PHOTOGRAPH: LYUBA BURAKOVA/STOCKSY
‘You like to keep yourself busy don’t you, Min?’ remarked my mother on a recent family ‘holiday’. I was too busy to respond. My mum’s comment stayed with me because she picked up on something innate, that I’ve never wanted to own up to. A mind like a popcorn machine, new kernels of thought scribbled down, plotted, dreamed. That has long been my driver, I see now – the excitement that comes with a brand-new day and a clean page – that fizzing feeling of creating something fresh, that I know very, very intimately. I wasn’t always this way. The younger me was often laissez-faire, bordering on lackadaisical at times… fireworks of inspiration when I would write novel after novel, followed by fizzling black-smoke periods, when I did nothing at all, other than hole up in my room and rewatch My So-Called Life on a lovelorn loop.