner, Ursela Le Guin, Roald Dahl, Quintin Blake were all contemporary authors and artists of children's books I read as a child (if not kiddy lit) who I either met or my parents knew and were at least professional acquaintances with in the world of the "known" if not "published" author circuit my family was part of at the time. Their work is also absolutely engrossing to me today still and of course, along with Tolkien, painted my inner eye of what is a "real" inner world of a book I like to read, and hopefully have begun to have to skill to create - even if non-fiction now and maybe forever.

Frank Herbert, particularly as I got a little older, also captured my inner fiction space as it were. Amazing storyteller, even before Dune.

In terms of the "official" writers? I read the official "Canon" of English Lit (most of it in first edition copy), most of it before I turned 13, and all of it influenced me. I thought about Thomas Hardy actually as I was writing Chapter 1 of Green. He was the person who taught me the importance of the character of the location itself. Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, the Brothers Grimm, Shakespeare, Melville. The list is long.

The educational access and opportunity I had, in writer "surround sound" was 360 at least for a period of my life. After that period was over, it was intense enough at the time to give me the ability to go back to it, at least in my head.

And there are still writers who capture a certain "writerlyness" who I respect. Long list. I love Matt Taibbi's work. He is the last person who really made me laugh.

This answer will only grow longer with time, I suspect, but proof is in the pudding.

They are the reason I am getting a book out this year and so quickly, if not so widely, about events that have just come to a close.