Please ask your questions here:

Christine: I began writing poetry at nineteen when I went up to university and wrote poetry exclusively until I was thirty-one, when I began writing FIVE AMBER BEADS. I have been exceptionally lucky with my writing, and I suppose that about 30% of all my poems have been published in anthologies, journals, magazines and newspapers of various kinds. The rest I keep in a file at home (perhaps 100 in total), and look at them now and then; some with pleasure and others with mild queasiness. I still write five or six poems a year. My two attempts at full-length prose fiction have both been published, and I have written only two short stories, both of which have been on this site.

Ewan: I would certainly have written anyway, as I had done so from nineteen until I discovered the site at thirty-eight. HOWEVER, I was faced with redrafting the whole of IT'S JUST THE BEATING OF MY HEART after some adverse feedback from my agent and publisher, and that seemed to me to be a near-impossible task. I posted the second draft chapter-by-chapter on to ABCtales and the feedback that I received, particularly from Tony Cook, got me through the thirteen-month process of redrafting. I was on the point of giving up and without Tony's support, it is unlikely that the new novel would be here.

o-bear: I write extremely slowly, so the polishing work for prose is perhaps less than that for poetry (where the sounds of the words that fall on the ear have a rather greater significance, perhaps). I write poetry long-hand always and wrote both of my first two novels the same way, and then edited and polished as I typed them up. The language comes out quite cleanly, then, but the real revision with fiction comes with the structuring, plotting and characterisation. It is tempting to be seduced by prose that is as pleasing to the ear as poetry, but in fiction one must of course remember that plot, structure and character place very different demands on you as a writer.

Tony: I think that reading is central to my writing, but it has for the last decade taken rather a back-seat to the writing itself. I grew up without TV in a rather alternative home, at least until I was fifteen or sixteen, so spent my childhood reading poetry and novels. When I do read (on my train journey to and from work sometimes and before I go to sleep at night, currently Coetzee), I realise how damn difficult it is to write really well. Some of these writers, from the perspective of one who has tried, really tried, to write to his highest ability, must have been born with the gift in place: you just cannot learn it.

Tony: Much as I like a drink or three, I think that John Stack, the central character, is an amalgamation of various people I have known. However, my adumbration of some of the more disturbing impacts of his drinking, on his health both physical and mental and on those people closest to him, was down to my rather mordant imagination and my deftness with Google.

Misha: I met the agent for my fiction before I had completed FIVE AMBER BEADS, and our meeting was a completely chance encounter where I used to work: I was proofing the manuscript of the novel on a quiet Sunday afternoon while on duty on the front desk at the small museum where I worked at the time as a curator. She asked what I was proofing, and when I told her that it weas my novel she told me that she was a literary agent. She read the draft of the novel when it was done and took it on very quickly, on 5th January 2004 (a day etched into my memory). She had huge hopes for it, and it went to various readings at Faber & Faber, etc. but was ultimately rejected twelve or thirteen times by most leading UK publishers before being picked up by Flambard. When it came out, it received - if I say so myself - very favourable reviews indeed by very respected reviewers. It has since been rejected the same amount of times in the US, so there is no accounting for the world of literary fiction publishing and its vagaries. It has never come out over there. My tips: talent, the daily practice of writing, more practice, more practice, luck, more luck, and chutzpah.

o-bear: No, I gave nothing up. I wrote FIVE AMBER BEADS while working as a full-time art expert at Sotheby's and then as a curator of a small museum in London. I still have a very full-time job, as I have been back at Sotheby's as a Director since July 2006 and wrote much of IT'S JUST THE BEATING OF MY HEART while in this role. I commute daily between my home in Cambridge and my job in London, and that's when I do the writing. I travel abroad once or twice a month for work, otherwise I am at work at my desk in London for the auction house five days a week - taking, of course, this hour out over lunch to answer these questions. And I'm married... but without children as yet (more's the pity).

Niki72: I am irrefutable proof that you can do a full-time job and write. Dealing with rejection comes with being a writer, just as everyone casts a shadow that is dark and always trails in your wake. You get used to it, and soon don't notice it. As I mentioned, FIVE AMBER BEADS was rejected unanimously in the US, but came out to acclaim here before that. And IT'S JUST THE BEATING OF MY HEART is being rejected regularly now over in the US: I get one email from my US agent with another rejection, and then another from my UK editor alerting me to a glowing review in the papers or online here. Weird.

Tony: I write as often as my energy allows - perhaps on five of the ten train journeys that I make between Cambridge and King's Cross each week. Each writing session lasts for about forty minutes. That's pretty much it, apart from taking a notebook with me on my holidays and writing the odd poem and prose idea down in it.