My YA novel Tigers on the Beach is out today. So I’m getting ready for these handy comments and quips: I'm in bold. Naturally.

‘I haven’t seen it in the bookshops.’Of course you haven’t. You won’t see anything in the bookshops. And please stop telling authors that.At least the cover’s nice. I like to think so. And by the way, you’re the eighteenth person today to tell me that. Did you nick the tiger idea from Richard Parker in Pi? No, but there’s no harm having a bestselling animal on the cover. How are going to cope with the critics?Okay, this is a bit of a leading question but … I’m getting ready for these: MacLeod is in very familiar territory here. Shame he tries so hard to be funny.Teenagers will find little to interest them. Is Doug MacLeod gay? Why do you ask? Well, a lot of his books have gay characters in the background. And so does this one.’I live in St Kilda, where there are always gays in the background, and occasionally the foreground. So I sort of write what I know. You didn’t answer the question. Neither did Ian Thorpe. Actually, he did. Oh, that’s right, he did I think. Is the book a piece of propaganda advocating gay marriage? Shut up! Oh god, so much for the Catholic market. The teenagers in his book don’t seem to talk teenagers. It’d like their IQ’s are about fifty notches too high. Doesn’t MacLeod bother to research the way they actually speak? I’m never going to use the word ‘whatever’ or ‘I’m like …’ except in their traditional contexts. Still, isn’t it stupid to have them swanning around, coming out with lines like Oscar Wilde characters. Maybe Oscar Wilde on a very bad day. But if I’m going to write fifty thousand words about a world I want it to be one in which I would like to live. I also borrow heavily on personal experience, because this dreadful history that I have in my head is really all I’ve got. And I lost a lot of it when I had the stroke. I‘ve never written a novel before, but I’m sure I could write a better one than this. You can’t. Does this novel have a serious message? No. Shouldn’t it? Hey, it’s my novel. Piss Off. Isn’t this book the third time that MacLeod has used this plot? Um, I was hoping you wouldn’t notice that. But yes, this is the third time I’ve written this novel Is MacLeod really the miserable old bastard he presents to the world? He’s actually worse than when he pretended to be Buddhist. Is it true that most of the stuff in this book actually happened? Absolutely and regrettably true. Dad really did blow up my face with gunpowder. But not deliberately. Or so he says …