“There’s two ways to do it,” I remember my school teacher saying. “Unjoined-up, and joined-up. Joined-up is faster.” That’s the one I need to learn, I thought, if I’m going to get all these stories down.

I’ve still got boxes and boxes of them (including a full-length novel I wrote at the age of 10¾ — that one’s definitely staying in the box). I decided I should read everything that had been written so far, which eventually led to a degree in English Literature at Downing College, Cambridge.

From there to the Bat’a shoe factory in Bratislava, Slovakia, where me and my friend Lou taught English to the factory workers. Not having return tickets, we persuaded two of our students to sell us their racing bikes. Then we bought a couple of leather satchels (no such things as panniers in Prague in 1992), asked our students to run us up a pair of trainers (which they did, overnight), then cycled back from Prague to London.

A year later, I followed Will to Venice Beach, and discovered that I loved the desert. With the stories I wrote in LA, I was accepted on to the MA in Creative Writing at UEA (thank you, dear Will.) Here, I began a story about a man raising his daughter in the American south-west. When the MA was done, I went in search of my characters and found them, doing handstands and eating ice-cream, just outside Tucson, Arizona. Sunset over Chocolate Mountains went on to win a Betty Trask Prize and be shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

In the years that followed I worked as a freelance journalist – general features, garden design, travel pieces, book reviews – for all the major papers and magazines. I discovered that I liked to teach. And at some point I went to visit Heather in Australia, where I fell in love with another harsh and difficult desert landscape… My second novel, The Voices, was shortlisted for the inaugural Ondaatje Prize for “books which evoke the spirit of a place”. One day, driving along the M4, Ian Jack called to tell me I’d secured a place on Granta’s Best of British Young Novelists. I nearly crashed the car.