It may be something to do with my having been to a girls' school, but I'm far more comfortable making male friendships than female ones. My friends tend to be men and their significant others.

My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete.

From a very young age my mother persuaded me that I could write for fun, but I had to have a proper job - very good advice.

Online communities are an expression of loneliness.

What I like about music is that you make a song, you've got your ideas in it, and people make that song part of their life - they hang out with their friends to it, they get in arguments to it, they get married to it, they get divorced to it. It's in their world, and it takes on its own life.

The reason steampunk attracts people is that it is premised on a technology which is visible and pleasing to the naked eye, and whose moving parts are comprehensible on a human scale.

If that's there, I believe that technology will probably step up to their part of it.

How do you convince somebody to host a stranger for the weekend? That's not a trivial thing. It's not something I think you can throw technology at, marketing at, or sales at. We threw design at it because that's all we knew, and in doing so, I feel like we brought a human touch to it, which is so needed.