10 Things I'd Like My Readers To Know About Me By Neal Asher

I was born in Billericay so you cannot be any more Essex than me – Ian Dury and the Blockheads have a lot to answer for in that respect. But apparently I don’t sound like an Essex boy, probably because of my Derbyshire parents, who are also to blame for my favourite expletive, which is ‘bugger’.

I’m not one of those effete writers who delights in being impractical and boasts about being unable to rewire a three-pin plug. I trained as an engineer and spend far too much time working with my hands when I really should be waxing creative at my computer.

After too many years over on the dark side with plenty of cigarettes and alcohol I’m now a bit of a fitness freak. After my wife died, rather than choosing the bottle or pills, I spent two years walking over 3,000 miles, also kayaking and swimming for miles. Now I walk and use the gym and, having experienced the bad effects of overtraining and under eating, have slowed down, a little.

I like repairing stuff. A recent obsession has been chairs – complete disassembly, hunting down materials (like lengths of broom for the binding on a bamboo chair), removing the detritus of old repairs, clamping and gluing, rubbing down and varnishing and re-upholstering. Don’t ask – I don’t know why.

People often ask me about how I plan out a book. Do I have a pin board covered with post-it notes? Do I write character sketches? Do I write out the plot? None of these. Apart from some vague images in my mind it all happens at the keyboard because writing for me is as much a voyage of discovery as reading a new book. This can be a problem when the publisher asks me what I’ll be doing next.

Apparently I am ‘a master of monsters’. The signs were there early when, at age 10 in art class, I was drawing dinosaurs and dragons while everyone else was concentrating on a still life of a rose in a wine bottle.

While living out on Crete I tried growing all sorts of things, but discovered that chillies were what I could grow best. I then proceeded to make a sweet chilli sauce to my own recipe. I have made gallons of it mostly to give away. Even Greeks out there, whose taste is generally for bland food, have developed a taste for it.     

I once trained at Shotokan karate. Because I was lax about taking my tests to move up a belt I only reached green belt. But this means that nobody, but nobody, can build houses on me.

I like mushrooms and toadstools. My mother, while in teacher training, did a project on them and, since as a child I necessarily tagged along when she was out collecting samples, this kinda stuck with me. I generally know what can be eaten without inducing a heart attack or visions of giant purple butterflies. My wife thought I was odd when on first date strolls in the woods I kept leaping into the brambles to claim some slimy prize.

I did not enter the writing world via academia. I went from school straight into a job manufacturing steel furniture with just a couple of ‘O’ levels to my name. When I decided I wanted to write I discovered that my wonderful comprehensive education had blessed me with the inability to know what a sentence was. Later I took an English A Level – just to prove a point, to myself. 25 books later I hope that point is affirmed.