What are your writing habits—where, what sort of times etc?
I’m a nocturnal person, so to me the optimum writing hours are around 6pm till 2am. I sometimes try to write in the mornings, but the sheer quantity of coffee it takes to make me into a normal human being before midday makes space and several of the primary Demon Dimensions warp around me. It’s hard to write a scene whilst simultaneously battling off three-headed swamp monsters from outer space who keep stealing my office supplies and demanding to be fed grilled cheese sandwiches. So I try to keep my writing contained to the nighttime.

What non-literary influences can be seen in your work?
I read a lot of graphic novels…. I find their structure and pacing to be a great deal of help when I come to write my own novels.

Happy or depressing endings, and why?
Neither. I dislike the whole idea of ‘endings’, because unless the book winds up with all the characters dying then the best ending should be a beginning, because life goes on even after the hero has saved the heroine or vice-versa. The one thing I really dislike is the ‘Disney-style’ ending - one where everything turns out to be alright, where every wrong is righted and the good guys go skipping off into the sunset while the bad guys curse them from the safety of their jail cells. What’s the point? Art is supposed to be about asking questions, not getting answers. I like books where the ending is left ambiguous, where the audience is encouraged to think for itself and decide what should happen next, or where the main question of the narrative is resolved but in an unhappy or unusual way.

What would you like people to get from your novels?
Whatever they are looking to get. I think everyone at any given time is always searching for something; an answer, a reason, an explanation. It could be a little niggling something in their lives, or it could be one of the Big Ones, such as, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘Is there a God?’, ‘How should a man best live his life?’, or ‘What the hell happens to all the spare biros in the world?’ But giving the reader an actual answer at the end of the book never works. No two people read the same book the same way, so what might be an answer for one person might just be a question for another. I get annoyed at writers who fill their prose full of explanations of everything, who try to right all the wrongs in the world. Sometimes there is no answer, and coming to terms with that is one of the hardest things that we as human beings have to put up with.

Do you write in silence or do you have background noise? If so what?
Background noise, always. If you write in silence, you start to think, which is the worst thing you can do when you’re writing a novel. In order to write, you first need to feel. I don’t mean that in some kind of ‘hey man, let’s go out and hug a tree’ kind of way – I mean it in a purely visceral sense. If you don’t feel what you’re writing, your readers won’t feel it either. If you write a love scene, you need to feel love for your characters. If you write a death scene, you need to feel grief for your characters. It’s as simple as that or your book won’t ring true. Listening to music while you write is a big help. For instance, if I have to write a big fight scene, I’ll grab my Ipod and stick a Rob Zombie or a Prodigy album on repeat, or if I’m doing a sad scene I might try some Evanescence or Coldplay. It all depends on what mood you’re trying to create.

How much prep goes into each story as far a research, etc?
I’m a research junkie, so for each book I’ll start by making a list of all the themes, characters, current scientific breakthroughs and religious theology that I’m going to use in each book, then I’ll go to the library and spend hours online thoroughly researching and taking dozens of pages of notes on each subject I’ve listed. I’ll then go home and dump the lot in a big pile beside my desk and spend the next month or so ignoring them in the vague hope that they will magically transform themselves into a novel. When the guilt gets too great I’ll mainline half a pound of coffee, chain myself to a chair and spend twelve hours sifting through them in order to come up with the book proposal, which I’ll then discard two days later in favor of something I came up with at 4am after watching some obscure Japanese movie in an eight-hour whisky-fuelled marathon HBO session. I’ve actually duct-taped myself to the table before, otherwise I just don’t get anything done. One of my favourite quotes of all time is by Douglas Adams, who said on the subject: ‘I love deadlines. I like the nice whooshing sound they make as they fly by.’

How did you get your start?
Long story short: I got lucky. I heard from a friend that this new book company called Black Flame were looking for new writers to novelize movies. I was working as a studio photographer down near London at the time, but I thought what the hell, I’ll give it a shot. The challenge they gave me was to write up a scene from my favorite film as though it was a chapter in a novel. I picked Blade 2 - my favorite movie at the time - and sent in a sample chapter. Within a week I heard back from the company that they loved my writing-style, and that they had this ‘little movie’ that I might be interested in novelizing. The movie was Blade: Trinity.

