I don’t think it occurred to me that I could be a writer until quite late on: seventeen or so. Yes, I made up stuff—a very rich interior life, as the psychologists would say—and it was all genre, but it was more directed toward role playing games. I discovered Dungeons and Dragons through my interest in wargaming, and I was hooked instantly: I could be in stories like the ones I read. I started designing my own scenarios; adding in history, geography, ecology, and ending up with some serious world building. But that’s Morden’s First Law of writing: nothing is ever wasted.

I finished my first novel at the same time as my thesis—fantasy, because it was different to my studies, and what I was used to GMing—fortunately the thesis was more impressive. That novel is in a drawer slowly turning into coal, but I had caught the bug: I wrote another book, SF this time (also unpublished and unpublishable), and just kept on going. I finally sold a short story in 1998, eight years after that first novel. I don’t know whether you’d call it persistence or sheer bloody-mindedness. But it was a good apprenticeship, all the same.

There’s a very rich back-story to Equations of Life.

Yes. Yes, there is, and it has a story all of its own to go with it. Some of this is in the dedication, but here’s the rest of it.

Back when I was a new writer and I was looking for markets for my short stories, the editor I was working with at the time (and eventually, the publisher didn’t take the novel) noted that I lived quite close by another writer who’d just pitched a charity anthology to him, and that I ought to make contact. That story was “Bell, Book and Candle” and was one of my first “pro” sales. It was also the first story I’d written set in the London Metrozone after Armageddon.

I kept on coming back to that world, and I realized I’d almost written enough stories to make a collection—something I successfully pitched to Brian Hopkins at Lone Wolf Publications. Thy Kingdom Come—twenty stories in all—was published in 2002. That was where Petrovitch, Harry Chain, Madeleine and the Sorensons all first appeared. I’d been kicking the idea for a novel set in the aftermath of Armageddon around for years, and I’d had repeated stabs at the idea before, but nothing that anyone would publish.

Then I wrote Equations of Life, and everything that was missing before suddenly turned up. Theories of Flight came without a break, and Degrees of Freedom charged relentlessly behind. By this time, I’d sold the trilogy to Orbit and had a deadline—and I put in some seriously stupid hours getting it finished: books two and three in little more than a year.