In bed! My other interests are long-distance walking, great food, reading maps, taking photographs, cycling, painting, politics and travel. I've been travelling since an early age, hitchhiking locally from the age of sixteen, overseas at eighteen. I tasted liberty in mind, spirit and geography - at first to escape my father- and as a way of seeing other people and places. An interest in maps, food and photography sit together nicely. Eventually, I collected stories and experiences that made-up my Pilgrimage series. But there's a lot more stories to be told.

Obsessive. I have to 'be there', 'live it'. There has to be a central narrative idea that drives the story. It is an entirely messy process that only becomes itself through repeated editing, an obsessive amount. It is only finished when I am sick of it the fifth or fifteenth time. Writing for me is exciting, dangerous and painful. I cannot always tell what will happen next. The engine takes me there. However with 'Knowing Simone', set in C19th France, there is additional work in living in a time, place and culture so different from my own. Additional research have transitioned into a more solid planning process. Currently inspired by Emile Zola, a great storyteller.

I cannot say any novel gave me that wow moment, although I greatly enjoyed Tolkien, Hemingway, Stevenson and Steinbeck at uni. I came to writing quite late, and without a literary background or training. And as an Economics and History student at uni, I also loved George Elliot's 'Middlemarch'.
For wow moments, I have relied on film, including Dursu Uzala, The Piano, Tampopo and many others. Quite a few people have called my my fiction 'filmic'. But also on poets with Dylan Thomas, and Alan Ginsberg.

For my travel and poetry, I use my own photographs, usually taken on my travels. I've had seven or eight photo exhibitions over the years. In painting I am developing my style, and notice its increasing parallels with my fiction. Although I have a high regard for common 'rules of thumb', I am not content with them. In my painting and in my writing, I am looking for boldness, for a sense of danger territory, of surpassing what goes for 'good', excellent' or 'literary'.

I read as much non-fiction as fiction, much of it, history.
As for fiction, there is just so much of it. Consider for a second that in the last fifty years, there are more book written than in all previous history. So 'the classics' of the last fifty years are more numerous. You just have to look for them and make your own judgments. That frightens people, so perhaps that is why there is this obsession with 'classics'. Less thought required. But do believe that many of the greatest books have been written in the last fifty years. It hard to know where to start.
If I limit it to Australian fiction, I'd choose 'Poor Fellow, My Country', 'Such is Life', 'Serpent's Tooth', the best of Peter Carey and Tom Kenelley novels.
Amongst the classics, Molliere, Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, George Elliot's Middlemarch, with plenty of Steinbeck and Hemingway and Zola.
Recent likes are Ondaatje and Hong-Kingston.

Maps!

Person to person! I perform poetry in Sydney venues, and make presentations in local libraries and elsewhere. I like it. Enacting the emotive power of your word, drawing out every part of its powers. Poetry is like a condensed narrative where I find the rhythm of its message, the colours, images and its human dimensions. I have Facebook sites for for each ebook, and occasional write a blog. There's only so much time.

I had no background in writing. My life was sport, sport and more sport. I wrote non-fiction first, historical and heritage information contained in two published guidebooks, the 'Great North Walk', and 'New South Wales heritage Walks'. My urge to write fiction was prompted by a chance encounter in Art school. I became obsessed with a nineteenth and early twentieth century photographer named Dr Louis Gabriel, a 'black' doctor in a 'white' Australia. Trying to write his story as non-fiction defeated me. I eventually realised that only fiction could do justice to his magnificent life. Yep, dragged unwillingly in the fictional world. Now I can't pulled out.

'Forgetting and Remembering' (now titled Trust) grew from two or three Australian outback trips, particularly the 1983 visit to Brewarrina. It's a half aboriginal town in arid country, the last 150 kilometres along dirt road in mulga country. It is another world out there, and amongst aboriginal people, you learnt that the rules were different and hostile to indigenous people. Famously, a few years later. the town made national headlines: a found aboriginal man died in police custody. As a result of police attacking his funeral, the town rioted, eventually leading the highest level of national enquiry, a 'Royal Commission'.
This was my backdrop, My town is fictitious, and I have added the occasion of Australia's Bicentenary, and rambunctious, insensitive and corrupt official who goes missing. The story opens with a burnt body found outside town limits. The mystery is who is it? And with the local koori taking responsibility for finding the missing Badger, how will fellow kooris cope?
Not that it is finished, 'Knowing Simone' is new new venture. It was based on my research of Decazeville, a minor French town that I wrote about poetically (Called 'Who Can Know You Decazeville?'). It seems that King Louis' used-up lovers were given an asset and sent away. One of those assets, a Decazeville mine, was given to a courtesan. This inspired by own considerably different story set in Third Empire France around 1867.

i dislike fandom. I like readers. I like readers who are curious and enquiring, about the stories. Although I am as willing as any to talk about myself, I prefer staying somewhat anonymous, and hearing how the stories relate to the reader's lives. So I have set up Face Book pages for each book, so people can chat and read about the story and how it came to be.

I read as much non-fiction as fiction, much of it, history.
As for fiction, there is just so much of it. Consider for a second that in the last fifty years, there are more book written than in all previous history. So 'the classics' of the last fifty years are more numerous. You just have to look for them and make your own judgments. That frightens people, so perhaps that is why there is this obsession with 'classics'. Less thought required. But do believe that many of the greatest books have been written in the last fifty years. It hard to know where to start.
If I limit it to Australian fiction, I'd choose Poor Fellow, My Country, Such is Life, Serpent's Tooth, and the best of Peter Carey and Tom Kenealley novels.
Amongst the classics, Molliere, Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, George Elliot's Middlemarch, with plenty of Steinbeck and Hemingway and Zola.
Recent likes are Michael Ondaatje and Maxine Hong-Kingston and Elizabeth Smart’s I Sat Down And Wept at….
I love The Golden Ass, Germinal, For Whom The Bell Tolls, Poor Fellow, My Country, Kidnapped, Cannery Row, The True History of the Kelly Gang, etc etc.

Poetry suited my spontaneous access-to-the-psyche-style of creating work. It suited my obsessive dedication to 'finding the magic' in words. But then I could take all those elements and use them to write a story. The story is paramount. Keeping the reader entranced in the objective. So my poetic streak could be an added component, indeed a key component i my novels.

Almost completed Blacksmith & Canon (working title, fourth novel), another historical novel. Set in 1503, it charts the end of the medieval, and the arrival of the Renaissance via a dramatic conflict between two characters: a Church Canon, and a town Blacksmith. Like Knowing Simone, it will be put into my Agent's hands very soon. My next working title is 'The Hymn of the Tar', about a solitary refugee and his Persian musical instrument, the Tar, from which developed the guitar, and sitar.

Perhaps not the first story so much the compelled-to-write moment that reawoke my interest in storytelling. I was already 50 years old where leading a tour in Spain. I had a near-death experience on a Spanish highway, and the adrenoline was pumping. I had to write. About the near-death experience but it appeared in poetic terms. I was hooked.