I don’t know that I’ve ended up with gold any more than any historical alchemists ever did, but on a technical level I feel like having to reconceptualise the same thing in so many different forms has given me a much deeper sense of it and my own capacity as a writer.

I find that my creative work happens best when I know the direction I want to go in and then give myself a sufficiently large pool of information from which to draw inspiration. These ideas then sit within my mind, simmering like a primordial soup from which a story may spring forth.