Most people seem to say they've had a compulsion to write fiction since they first put pencil to exercise book, and that was initially true of me (my mother keeps a stapled-together wad of paper entitled 'Detecshun Mistri Horro' dated just after my fifth birthday and containing a ghost story) but school soon squashed it. There was a one-off flare when I sat the 'Use of English' exam that used to be a requirement for scientists doing Oxbridge entrance, when I squirrelled the composition title 'What My Life Will Be Like In Old Age' into a pastiche of Rose Macauley's The Towers of Trebizond - I was so overcome with my own humour that I laughed out loud in the exam room - but I wrote no fiction after that for three decades. Even when I read my first few SSHGs I thought that I would forever be a consumer rather than a creator, or a beta at best. But then a hardback notebook started filling up during the kids' swimming lessons, against my better judgment and almost against my natural inclinations. It is only recently that I've realised that I have always told myself stories in my head any time that my hands are occupied but my brain is not (sewing, driving) or when I can't sleep. The actual writing is surprisingly hard for me; well, it surprises me because I am a ready and fluent writer of non-fiction: I actually enjoy writing essays. I am not naturally suited to the process of writing fiction (dialogue is especially hard) but I have a compulsion to work an idea out and express it somehow. Very, very slowly...