I love the idea that magic and witchcraft and battles between supernatural creatures could be raging all around us but just out of our sight.
A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.
You like to think with young adults that with your books, a little part of it has reached them and will stay with them. It is great to be part of an eight-year-old's world.
Everywhere, publishers are being squeezed out.
Writing about magic is harder than writing about spies because you're dealing with something that doesn't really exist.
I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.
