My wish for others is that they don’t need to wait for a wake up call. Instead, Gulp! can provide them with the game plan, the inspiration and the practical techniques they need to turn their idea or a dream into a reality – calmly and swiftly, and without the crisis.

From the moment you conceived the idea for the story, to the published book, how long did it take?

It was just after New Years when I put the stake in the ground and committed to writing Gulp!. I was running a seminar at Lehman Brothers and made the commitment in front of 150 people. Once I’d charted my course, things happened really fast. I had signed with an agent by February, and then by April my contract with Penguin was finalized. My deadline was the end of October to submit my final manuscript. “Gulp!” came out in the U.K. five months later in May and then it launched in the U.S. in January this year.

Are you a disciplined writer?

When I first started writing I had this romantic notion that I would be overcome by divine inspiration and the words would simply flow through my fingers. I quickly realized that for me, it didn’t quite work like this. From my experience, writing a book is about 20% inspiration and 80% discipline. And the hardest part for me was actually getting the words written down. My brain was buzzing with ideas, but at the end of the day when you’ve committed to deliver 60,000 words, you gotta get ‘em down on paper.

After a lot of trial and error, I discovered my “writer’s rhythm.” In the early morning I’d commit to getting as many words on paper as possible. In the late morning I’d have a break and do some google research for the next day. Then I’d take the afternoon off and come back to it in the evening where I’d shape and edit what I’d written in the morning.

If I hadn’t done this, Gulp! would never have been written.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? What seems to work for unleashing your creativity?

I remember one day when I was writing Gulp! I got really bad case of writer’s block. It could have been something to do with the fact that it was a beautiful sunny day outside and there I was stuck inside. Anyway, I decided to go to the gym to see if a workout would get my creative energy flowing again.

As I was going through my paces on the treadmill, by a stroke of serendipity Natasha Bedingfield came on the radio singing her song “Unwritten.” Her words were very apt: “Staring at the blank page before you, open up the dirty window, let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find. Reaching for something in the distance, so close you can almost taste it, release your inner visions. Feel the rain on your skin, no one else can feel it for you - only you can let it in.”