Do you ever draw inspiration from current events?
Not if I can help it, because they’re just that – current events. In a week’s time they’ll be non-current events, and everyone else will be so busy prancing around on the bandwagon that they’ll hopefully leave me in peace to get on with writing about the things that really matter, like love and life and death and vampires.

What is your opinion on the state of publishing today?
That’s a big question, to which I’ll give you a small answer: it rocks. There is so much diversity out there, with the Indie presses giving new authors such as myself a chance to be heard, e-books and the internet changing the way novels are delivered and read, and the ever-expanding globalization of the fiction market meaning that there’s more to read out there than ever before, catering to every conceivable taste, interest or need, as well as many inconceivable ones - I speak as one who was given The Little Bedside Book of Roadkill as a Christmas present. The mind boggles.

What advice would you give a writer starting out today?
Write. Then write some more. Then when you’re done writing, get up and make yourself some coffee, then sit back down and keep on writing, because there’s always someone out there who lives 5000 miles away who will somehow telepathically guess down to the last tiny detail the idea for a great book you’ve been working on for the last 10 years, and will have it optioned and made into a crappy TV show that destroys all the credibility left in the concept before you’ve finished lovingly polishing the final chapters of your great masterpiece. Don’t think it won’t happen to you.

What books have had an effect on you—for better or worse?
When I was little I was exploring my grandmother’s attic when I came across a compilation volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It was bound in black leather which smelled like burnt bacon, and had a gold embossed engraving of a devil eating a small child on the front. I was spellbound. I took it out to the garden and spent the rest of the summer reading it from cover to cover. When I was done reading, I took it outside, dug a big hole in the garden and buried it. But I’m glad I read it. Up till then, I’d read books about fluffy puppies having equally-fluffy adventures in a world where nobody died, where the good guys always won out in the end and where the bad guys were punished for their evil deeds. Even at the age of five or six I remember somehow knowing that the people who wrote these books were full of shit. In the Grimm’s fairy stories, little children were maimed or killed for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong place, trespassing where they shouldn’t have, or just making a wrong decision. That’s the way things happen in the real world, and it’s a lesson that’s stayed with me to this day.

When was the last time you didn’t finish a book, and why?
I rarely finish books. I usually have five or six on the go at once, and leave them all open and piled in great teetering stacks about the house. I’m very hard on books. If one doesn’t grab me immediately, I rarely bother plodding through to the end. There are so many wonderful books in the world – it drives me nuts to think that even if all I did was read, I’d never read them all in my lifetime. Last book I couldn’t finish reading? Anne Rice. I’m not telling you which one as I don’t have time to deal with all the hate-mail. Last book I couldn’t put down? Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. I bought it at the airport to read on a plane and I almost missed two separate connecting flights because I was so engrossed in reading. I stayed up all night reading it and was done the next morning. I haven’t done that in years. I think he’s an incredible author.

We’re in the bar at a convention buying you a drink—what’s it to be?
Cheers! I’ll take a jack and coke – a bit girlie I know but I can drink a dozen of them and not fall over, which for me is the main goal of drinking. I’m also partial to black vodka and absinthe, although the latter gives me weird dreams. I’ll drink anything but Patron, a kind of extra-strong Tequila. Patron is BAD. I found this out last Thursday night, and I haven’t dared go back to that particular bar since. My two guy-friends who carried me home will know what I mean.

Do you think there’s anything truly original left to say in the genre, or has it all been said?
SF/ F doesn’t always have to be about originality. It’s all about re-interpreting the events of the world from your own perspective, which is lucky as we all have one. I think that there is no such thing as something truly unique, and a lot of would-be writers in the genre cause themselves a lot of stress and heartbreak in a vain attempt to ‘be original.’ It’s a pointless cause. Every time I think I’ve come up with an original idea I find myself reading it in some history or philosophy book a couple of weeks later. It makes me very cross, but in some ways it’s a relief.

