Quite literally, it's "Herbert West, Reanimator," an early short story by H.P. Lovecraft. Herbert West, Lovecraft's corpse-reanimating doctor, has more personality than most of HPL's protagonists, whose main function is to experience horror. I began wondering about Herbert -- what lay behind his bizarre interests? Why did his friend help and support him? To answer those questions I wrote the four novels of the Herbert West Series, which take Herbert on a long journey and transform him from an amoral, rational scientist to a wounded healer, psychopomp and magus.

That's an excellent question (which is what interviewees say instead of "I don't know"). The Lovecraft story on which The Friendship of Mortals, the first book of the series, is based, is a combination of science fiction and horror. I retained elements of these genres, but I would call this book, and the others of the series, "psychological fiction." Instead of the process of corpse revivification, or what the corpses do once they come back to life, I focus on Herbert West and his librarian friend, Charles Milburn. I explore their friendship, the choices they make, and how they deal with the consequences of those choices. The second through fourth books of the series depart almost entirely from horror, apart from the plain old human kind. Readers who come to the series because of its origin in HPL's story may be disappointed, but I think my characters and their situations are sufficiently interesting to keep them engaged. If I had to create a genre label for the series, I would go with "literary supernatural/psychological." Lumpy but accurate.

In 2018 I published She Who Comes Forth, a sequel to the Herbert West Series. It's set in Luxor, Egypt and the Valley of the Kings in 1962, and involves archaeology, geology, ancient magic and secrets. The sequel to that book will be published in 2022. Until then, my most recent book is a collection of stories, half of which are "spin-offs" from the Herbert West Series. I'm also getting closer to publishing Winter Journeys, a novel I wrote several years ago about Romanticism in art and life.

Aside from juvenilia and poetry, and essays required in school and university, I began writing seriously in November 2000.

Yes -- it was some sort of adventure set in ancient Egypt, inspired by one of Joan Grant's "far memory" books (that purported to be based on her past lives). I was about 14 when I wrote it. And now I'm writing another novel that is an adventure set in Egypt. Life is full of circles and spirals.

You know that saying -- "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting a different outcome." That's how I came to regard the submissions process. After many rejections and -- worse, in my opinion -- non-responses, in March 2010 I heard two life-changing words -- Smashwords and Wordpress. I reasoned that publishing on Smashwords and using a blog to establish an Internet presence was a more optimistic plan than to give up and stash my manuscripts in the basement or continue the send-out-and-wait submissions process.

It's best when I'm obsessed with the story I want to tell. The writing then is inevitable, like giving birth. I don't have to find time for it; everything else in my life has to be fitted in around writing time. The obsession also makes it easier to slog through the tough parts -- connecting the scenes that come to me complete, needing only to be transcribed. So far, I've written my first drafts in longhand. Coming back to the spot where I left off -- rather than the beginning of a document on a computer -- makes it easier to continue with the story rather than fiddling with the beginning. It also helps that reading my scribble isn't as easy as a Word document, where the words jump out at you in stark clarity. Once that first draft is done, I transcribe it into Word, and endless revision begins.

Either a pile of paper with a computer to the side or a computer with a pile of paper to the side, depending on whether I'm writing a first draft or something else. Also lots of small scraps of paper with ideas, notes to self and other random scribbles, weighted down with rocks.

Two things: first, the extent to which my characters seemed to come alive and influence the plot in ways I didn't expect. Second, the fact that music I listened to as I was writing sometimes found its way into my novels, becoming part of the plot in some cases and in others influencing the outcome. The ultimate example is my as yet unpublished novel Winter Journeys, which is actually about Franz Schubert's song cycle Winterreise.

No, but I remember the effect of my favourite book when I was a kid of 8 or 10 -- Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. I was totally captivated by Mowgli's life in the jungle with the wolf pack and devastated by the ending when he goes away to live with humans. I made my friends act out scenes from the book, drew pictures of them and read it again and again for years.

Almost anything. Lately most of my reading is books by fellow indie authors. I don't deliberately seek out "best-sellers" or the latest prizewinners. If such books catch my attention it's for other reasons. I've decided the process involved in selecting books to read is both complex and somewhat irrational.

Well, here are five books I have re-read many times:
1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
3. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
4. Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault.
5. The Throat by Peter Straub.
I can feel a lot of other titles jostling around, trying to get on the list. Also, these are just fiction; I have another whole list of nonfiction books and poetry.
As to why these books, the only thing I can say is that I found the characters real and the stories compelling.

Over the years, I have loved the writing of these authors: Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, Robinson Jeffers, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Elizabeth Goudge, Henry Mitchell, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mary Renault, Mary Stewart, H.P. Lovecraft and many others.

Random chance. If I see a cover image or book description that sounds interesting, I give it a closer look.

Ironically, giving away books for free. I suspect a lot of people make that their primary search criterion, so "free" equals findable. That's not really encouraging for anyone who wants to recoup their investment in self-publishing or to make a living from writing, but for authors who do not depend on book sales for income, it is an option. Being allergic to advertising, I am not keen to inflict it on others, so writing excellent books and furnishing them with excellent covers and metadata has to suffice.

Creating characters and situations that come alive in my imagination and embodying them in prose for others to discover.

The possibility that on any day something wonderful might happen.