First up, from Sal in Whitstable, where do you feel your creative spark comes from? I

think to me, writing is something that I enjoy doing, but it's also something that I need to do in a lot of ways.

I'm someone who's very conscious of time and of being on time and of doing things.

I've always got to have a plan.

I've always got to do X, Y, Z and then know what's going on.

But if I'm reading or if I'm writing, it's the one thing I can do where I completely lose track of time, where I can spend hours literally working on the same paragraph, reworking it, rewriting it.

And maybe you end up the exact same as it was where I started, but that kind of piece is something I need in my life and it brings me a lot of Yeah, a lot of content in what I'm doing in the process and I really enjoy writing.

Ellen in Greenwich asks, do you have anything to use that you can get back into your novel each time you sit down to write? So you must be thinking about this a lot at the moment.

I'm reading from a section of Nearly Departed, which is my debut novel.

This chapter is called What Dreams May Come.

And for context, it takes place where Joel has essentially started going to a therapist after Beth's death.

And this is just a snippet into one of his therapy sessions that he's having.

Tell me about this dream you keep having, Joel.

Joel had been having semi-regular therapy sessions with Dr. Shah since Beth died.

there's beautiful rhythm and the prose in your writing but also rhythm and the humor and then also some of the really uh the notes that you strike being very heartfelt and there's a lot of longing and searching you've got this joke at the beginning about uh the therapist saying you can't call them dmcs which really makes me laugh and then by the end of that passage I feel really you know struck by the sadness in Joel's voice like do you feel like balancing humor and sadness like are you always thinking about that when you're writing or do you feel like that just happens organically?

I think it's something that happens in life, really, to be honest.

What was like that first idea that came to you when you were thinking about this book?

It was quite a long, long gestation process in some ways, where I think I started writing it during COVID, obviously, when everyone had far too much time on their hands.

And I think if I was ever gonna write a book, that was the time to sort of sit down and actually start getting some words down on a big Google document.

Uh, it felt like I've got so many hours in the day, I might as well at least noodle around a little bit every now and then on it.

And the impetus was basically, uh, I used to work at a magazine in, um, in Clapham.

And one day going to work, I essentially saw a woman go into the back of a cement truck off her bike, and she unfortunately died from that incident.

And it was really horrifying to see, but I was quite separate from it.

Well, uh, talk about- Uh, tell me about your history writing with food.