other kids were good at music or sports. By the time I was in about year 10, the school library got a subscription for a couple of years to Writer's Digest magazine from the US, and that was a huge eye-opener. Here were people not just talking about storytelling as an exercise for one's English teacher (which was still where I was doing a lot of my writing), they were talking about it as a craft, and an art, and a career. I went through those magazines over and over again, reading about exposition, subplotting, research, editing, markets, queries. I think that that was what sharpened my awareness of writing that people really, actually, did, and as a thing I could really, actually, do if I wanted. 3. Who are you literary influences and have there been any pivotal or defining works that you've read that really inspired in the early days? The biggest one: Michael Moorcock, no question. I devoured every one of his Eternal Champion cycle books I could get my hands on, pushed them on all my friends and read them to tatters. The books had a breakneck, delirious quality that put me off a lot of other mainstream spec fic on the shelves at the time -- Eddings and Feist seemed awfully slow and stodgy by comparison. In the middle of all that I moved on to the End of Time books, which fascinated me: I was too young to understand a lot of what was