I reached a point during the writing of Members Only where it became apparent that someone was trying to kill Eric. This begged the obvious question: how can a person die in heaven; and even if such a thing could happen, where would that person go?

I stopped writing and did not start again for the best part of a year. In that time I pored over texts of Eastern philosophy and was particularly taken by the Taoist tale of heaven and hell being states of mind rather than places we go to when we die.

From there the plot developed and I found myself able to explore different concepts as problems in the plot arose. At one point, quite early on, I had Carmine Craxxi – who had found himself in a state of limbo just outside of heaven – shoot his way in to paradise, which was, of course, ludicrous. It took me several weeks to come up with a more satisfactory solution to this, and it required that Craxxi go on a journey of self-discovery; and since what he found was as new to me as it was to him, I had to go on a similar journey during the writing of it. I hope the reader has the same experience.

If you want to find out more about the concepts explored within the book, try Taoism.net where you can even get to discuss them with like-minded individuals.