I still recommend reading travel guides as an insight to a traveller's perspective on fantasy worlds. Nearly all characters end up travelling at some point, and they have many of the same needs and concerns covered in travel guides.

The Black Magician Trilogy' was about a conflict between countries and was very limited and almost claustrophobic in its range of settings, while 'The Age of the Five' was about a conflict between continents.

The first rule of world-building is available physics, which basically means that if you want it to feel real, it has to follow the same rules as this world, from gravity to how human behaviour works. If you have a fantasy element that doesn't obey the laws of physics, make sure that it has a fantasy explanation.

I wound up studying art and design, got a job at Lonely Planet Publications as a designer, cartographer and illustrator.

One day, it hit me that music is my calling. I just started playing and writing music. How, I don't know. I just started doing it, and then this big voice came out of my mouth. And it felt like I was releasing something.

Creativity is about a reaction.

I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.

I believe in a higher power. I believe in inspiration.