What is your favorite non-writing job you’ve held?
Working as a night security guard at a movie-editing house in London. It was a great job. All I had to do was lock the door at the end of the working day, stay up all night watching movies on the giant flatscreen editing TVs, then unlock the door again in the morning. If my old boss is reading this, it wasn’t me who spilled that beer on the new leather sofa, and I had to take all those Coffee sachets home because they represented a significant threat to security. Well, they could’ve been bugged, right?

What was your most unusual job?
Cow-herding. When I was younger I lived in the middle of nowhere amid rolling farmland, so the only real work available was at the farm next door. I’ve also done strawberry picking, family portrait photography, waitressing at a country golf club, and accounts managing for an LA based Vegas casino firm. When I was younger I used to tell people I’d done bee-keeping, but it was really just one bee I kept. But I left it in the jar too long and it died. I was a very bad beekeeper.

What are some/any hobbies?
I’ve tried most hobbies. I get bored very easily, so I’m always up to something new. I live about two blocks from the beach, so my main hobby right now is called Trying Not To Drown, otherwise known as surfing. There’s this cute guy who lives in our building who’s trying to teach me to surf without killing myself or maiming passing tourists – ‘trying’ being the operative word. Baywatch totally lied to us. It’s very hard to look cool in a bikini when waves the size and weight of small trucks are crashing into you at 70mph and wrapping seaweed around your neck whilst passing seagulls crap on your head and small children on the seashore laugh and point. There’s a lifeguard on the beach who can’t even keep a straight face when I walk past him. I’m thinking of giving up surfing to try something a little less humiliating and dangerous, like maybe naked bullriding.

What do you do when not working?
Lie on the floor laughing hysterically and blowing bubbles until someone finds me and gently shovels me up into my writing chair again. Then I start work for the day. In the evening I do much the same thing in reverse. Life is all about balance, that’s what I say.

Favorite vacation spot?
I’d have to say London, England. I moved from England to California about two years ago because I was sick of getting rained on. Now I go back there every six months because I’m sick of it being sunny all the time. The grass is always greener and all that.

If you could interview one person past or present who would it be and why?
If I had that kind of technology available I’d choose to interview myself in the future. I’d ask myself what happens in the second Kayla Steele book, because I’m just doing the proposal for it right now and I’m stuck for an ending.

Any pets?
Before I moved to the States I had a pet iguana called Rhubarb who lived in my room when I was a student. She ate lettuce and pizza and grew to be over six feet long, and used to terrify people who gatecrashed our parties. For some reason, she thought that anything green was food, so we’d be sitting on the sofa having a few quiet beers and the next moment we’d hear a crash and a bloodcurdling shriek, and some guy would race past us screaming bloody murder with Rhubarb hanging from his green shirt by her teeth. Always good for livening up the party.

Married, single, not telling?
Single right now, by choice. If I dated then that would mean I might actually be happy, and then my writing days would be over. I’m serious! I think the best artistic work is done by people who are unhappy, or angry, or heartbroken, just mad at Life in general; people who have that particular fire to them that makes the world sit up and take notice. I mean, think about it. When was the last time a song about being happily married and content with your lot got to Number One in the charts? So I intend to spend the next few years being as thoroughly miserable as I can for the sake of my art. Next question!

Was there a specific message you were trying to convey in your novel?
In Dante’s Girl, all the characters are united in one thing; they have lost someone they love, and are trying to come to terms with this. Our heroine Kayla has quite literally lost someone – her fiancé has been murdered by werewolves, and she can’t rest until all nine of his killers are dead. But there is loss and then there is losing someone. I think one of the worst things in this world is to lose someone and still have them around. Kayla goes through this, quite literally, when her dead love Karrel comes back as a spirit to help her avenge his death and set him free. It’s like the worst torture for her – the guy she loves is right there in front of her, but she can’t touch him again, ever. Anyone who’s been through The Breakup from Hell and then has to put up with seeing their ex in the street every day knows what I’m talking about.

Tell us in one sentence what your book is about.
Love, life, and death. There’s not really much else to write about, when it comes down to it.