In a word, shambolic. I am disorganised and undisciplined. I do try and plan my plots, but my plots change and evolve as I write. Sometimes I can sit down and write a couple of thousand words. And other days, I struggle to get into three figures.

With difficulty. For me, the structuring of a good story is by far the hardest part of the process. The writing is the easy bit. Good, original stories with surprising endings aren't easy to come up with, and they take time to develop. Characters aren't so difficult to create. You inevitably think of people you have known or have worked with. And often characters can be amalgams of such people. Creating compelling narratives is for me the toughest part of the writing process. Unlike a lot of writers, I can't just sit down and let my stories evolve as I write. I'm a planner. So my ideas take time to come to fruition in my head and then on paper as a very detailed synopsis. This is my road map, and without this, I'm completely lost. And I have to constantly refer back to it. This isn't to say that my storytelling sticks rigidly to it. It doesn't. But the overall shape of my plot won't change wildly. When I came to tackle my first thriller, The Chair Man, the plotting took far longer than writing the book. This was largely down to the extra need to research my subject. I didn't know how terrorist cells communicated back in 2005. Nor was I 100% familiar with Middle Eastern politics, or for that matter, the workings of GCHQ and MI5. So all these subjects required research and reading up on. And this process often sends you down rabbit holes. But you have to know this stuff, even if you hardly refer to it. In fact, you have to be careful to be sparing with your knowledge; you don't want to bore the pants off your readers. But to get back to your question, coming up with ideas for stories can come from anywhere. In the case of The Chair Man, the story of someone posing as a terrorist to catch other genuine terrorists was based on a real news story from the US. And I thought it would be interesting if my protagonist was a tetraplegic in a wheelchair having been a victim of a terrorist attack. My very first book Sleeping with the Blackbirds was very different. It was conceived over several months as an urban fantasy of sorts, and was based entirely on my imagination and deliberately written in a an old-fashioned style redolent of writers like Clive King and Richmal Crompton. My most recent murder mysteries, on the other hand, draw heavily on my experience of working as an advertising copywriter in London in the 80s and required very little research.

It means that I'm struggling to plan a road map for my next book. It happens to us all. It can sometimes take me many months to have a first draft of a synopsis that I'm happy with. And invariably, it will change.

You will always receive negative reviews from some, but hopefully, just a handful of readers. Most readers are very constructive and spell out what they do and don't like about a novel. The vast majority of reviews I receive are very positive. The negative ones are fine - particularly when the reader explains what they don't like. One recent reader gave my most recent novel, a comic murder mystery, three stars and a fairly critical analysis that complained bitterly that it didn't fulfil their expectations of a murder mystery. For them, the first murder took too long to materialise, and there weren't enough procedural elements woven into the plot. It's a very narrow and subjective view, and that's absolutely fine. You can never please all the people all of the time. Neither should you try to.

I started writing in 2011. My first book was actually written while I was waiting to be made redundant from an advertising agency that had become part of a massive global merger. The two lumbering giants took an entire year to merge. Someone at the time likened the whole thing to the Hindenberg coming to the rescue of the Titanic. By the time I was finally given my marching orders, I had a small crate of possessions including a few laminated press ads, a Collins dictionary and a manuscript entitled Sleeping with the Blackbirds that was eventually published by PenPress as a paperback. It was a modern-day urban fantasy for children and young adults, and it went on to be shortlisted by the Millennium Book Awards and was also selected by the Indie Author Project for distribution to public libraries across Canada and the US.

Enjoy your writing and don't consciously try to emulate another author, or try and follow a so-called formula. There isn't one.

By the end of this year, I will have written four novels; one short story; and two non-fiction books. The novels are: Sleeping with the Blackbirds - a modern-day urban fantasy for children and young adults; The Chair Man - a gritty thriller based loosely on the terrorist attack on London's transport system in 2005; A Brand to Die For - a comic murder mystery set in the world of advertising in 1983; One Man Down (the sequel to be released at the end of 2023). I have contributed a short story to the anthology The Clock Struck War, which was published to mark the centenary of the First World War; and I have written two non-fiction books: Random Ramblings of a Short-sighted Blogger - a collection of blog posts; and 100 ways to Write a Book - over 100 author interviews conducted during the Covid epidemic. I particularly enjoy writing fiction. I'm not sure that I have a favourite. They are all very different, and they all have their individual merits. I probably enjoyed writing the most recent one (a Brand to Die For) the most because it was a trip down memory lane and was a lot of fun to write.

I think the hardest part of any of my books to write was the section in The Chair Man that outlines the ways in which my terrorist characters devised a way to send online messages securely. Researching how exactly terrorists did this in 2005 is remarkably difficult for obvious reasons, and one doesn't want to search too hard online for fear of being spotted by the likes of MI5 or GCHQ. I was fortunate to come across a very obscure self-published academic publication written by boffins that gave me these details. Once you have the information, you don't want to divulge it in its full glory unless you really want to bore the reader. The skill is just alluding to some elements of it to make your narrative feel authentic.