I ran a hotel with my parents for many years and the practical influence of that on my writing was that all my stories were about 600 words long. My free time came in little chunks. But the mind works wonderfully well if it's being pushed hard: I wrote a conceptually complex piece about a far future humanity entirely in my head while mixing martinis for hotel guests at three in the morning.
What would you say are the biggest challenges that you face?
Knowing what you want to say but not being able to say it. That's an admission, isn't it! It's retaining that purity of the initial vision. I've been lucky to have been published for 20 years — but it's still a bit of a struggle.
On more practical matters, my biggest challenge is probably the real world fighting for my time. It's so easy to discover tasks that you should be doing.
How do you deal with these challenges?
There's no easy answer for the first part of the last question - although I'll never walk away from a blank page before I've achieved a breakthrough, even if it's in an unexpected direction. And when the real world battles for my attention, I just think of the places I take myself when I'm typing away: those mad 48-hour writing marathons fuelled only by toast and Rose's lime marmalade. Bob Shaw once said, perfectly: It's hard to write - but it's good to have written.
What is your latest book about?
Actually, it's a novelette of around 15,000 words called "fight Music". I suppose one might describe it as a school story of sorts, set as it is in a girls' musical conservatoire — except the pupils collect shrapnel from the latest air raid during breaktime. And some of the older girls are undergoing a curious metamorphosis in the school swimming pool to help the war effort .
How long did it take you to write the novelette?
I wrote the final two hundred words last December. And the remaining 14,800 this last April. It appeared in a great Gary Couzens-edited anthology from Elastic Press called Extended Play in November 2006. I'm in the company of some super authors who have written longer-than-usual stories taking their cue from all facets of music.
Which aspects of the work that you put into the story did you find most difficult?
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