No, we haven’t been kidnapped by aliens and been shot back in time, but sometimes I wonder what advice I would have for a younger me, a younger me that was still many years away from having a first book published. And I also wonder now what kept me going after the many stumbles and rejections. Maybe this re-found Q&A with publisher Spineless Wonders (the publishers of my debut collection of short stories My Life & Other Fictions) from May 2011.

Q: What do you like about the short story form?
A: The immediacy. At their best they are gut-grabbing exposes from another world.
I put myself in the Borges camp (as he outlined in the foreword to The Garden of Forking Paths): ‘It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes … A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.’

Read the full interview.