Q. What is your favourite film? A. Star Wars, I know that it’s a corny answer but I was five years old when I first saw it and I’ve never been more slack-jawed in amazement than I was when the final credits rolled that day. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. What music do you like? A. Anything and everything, I’m not a fan of any particular type of music, if I like something I’ll listen to it regardless of genre. Curiously though I do find that movie soundtracks help me write, it’s just something about that type of music. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. What is your favourite food and worst? A. I love food, all food, any food and my poor battered bathroom scales will back me up on that but if I had to choose a favourite it would probably be something Italian, especially my wife’s lasagne! The worst food would have to be the sort of convenience foods that you get from garages, things like microwaved hamburgers. I mean, who came up with that concept? That’s a true evil genius if you ask me. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. What is your favourite colour? A. Black is the new black but that’s not really a colour is it? So I’d have to say that it’s purple because it’s definitely the most badly behaved colour. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. Do you have a pet? A. I have a cat called Marge although she views me as her pet rather than the more traditional arrangement. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. What subject did you enjoy most as school ... and least? A. English because we were encouraged to write our own stories and poems and it was one of the few lessons where creativity was encouraged – although, if you speak to my old Maths teachers they’d tell you that some of my answers were very creative ... utterly wrong, but very creative. My least favourite lesson was probably woodwork, in fact my old woodwork teacher once described me as a “wood butcher” if that gives you any idea of how good I was! ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. What inspired you to write H.I.V.E.? A. I was sitting at a friend’s house and we were discussing how his cat Otto looked just like the cat that Blofeld owned in the James Bond movies. That led to me thinking about those kinds of villains in films and literature and how they never really have their origins explained and so I came up with the concept of H.I.V.E. to answer the question of how these mysterious characters learn how to take over the world. Obviously my friend’s cat supplied a little help with my central character’s name too. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. If you hadn’t been an author, what would you have been? A. If I could be anything? An astronaut, the whole concept of riding a controlled explosion into orbit and experiencing zero-g just thrills me. When you read about the first men who travelled into space you realize what enormous risks they actually took and still do even today. More realistically if I hadn’t been an author I’d probably still be involved with making video-games, especially the design side since that has some scope for creativity and that’s what I really enjoyed. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. Who or what was your biggest influence in deciding to become a writer? A. I don’t know if there was a single person or event that drove me to write my first novel but I’ve always had a very active imagination so the urge to express that has always been really strong for me. I’d worked in the video-game industry for ten years when I wrote H.I.V.E. and by that point I was getting frustrated with the fact that it was no longer possible for an individual to have much effect on what is a massive team effort to produce a single game. With writing I was able to express myself completely independently so I guess that some of the drive to write came from that frustration. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. How long does it take you to write a book? A. Well, H.I.V.E. took about four months to write but that was working on it pretty much full time. I suppose it really depends on how many hours you can devote to writing each day and how inspired you are by what you’re writing about. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. Where do you get your ideas from? A. Anything can trigger an idea that drives me to the keyboard. I have a very active imagination, so I rarely struggle to come up with concepts, the real trick is being able to sort the good ones from the rubbish ones. My wife Sarah often acts as a sounding board for a new idea that I’ve come up with and her reaction usually tells me whether it’s worth bothering with. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. What’s the best thing you’ve ever written? A. I hope H.I.V.E. – it’s certainly the first time that I’ve had a concept that I’ve been driven to flesh out to a full length novel. I’ve always written, though it was usually purely for my own amusement so there are lots of other ideas and concepts that I’d like to explore further now. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. Is there any particular routine involved in your writing process (favourite pen, lucky charm, special jumper)? A. I have to be quite disciplined when I write because I’m easily distracted so I usually try to set myself targets of a certain number of words per day. That approach may sound a little mechanical and it does sometimes result in me writing a few thousand words of rubbish that I have to throw away if the inspiration isn’t there. However, I do need to keep myself in the habit of writing a certain amount every day. You know you’re having a good day when you sail past your target for the day and just keep on going because you’re on a roll. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Q. What were your favourite books growing up? A. I’d have to say that Roald Dahl was always my favourite children’s author because of the sheer manic inventiveness that was always on display in his work. I also enjoyed the slightly bitter streak of black humour that ran through a lot of his work – it was a very British quirk that I really loved. I’ve also always been fascinated by games and so I was particularly fond of the fighting fantasy gamebooks when I was a kid. I was fascinated by the idea that the story would be different for every reader based on the decisions that they made. I also knew a lot of guys my age who were encouraged to read more by those books, which can’t be a bad thing.