And if you do stand up to the assault on your confidence by your self-doubt and the whispering behind the doors that line the seen-and-not-heard corridors of childhood and say; ‘I can do this and I will’, then you are faced with another hurdle - you have to figure out who you are. No, this is not about psychoanalysis (although…  probably wouldn’t hurt… maybe next year…) this is about voice. Who are you? Does your writing sound like you or someone else? Are you writing from within a character, never revealing yourself or are you assuming a role, a pretence?

I wrote for a few years without publishing anything until I thought I was close to finding a voice. One of the greatest compliments I’ve ever been given (and I got it separately and from a few people who knew me), was that when they read Reset they could ‘hear’ me in the text. But what is that? What is my voice?

I’m not sure I’m the one to define it. I love science fiction and when I write it seems to come out surreal and funny - or at least irreverent. But then I grew up listening to The Goons and Hancock and watching Python and, later, reading Douglas Adams (who only reluctantly admitted to being an SF writer, preferring to think of himself as a comedy scriptwriter) so perhaps it’s not my voice but a mixture of everyone else’s?

But where else could it come from?