When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I devoured books from as early as I can remember – reading has always been a very deep need – and ended up with ‘A’ levels in French and English literature, but it took me years to figure out that people ‘like me’ could write! I don't know why I needed to learn that, but I didn't really get it until, when I was doing my PhD, I went to stay with some academic friends at Cambridge and they were helping a friend of theirs proof-read the final page proofs of her just about-to-be-published novel. Her background wasn't all that different from mine.

Then I began to think about writing, and thought about it for a long time – and thought about it really quite seriously from my early thirties onwards – but It took till I was 40 before I was really convinced I had anything interesting or especially different to say. And that's important: to me, writing is something that you do once you have a real need to, and not before. It’s absolutely not about ‘wanting to be a writer,’ it’s about needing to write, and needing to write a specific thing that tugs at you and haunts your dreams and won't let you go until you do something with it.

At the point that I decided there was a story I badly wanted to tell, I decided I should also have a bit of craftsmanship to go along with the need, and registered for an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University (which I did as an online student). I was also lucky enough to spend some time working with the novelist Margaret Graham, who was the most effective teacher of certain aspects of the writing craft that I've ever come across.

Inspiration for my writing? – so many! Camus was the first author who really made an impression on me, when we read L'Etranger during ‘A’ level French literature. We studied DH Lawrence in English lit at the same time (The Rainbow) and both were a real revelation after years of Jane Austen and Milton. Other later literary inspirations included Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Now I look for inspiration in literature that surprises me – that does something different, that isn’t too tied to conventional structure or conventional language or conventional style. But always, it’s been about ideas and language in literature. I love language that’s poetic, full of imagery. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is, to me, one of the most beautiful novels ever written. And Nikki Gemmell’s stunning prose in Lovesong, Shiver and Cleave.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind The Long Delirious Burning Blue? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

I lived in America for five years, around the turn of the Millennium. It was a restless period: I’d just gone through a divorce, and was seriously disillusioned with my corporate job and the whole lifestyle thing that went with it. In many ways it was a classic mid-life crisis. And in classic mid-life-crisis style, I needed to do something drastic to work my way out of it. So I decided to learn to fly. Sounds like a great idea – unless, like me, you have a fear of flying... Well, let’s just say, eventually, that it worked. It worked so well that I left my job, left America, came back to Scotland, took an MA in Creative Writing, wrote a novel, and then decided to set up a publishing company!

But there’s more to Blue than just flying. It deals predominantly with the difficult relationship between a mother and a daughter – a breach that stems from the mother’s alcoholism when the daughter was a child. What caused the mother’s alcoholism? Domestic violence. And so, although this is a novel that ultimately, I hope, is uplifting – a story of courage, of learning to fly, of transcending the residues of the past – it focuses on a number of issues that touch so many women today.

One of the key things I was trying to do in the novel was make the point that we all have the ability to reassess and retell the story of our life – maybe, ultimately, even to transform it entirely. You can interpret the same facts in a bunch of different ways. You can decide that your story is one of fear and failure and misery – or, at any point in your life, you can say – I don’t like this story. The next chapter will be different. And then the negative backstory becomes instead a story of growth, of learning to overcome obstacles. I drew heavily on my own training as a therapist, and my specialisation in storytelling and ‘narrative therapy’ – the use of stories and creative writing in health and therapy settings. Story and myth are very important parts of the novel, as they’re very important to me in my own life. That, and the landscapes where I’ve spent lots of time – landscapes that have affected me deeply; landscapes that are themselves filled with myth and story. Landscapes where the novel is set: the excoriating heat of the Arizona desert and, in contrast, the misty sea-lochs of the north-west Highland coast where I now live.

How and when do you write?

I find it near impossible to write if I don’t have a whole big chunk of time ahead of me. I’m very bad at squeezing it in when my head is full of other things. When I’m writing 'properly' (as opposed to editing or tweaking) it normally comes early in the morning. Early mornings are when I take the dog for a long walk, usually along the lochside at the bottom of our croft. There are birds there, and seals, and not very much else except rock and water. I’m not always consciously ‘writing’ inside my head when I’m down there, but something is happening – as evidenced by the number of times I’ve gone down there with a plot problem and by the time I come back up and sit down again at the computer, it’s solved!

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

Right now it’s hard to find time to read because I spend so much time editing other people’s manuscripts! But one of my favourite authors is Janette Turner Hospital, and every so often I re-read her novels, which I first discovered in Australia about twenty years ago. Other favourites: Thomas Hardy, Alice Thomas Ellis, Helen Dunmore, John Fowles, AS Byatt ... Michael Ondaatje's poetry – in fact, anything Ondaatje has ever written! Recently read David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten and loved it, also Alan Warner's Morvern Callar. Thomas Glavinic's stunning Night Work is probably the best and most thought-provoking book I've read in a long time, along with Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I find myself so often getting so bored by contemporary British novels – what I want to read is anything that still has the power to surprise and the courage to make interesting use of language rather than that flat pared-down style that seems so beloved of the critics these days. And so often it seems that people write for the critics or the market, rather than for the sake of the writing.

What are you working on now?

I've been lucky enough to have just been awarded a Writer's Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council, which has freed me up to spend a bit more time completing my second novel. Its working title is Telling the Bees, though that's likely to change. Very roughly, it's about the fictions we weave for ourselves about love.