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I realised I'd never climb Everest but thought I could still write a book.

Start with short stories. After all, if you were taking up rock climbing, you wouldn't start with Mount Everest. So if you're starting fantasy, don't start with a nine-book series.

Adventure books are my personal favorites. 'The Endurance,' a story about Ernest Shackleton's legendary Antarctica expedition, or 'Into Thin Air,' Jon Krakauer's personal account of the 1996 disaster on Mt Everest, are two notables.

I really absolutely loved writing my first book.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

My first book was called, 'Mountain, Get Out of My Way,' where I did an autobiographical sketch, if you will, looking back at myself and looking back at things in my life, and juxtaposing them against things that are happening in other people's lives and trying to be motivational.

I love books that give you space to climb inside there. And you have to run to keep up in places, and you have to fill in a lot of blanks yourself. So it almost becomes your story.

The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, 'The Magic Monkey' - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.