It's still early days but Mark Coker's advice on marketing has been really useful - hard work though. Have created a blog, followed the right people(I think) on Twitter and will shortly embark on recording videos about my work

Letting my imagination run wild! But at the same time entertaining people. It's really scary to think that people can read what you've spent ages putting together and judge you - they might hate it!

When I find one I'll ask them......

I think I might resurrect a sitcom idea I was working on about eighteen months ago. It's based in the White House and as per usual for me it's a little bit 'out there'.

Easy question. My biggest inspiration is and always will be Douglas Adams. I also have enjoyed Robert Harris and, like most of the reading population on the planet, J K Rowling.

Well I have not a lot of choice in that writing is not my day job. So my only inspiration very first thing is the alarm clock. But want my children to have the best and brightest future possible - so pretty much all of my energy is directed towards doing whatever it takes to give them a great life.

I'm going to put writing on the back-burner for a few weeks and really get my head into Christmas preparations. I love to cook and there's plenty of cooking to be done in our house ready for the Yuletide festivities. Also need to do some jobs around the house that I have been neglecting whilst getting AOA ready for publishing.

Good question. I do find a lot of search engines/publishing sites are really good at providing suggestions. I tend to flick through one after the other until I settle on one that catches my eye.

Yes! I was about nine years old and wrote a book which used characters I had seen in a comic called The Spludges. The other kids in my class would insist upon me reading the story to them and then I would have to go away and write the next bit so they could find out what was going to happen next. I have no idea where that ended up (note to self: search loft after interview is over.....)

I always concentrate on the plot structure before anything else as it's the most important thing to me whenever I read a book/watch a film. Once all of the plot strands seem to have come together I flesh out the characters. Then when rewriting I usually change some plot elements that don't seem to have fitted in with what the characters would do. Then I look at the page structure in terms of description. But story to me is king.

The one that really fired my imagination was a great book written by none other than Julie Andrews. It was called The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles and I bought the 25th anniversary edition of it to read to my own children. It is a great book about setting your imagination free - perfect for any child with a creative mind.