Sylvia Petter is the author of BACK BURNING. She blogs at www.mercsworld.blogspot.com and her website is at www.sylviapetter.com.

Q1. What is the first book you remember reading?

Must have been Noddy and Big Ears by Enid Blyton. I remember I loved the Five Findouter books and The Faraway Tree.

Q2. If you could choose to be any fictional character who would you be and why?

Peter Pan. I never really wanted to be Peter Pan, though, but I wanted to fly like he did.

Q3. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

When I was 44. (NB: being nosy, I asked Sylvia why 44, and what she said is too good to miss: "You're in a career path and the only way forward is an MBA. So you take an OU module called Planning and Managing Change. You've just thought you've documented a great diet book after losing 10m kg - that age, right? And your OU tutor tells you that if you want to write a book, then don't do an MBA. Then you start thinking and work out that an MBA will bring you up to 50 and who needs an MBA at 50 when the career will be over at 60 and you can stick your MBA up on the loo wall. And you're thinking, hell, I want something I can do with passion until I die, believing of course that you will live forever, which one might do at 44. And at the airport you stumble on a writing magazine, the first you've ever noticed. And there's a story comp. And you go home and write a story. And you write, and hubby says come to bed. And you say but I want to know how the story ends. And he says you are crazy cos you must know if you're writing it. And you finish the story and send it off and it gets nowhere. And the prize is that you're hooked on writing, so much so that you step out of the career path and manage a way to take early retirement at 57 - main breadwinner status oblige the extra years - to write. I guess that's the story.")

Q4. When was the first time you actually called yourself a writer, and how did it feel?

About 5 years ago. It felt scary at first, but now it feels good. And I write full time now, so guess I am.

Q5. Can you talk about the inspiration behind one, or more, of your books?

Australian bushfires triggered a number of my stories. And then there are political events and how some people slip through the grids. I guess it has something to do with being an expat and not really belonging anywhere. The publication of my latest collection, Back Burning, in Australia gave me a feeling like coming 'home', wherever that is.

Q6. What is the most important piece of advice you would pass on to new writers?

Write. Read. Have paper and pencil handy to jot down ideas, words, fragments, dreams; they disappear to where they came from so quickly if you don't catch them. Dare. Persevere. Love the process.

Q7. Do you have any writing rituals you could share?

I’m not too good at taking my own advice, but I do jot things down on scraps of anything.

Q8. What has been the best thing about publication for you?

Being read. Touching someone with what I have written.

Q9. Who is/are your writing gurus (nb you don't have to have met them!), and why?

The late Timothy Findley, a Canadian writer. I did a correspondence course with him. He was very generous with his feedback. He said that the beginning of my book may appear on page 200. It's ok if it takes 20 years to write, as he did for one of his. But he did other books in the meantime.

Wayson Choy, at a workshop at Humber in Toronto. Find the diamond. One single diamond is worth much more than a tiara of rhinestones. Only one diamond per page, though.

Alex Keegan from an online writing bootcamp in the late 90s. Write, write, write. Submit, submit, submit. The former still holds. The latter was good for getting stories out there. Now it's revise, revise, revise. Also

Susan M. Tiberghien, my writing teacher at The Geneva Writers' Group. It was at that group when I started writing that I claimed the "right to write". You, see, I never thought that that right was mine - I was trilingual, hadn't read widely in English beyond high school and airport novels. I was speaking wonderful tri-lingual mish-mash, but I had lost my mother tongue. I found it again in Geneva, Switzerland, ten odd, very odd, years ago.

Q10. Why do you blog?

I've asked myself that a couple of times. Even wanted to delete the whole thing. But I've been blogging over a year now and I'll keep on. It's a way of expressing thoughts on all sorts of things, announcing writing news, telling people about how other artist friends in writing, music, painting, photography, etc are doing. It's a way for my friends and people who know me to keep up with what I am doing. But I think essentially it's about sharing.