You asked me how I write. So here are some fragments, some words in bits and pieces. My writing is always fragmentary. I start on a short story and then stop, start on a play and then turn to the story for children I started months ago. There must be countless folders with unfinished pieces on my laptop. Some of them I’ll never develop properly, others no longer clamour for my attention.

Even the way I read is fragmentary. A novel for children and one for adults, short stories and plays, all at the same time. There’s a tottering pile of books on my bedside table. Some of them have been there for months, others are replaced after a couple of days. Somehow or other, I always find myself finishing two or three books at the same time. There’s nothing to be done, really. My life unfolds in bits and pieces ...

So it will come as no surprise to you when I say that even the places where I write tend to change. Sometimes I write at the desk in my bedroom at my mother’s place, other times, I lock myself in my older brother’s farmhouse and sometimes I write at my desk in the staff room at school, letting it tell me the stories of il-Bugan, il-Beqqu and il-Killer.

I do most of my writing in summer. For the past few years, I’ve spent my summers in different apartments in the United Kingdom – one of them in Brighton, the others in Aberdeen. The Brighton one was more of a nook below street level in a small house. Whenever I raised my head, I could see the legs of people walking along the pavement. A tiny desk, greyed by the exhaust of passing cars ... that’s where I wrote my Masters thesis, and that’s also where most of the short stories in my collection Il-Linja l-Hadra originated. My second sort-of-writing-desk was in a flat in George Street, Aberdeen: a flat which was imbued with the smells of curry and cinnamon from the spice shop below, and the smell of rancid oil from the Mikado down the road. But that’s where I finished my play L-Interdett Taht is-Sodda, which was performed at St James Cavalier in 2006, and then at the Odeon in Paris in 2008 and in Alexandria in 2009.

Whitehall Road, and a table in an otherwise empty room – sheer luxury for someone living abroad. Here, I began to plan and write Il-Kaz Kwazi Kollu tal-Ahwa De Molizz, although that one wasn’t finished there, but in a different flat, a year later, this time in Bedford Road. A second floor flat facing one of the dodgiest streets in Aberdeen. This is also where I acquired the habit of spying from the window, and it was here that I got to know the woman in the scarlet anorak who went about with a scarlet radio under her arm forever blaring out Dancing Queen. Here, more than in any of the other apartments, I wrote sitting on the windowsill with a mug of tea and a cigarette... The only quiet desk I’ve ever had was in Linksfield Place and I hardly wrote anything there except for a few chapters from my second novel about the De Molizz brothers.

I write best amidst noise and bustle, probably because, having been brought up in a big family, I’m used to the shouting, the teasing and the bickering. I write about people that I see or meet, about those I read about, or those I imagine. I steal fragments from people’s personalities, sewing, stitching, melding them all together as I see fit. Many people think that everything I write is rooted in my own experiences. But that’s all a lie. In my writing, imagination takes centre stage.

I write because I want to write, and because I know that there are those who read my work. Sometimes, writing is about having a laugh and pulling the reader’s leg; other times, it’s about weeping and ranting in a rage at my own characters.

I’m currently applying the finishing touches to the first two out of a series of ten short novels for children. I hate it when kids bounce around a lot and I’m always hoping that a good book will force them to stay put for a while, on the sofa or in bed. Hopefully, once they’ve read the first two (due out this month courtesy of Merlin Library), they’ll be waiting on tenterhooks for the next instalment. People often ask me what I will write in the future. Whether I’ll turn to writing just for adults or just for children, or both ... I really don’t know. It probably depends on whoever pisses me off the most, or tickles me the most ... who knows?