I keep a notebook full of ideas. Some of these turn into screenplays, short stories, novels or graphic novels. Sometimes an idea gets so strong it keeps going around in my head and growing and growing until I have to write it. Sometimes I write because I have discovered a market or to collaborate with someone I want to work with. I used to always create a detailed outline first which I would modify as I went along. More recently I've written a couple of things I made up as I went along. All my stuff soon takes on a life of its own. I don't feel as if I am making it up. I see it like a movie in my mind and write it down with the best words I can find. It's a magical process.

This week?
My favourite book changes all the time. When I was a kid it was a book by Enid Blyton I can't remember the title of but it was about a kid named Barney who lived in a circus and had a monkey named Miranda.
My favourite book from high school was Catch 22 which seemed to me to encapsulate how crazy I had discovered the world to be.
A favourite book of my twenties was Something Wicked this Way Comes - another circus book full of vivid imagery. It was one of the first books that really impressed the poetic possibilities of prose on me and how adventure, fantasy and literary qualities could flawlessly combine.
In my thirties I read a lot of horror. Clive Barker impressed me with the sheer originality of his imagination and the quality of his prose. The Great and Secret Show is a favourite.
In my forties I read Anthony O'Neill's brilliant Scheherazade. This impressed me as a magical historical novel to compete with Perfume (another favourite) but written by an Australian so an inspiration to me. A move away from the social realist, parochial stuff which is standard here.
Most lately I love Chuck Palahniuk and Cormac McCarthy. The darkness is unfortunate but their intelligence and writing ability makes them compelling despite it and Palahniuk's humour amuses me.

Messy. Sometimes I only know a desk is under there because mess doesn't usually levitate.

I grew up on earth. I didn't like it. I've been inventing ways of escape ever since. Every now and then I write about the end of the world. This is something I first learned to enjoy reading John Wyndham. Stephen King's the Stand is another favourite. My graphic novel The Twilight Age and the spin off series of pulp novels Twilight Age Vampires are inspired, partly, by the feeling that the world needs a major makeover and things might have to get a whole lot worse before they get better.

I started writing my own scripts for comics when I was in primary school. I started doing full-lengths scripts at high school. I started to write prose fiction in my twenties and after a few false starts finished a SF novel when I was 24 (it was terrible). I did my university studies as a mature-age students and did more creative writing as part of my studies. In 1989 my picture book series Wild and Crazy Dinosaurs was published. I started writing in earnest after the breakup of my first marriage of 9 years. I was 37. I've written about fifteen books since then.

It's a way of getting an audience. I've studied the industry long enough to know that a lot of things influence whether a book gets published or not, apart from it's quality. I've done manuscript assessment for 20 years. I've seen hundreds of poor novels but dozens of publishable ones which have never seen publication with a major company. I've managed to help a number of professional authors get their start but not everyone who deserved it. That's one of the reasons I've started Possible Press.

I always felt that this was what I came here to do - to be creative. Most of my creativity went into drawing when I was a child and teen but it was mostly comics - narrative - so telling a story. It is like a form of meditation. It takes me out of myself and I feel calm and purposeful. There's a feeling like discovery, as if the work is channeled. I love to draw but drawing is hard. Writing is easy.

There are two aspects to creation, self-expression and communication. I would write if there was no audience but it would never be as satisfying. When someone comes up to me at a convention and can't wait to get the next issue of the Twilight Age, that is a great moment because you know then you've done something for someone that the people you love, like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, or Ray Bradbury or Joseph Heller did for you. The same when you get a nice review. That feels like success.

At the moment I'm working on the sequels to The Secret Quest to Jumlatan which I created with Bruce Walshe. We have a director who has been involved with a bunch of movies and directed a couple for Disney. He's helping us develop it for the screen and I have a major publisher interested in the series. I've written three sequels but they need to be polished up before release. Maybe we'll close our deal with this major publisher beforehand, otherwise we'll be releasing them one at a time over the next year or so. Readers can follow the progress of the project on the Secret Quests website.