Sure do! It was my epic masterwork, "The Six Million Dollar Cucumber." It was a writing project in grade 5, and I bound it in Bristol board and everything!

Ideas percolate well for me while I'm exercising. A lot of "Beltane" came to me that way. It was written almost exclusively between 9:00 PM and 4:00 AM. My muse is a little more diurnal these days, and I've taken to writing on the bench swing in my back yard.

Definitely: it was "Sharlot's Web." I'm blind, and that was the first audio book I ever checked out of the public library when I was a kid. I was hooked immediately by the escapism into another world. I still seek out and write genres that do this

I'm a total escapist when it comes to reading, science fiction or historical fiction; I get enough of the present every day.

I don't have a desk; I always write using my laptop, which always sits on my lap, and this probably isn't a good place for a description of my lap.

Years ago, I was reading a rare non-fiction book about anthropology, where I came across the idea that perhaps the agricultural revolution hadn't been an especially good thing for our race. This challenged what I'd always thought. Later, I began thinking about the role of gender in this revolution, and the ways this might have played out. All these abstractions simmered for a long time, helped along by my reading of a nice translation of "The Epic of Gilgamesh." Onto all of these, I began superimposing one of the oldest and most enduring stories, the quest myth: and I was off.

Oh that's easy! It's that magic space when ideas are at their maximum kinetic energy in my imagination, my linguistic centres are thrumming along so that the right words come out in the perfect shapes, and I'm so entirely focused on the act of creation that I'm oblivious to the passage of time.

Coffee? The knowledge that I can slide back in in 16 hours or so? I'm not a morning person.

As a blind writer, this is even more of a complex process than usual. For "Beltane," I approached a friend who'd done graphics work for me before, and gave her some general themes. She came up with several designs with verbal descriptions. I amassed an email list of a dozen or so sighted friends, and asked them to comment on each option as thoroughly as they could, and to offer opinions and impressions. After quite a bit of back and forth and some pithy suggestions, we all decided on one.