One thing I’ve learnt from writing is that it’s the ideas that matter most. So while plotting and world-building and character development all matter, it’s the IDEA which defines your book.

The world’s biggest water fight?

Midnight on 31st January 2016 has been on my mind since the middle of last year. That’s because, after my wife Kerry accepted a posting to Bangkok, Thailand, I approached my publisher and asked for my 30th November 2015 deadline to be extended by a couple of months. I knew that the shift to Thailand (effective 16th November) would make meeting my 30th November deadline impossible. My editor Jo Fletcher agreed (bless her!); so 31st January 2016 became the new red-circle date on my calendar.

Hi All - this was actually written some time ago, for the Jo Fletcher Books website, and I agreed not to publish it online until they had done so - it then got caught up with Christmas/New Year so only just got posted last week. So apologies if it feels slightly dated...

Hi all, Kerry and I are just back in Bangkok after a week in Manila, capital city of the Philippines. Kerry was visiting the office, and I played the tourist (as I hope to do to all the countries in her jurisdiction at some point during our tenure here (Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam at al, you’ve been warned)).

So, you start a series of books, and you’ve got a plan. Your pivotal events have been envisaged, and then carefully plotted to happen in a logical way. Revelations and twists all get sequenced in, and you try and imagine each scene from everyone’s point of view, so they work naturally.

Ascendant’s Rite is about to hit the bookshelves, completing The Moontide Quartet. As you can probably imagine I’m pretty excited by that, as well as lots of other emotions. Relief, to finally complete the series to the satisfaction of my publisher and editor, Jo Fletcher. And to meet my own very high expectations of what it should be. There were a hell of a lot of open threads by the end of Book Three, and I don’t think I was alone in wondering how I’d get them all tied up and resolved. Well, we got there, and did them justice too!

When I first started reading fantasy (and to a lesser extent sci-fi), I loved it, of course: the wonderful sense of being transported to another realm, the heroic challenges and the sense that anything was possible. But the initial books I read were very serious.

One of the unexpected (by me) side-effects of becoming a writer was that suddenly there were a few people out there who became interested in what I had to say about writing.

The first time we experience something, the more powerful it's effect on us. This is true of many things: new love, broken hearts, deaths, the first time we achieve something special for ourselves. I think it's also that way with books, or a piece of music or art.