Paul Glennon is the author of Bookweird and The Dodecahedron, which was a finalist for the 2006 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and was selected as one of The Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of the Year. His new book is Bookweirder.

1. How would you summarize your new book in one sentence?

Sometmes fiction really is stranger.

2. How long did it take you to write this book?

The idea came to me in a moment, but it took about a year to get it right on paper.

3. How did you choose your characters' names?

I choose names that help me visualize the character. The distracted book-eating boy in Bookweird only be Norman. Fuchs, of course, is fox in German, but I also had a childhood friend named Fuchs who was the same sort of troublemaker.

4. How many drafts did you go through?

As many as I can before the deadline arrives. Usually there at least three serious sets of revisions.

5. Who was the first person to read your manuscript?

My children Nicholas and Kate get the first shot at all my Bookweird stories. They take a month's worth of work and read it in half an hour then ask me where the rest is.

6. If your book were to become a movie, who would you like to see star in it?

The hero of the book is a young boy. It's hard to visualize any child actor because they grow up and look entirely different. How about I imagine what an adult actor might have looked like when he was a child. I'll bet Matt Damon was a geeky 11-year-old. No?

7. What's your favourite city in the world?

I don't want to say Paris, because everyone says Paris, but there is a reason. It's a city that is almost fictional itself. We've all read and seen fictionalized versions of Paris, that visiting, even for the first time, is like revisiting it. Florence is like this too. Both manage to loom large without dwarfing you. I feel lucky every time I'm allowed to walk their streets.

8. Did you always want to be a writer?

I always wanted to be a writer. I also wanted to be an architect, but if you make a mistake as an architect, buildings fall down.

9. What was your very first story about? When did you write it?

I wrote lots of adventure and mystery stories as a child, mostly imitating the books I was reading at the time. The first story I can remember anything about comes much later, during high school. It was about Domenico Scarlatti and a cursed pipe organ.


10. What was your favourite book as a kid?

As a boy, I loved the Three Investigator series. Jupiter Jones made the Hardy Boys look like the spoiled frat boys that they were. Jones was a chubby, former child actor whose headquarters was a trailer hidden in the depths of a junk hard. Hard to beat that.

11. If you could be any character from any book, who would you be?

This is a difficult one for me. I'd always rather be the character's best friend. This is the whole premise of Bookweird. A good book creates a connection between you and the protagonist. You want to be there to help him through, share his world, tell him the secrets only you the reader know. That's the dream that Norman lives in Bookweird.

12. If there was one book you wish you had written what would it be?

If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, without a doubt. It is for me the perfect book, playful and inventive, but in a way that involves the reader rather than alienates him. It is the book that freed me to write what I wanted.

13. If you could talk to any writer living or dead who would it be, and what would you ask?

Now this is going to be another clichd answer, like the Paris question, but I really would like to spend a day with Shakespeare. We attribute so much intention and so many of our modern sensibilities to him. I'd like to know if we're right. Is the Kate's speech at the end of Taming of the Shrew really ironic? Is she really only playing at being tamed, or is Shakespeare just a misogynist like most of his contemporaries? A day at the playhouse with Shakespeare during rehearsals would sort that out.

14. How do you organize your library?

My library is organized like a college syllabus - Classics, Elizabethans, Early Novels, Modern English, American, European, Contemporary. There is also a special "Anxiety of Influence" shelf with my literary uncles: Borges, Calvino, Perec and Oliver Sax.

15. What's on your nightstand right now?

I've just finished number9dream, by David Mitchell, one of my favourite contemporary writers. It's the story of a young man in search of the father who abandoned him. It's told by turns as a video game, a yakuza gang thriller and children's story.

16. Where is your favorite place to write?

I used to be able to write anywhere, a caf table, a bus seat, leaning against a wall. More and more though, I need to be in my own study, at my own desk.

17. Do you have any writing rituals?

No rituals, just habits, both productive and unproductive.

18. When do you write best, morning or night?

The evening is fine for generating ideas and jotting them down, but for me the serious work of writing has to be done in the morning, before the day has started to clutter my head. It seems easier to write when your teeth are freshly brushed.

19. What is the best gift someone could give a writer?

I suspect that most writers have all the pens, pencils and notebooks that they need. The most valuable commodity for most writers must be time, ample, guilt free time to actually write.

20. What is the best advice someone could give a writer?

I've always hated the advice to write what you know. Where's the fun in writing what you know? You should write what you don't know. Writing should be as much a discovery of reading. Write what you would like to know. Write the story you would most like to read.