I grew up in New England and in the South, a bit in Hawaii and ultimately, on the West Coast before the age of 26. How it influenced my writing is simply that I have a sense for these regions in particular and I have strong emotional bonds within those areas, some of them sentimental and generous and others, stormy and unresolved. I think this all adds into the reasons why I've written novels in various places, most of which I've lived in, around, among.

When I could first communicate at all I was telling stories, but I was eight years old when my mother gave me a typewriter and asked me to write a story about a pet mockingbird that had recently died. So I did -- I typed the story out and I've never really stopped typing and writing stories since.

I've written a lot of books over the years; at the moment, I'm editorially going over a novel I wrote called Neverland. The story behind it involves simply a confluence of memory and culture -- when I was a boy, I traveled in various capacities in the southern U.S. and later, spent a brief but eventful time on an island off the coast of Georgia, but the influences of this book were several -- from the stories that stayed with me of children who ignored, avoided or had no parents, J.M. Barrie, Saki, John Collier, others, too, and the horrors of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short fiction and Arthur Machen's and even H.P. Lovecraft's, all of which I could relate to as a boy -- the isolation and misunderstanding of how the adult world operated versus being a child, the sense of something terrifying in mysterious and isolated spots, the idea that there were unseen forces in the world. From all this -- life, fiction, imagination -- the idea of the cousins, Sumter and Beau, and the shack in the woods came to be. When I was a kid, there was always some mysterious and potentially horrific shack in the woods, a place you were warned against entering upon your life.

So somewhere in my psychological make-up, the culture of stories from which I sensed a kindred thought, the characters of these two cousins and their families, came to me and I longed for this one island I knew of off Georgia, which had begun to represent something important to me when I wrote the novel. It all came together But there were other influences -- there was a little islet within a lagoon in Los Angeles where I'd lived, and on it, rabbits and ducks that had been dumped by families after Easter, and the sense of innocence and protectiveness i felt whenever I saw those animals on the little island (which the city maintained), as well as friends who talked about their grandparents. I barely knew my grandparents since I was young when they died, so I was fascinated by other peoples' stories.

But ultimately, the Jackson family, their matriarch with her punishing attitude, the parents with their own messed-up lives, and these two boys, seemingly opposites of each other, but in some respects two halves of the same coin. Long answer to this brief question!

The relief of having the story down on the page, of excavating it from within my mind, of revising it so that what I imagined can come alive.

Coffee or tea. The sense that I'll never get everything done that needs doing. The idea that if I don't get up, I'll just live inside my head all morning long.

I feel as if I'm always writing even when I'm biking, walking, running errands, swimming, reading…pretty much always writing or thinking about the writing and the story or wondering why I'm not writing...

I discover them mostly by browsing at random, through bookstores and online, and after that, based on what friends suggest or what my favorite writers are putting out at the moment.

Yes, it was called Sammy the Snail and Jimmy the Moth, and I wrote it when I was five. I illustrated it also. It ended sadly when Jimmy was eaten by a bird and Sammy was lonely. Even then, there was an edge of psychological darkness to what I wrote.

I wake up, avoiding writing as long as I can and then force myself to sit down and start. Then, I feel resistance to starting so I make a phone call or make another cup of tea, and then eventually, somehow, the writing goes and work gets done and I feel much much better than I'd have felt if the day had gone the other way. Somedays go better than that -- I get up, feel all chipper, head to my office, open the computer or turn on the Selectric or pull out the pad, and just start in and suddenly it's 3 or 4 in the afternoon and it feels effortless.

But most days, I avoid it as long as I can and then make more tea.

I suspect this was a Dr. Seuss story, and yes, his stories had immediate impacts. They were subversive (the children in The Cat and the Hat don't intend to inform their parents about their wild day), they had a dark edge (who actually LIKES green eggs on a plate? The ham may be fine, but green eggs?), they rhymed (good for remembering and feeling like smiling when there's a fox in a box or a cat in a hat), they had wonderful illustrations that took you into an alternate universe, and of course, they were hard to put down. Additionally, many of them described the illogic of the adult world and the sense that another world was about to open up for adventure.

I can't say enough good about Dr. Seuss.

With trepidation. I've had terrible covers on past novels and great ones, too. At this point, I mostly just trust good cover designers to know what will invite a reader to want to pick up a book.

I own several and play no favorites. I even own the first ebook reading device ever made -- called the Rocket Ebook Reader. Mine, the 40th one off the line, still works and I love it and wish it were still around. I used to get on the subway and grab the strap to hang from while I stood and read from the Rocket with one hand. That ebook reader made reading Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame seem like a breeze.

But i own every kind of ebook reading device known to humans. And I have not found one I disliked yet.

My long-running email newsletter, which has been going since 1999 when I launched it with cyberspace's first email serial novel, Naomi, which I wrote week-to-week for the thousands of readers who subscribed. I invite everyone to subscribe now at http://DouglasClegg.com/newsletter

I have four desks. One is a long panel with a raised, slanted lectern-kind of platform. It goes across my office chair, the one I can lean back in. I prop my laptop on it. I have a more traditional table-desk for my desktop computer and my typewriter. But I also have a writing shelf on my exercise bike and another one on my office treadmill. Sometimes I feel like I need to exercise while writing and researching, so I put the laptop on the treadmill or bike and I start going for an hour or so. With the treadmill desk, I've got to walk very slowly but I understand it's better for your health and thinking than just sitting all day long. I find it productive -- and switching between writing tools seems to free up some creativity when I'm a bit stiff.

Truman Capote, Patrick McGrath, Ian McEwan,William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Christopher Marlowe, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Haruki Murakami, Roald Dahl, Homer, Euripedes, Aristotle, Anne Rice, E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Jack Kerouac, Stephen Crane, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Donna Tartt, Joe Hill, Joan Didion, Dean Koontz, John Connolly, Marcus Aurelius, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Sigrid Undset, and then I could name a thousand more, most dead, many living. I've intentionally left off close friends who are wonderful writers because if I forget even one of them, they may not feel so close anymore. But I don't have a friend as a writer whose work I don't adore.

I read only for pleasure. Even my research reading is for pleasure. Even when I read Melville's Moby Dick and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, it was pleasure and nothing more. I believe if you read fiction for anything other than pleasure -- even as a student -- you've missed the point.

This will always be a secret until I'm ready to divulge.