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I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager - mostly desperate love poetry!

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know.

I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.

One of my earliest memories is of seeing my mother in her beach chair, reading a book under an umbrella by the water's edge while my sisters and I played beside her. Of all the life lessons she taught me, that is one of my favorites: to take time at a place I love, restore my spirit with books and the beach.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

I grew up sailing in the North Sea.

When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.

In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.