Why did you start writing?
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As a child I'd always been captivated by stories, demanding fairy-tales at every bedtime and (like a lot
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of kids) learning them by rote until I could catch out anyone trying to skip a line. (Parents have a
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tendency to do this when they're reading a story for the forty-sixth time.) I started writing stories at
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school, but thought my parents were very encouraging my teacher was unimpressed. He was, I
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realise now, a simply awful teacher who should never have been in the profession; his idea of a
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worthwhile English lesson was to have us copy down poetry 'in our best handwriting' and in silence.
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When I was 12, though, he was replaced by a genuinely inspirational woman who introduced us to
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the wonders of Beowulf (in translation!) and told me I was good. Suddenly English was my favourite
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subject and I was writing away like crazy. She entered me for the WHSmith Youg Writers award, and I
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won a prize. I think this set the seal on it all for me: a panel of judges I'd never met said I was good. It
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was wonderful.
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The next year, when I was 13, I went to boarding school for the first time. I wasn't sent away; I'd
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chosen the school myself, after visiting a lot of places, because it seemed friendlier than all the
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alternatives. As it turned out, even a friendly boarding school was too much of a wrench. I was
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desperately homesick and my first year passed in a blur of increasing isolation. At a loss for how to
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cope with the world around me, I turned instead to the world inside me to give some sort of order to
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my days. I started writing a long, involved story, much more ambitious than my previous stories and
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school essays. Page after page of A4 filled up as I spent lessons and free time scribbling away. The
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story - a fantasy, swords-and-sorcery kind of thing which now turns me crimson with embarrassment
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- provided an escape route from the everyday situations I couldn't adequately deal with. Before I
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really knew it, and without really intending it, I'd written a full-length novel.
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This story was never published - and neither were the two that followed it. But two important things
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came of it. Firstly, my housemaster read it and, once he'd overcome some measure of surprise, said
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that I should get it typed up and show it to a friend of his, a literary agent. I did so, and on the
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strength of this chance introduction I met the agent who represents me to this day. For a while, it
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looked as though the novelty value of a book by a 13-year-old kid might sway a publisher, but in the
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end we had to admit that we'd missed the Dungeons and Dragons craze by a good few years (this
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was 1986) and that novelty alone wasn't going to be enough. She did, though, tell me to let her see
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anything else I wrote.
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The second thing to come of this story was that I realised I was hooked. I loved every part of it: the
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writing itself; immersing myself in a fantasy world; interacting with characters (most of whom I found
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greatly more approachable and likeable than those around me); trying to make the words on the
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page convey the images and emotions that were in my head. And though all I got were rejection
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letters for the next four years, at least those rejection letters came on publishers' notepaper. I felt
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like I was grazing a world of books that I'd never before thought was open to me. Suddenly it looked
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like, one day, it might be.
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I left school a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday and spent a gap year before university
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working as a teacher in a prep school in Devon. (I've since worked for five years as an English
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teacher before choosing to write full-time, and it remains a job for which I have great respect and
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affection. Something to do with seeing what a difference a good teacher can make must have
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rubbed off along the way.) During this gap year, in between teaching Modern Music to 5R and
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supervising the pre-prep at lunch hour, I wrote After the Hole. It was different from what I'd written
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before mainly in that it was a novel about people my own age - the previous three books had been
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intended for, and written about, children. It was also a dark, macabre story, with a rather chilling
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ending.
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I sent it to my agent with, I suppose, no more hopes than I'd had for the last effort. This time,
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though, I'd got it right at last (or perhaps just kept going long enough to wear everyone down!). The
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novel was published by Black Swan as a paperback original. I got the news in the Christmas holiday
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of my first term of university. Best Christmas present ever. (Top)
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Where do you get your ideas?
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This has to be every novelist's most frequently asked question!
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The short answer is that I don't know. I certainly can't 'work up' an idea - I know because I've tried.
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Generally, they just arrive, and not too often, either. I seem to get an idea for a novel once every
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eighteen months or two years, if that.
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When they do come, I can recognise them, though. My imagination is very visual, and my book
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ideas have generally come to me as visual images rather than as, for example, plot strands or
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character notions. The idea for After the Hole is a good example.
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It came in my last term at boarding school. I was late for a Geography lesson, and walking from the
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boarding houses to the teaching buildings - which were about a five minutes away through playing
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fields and chestnut trees. It was a wonderful early summer day and everything was bright and
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sunshiny and leafy. I wasn't hurrying because it was only Geography...
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In the middle of this comfortable stroll, the image snapped into my mind of a deep vertical pit - a kind
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of chasm into the ground, like a well or a mineshaft. It was very dark down there but there were
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figures sitting around the base of the well (or whatever). It was very clear that, now that they were
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down there, there was no way they could get out.
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Once I had that in my brain it wouldn't stop rattling around. It stayed with me all through the rest of
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the term and all through the summer holiday, until by the autumn, when I was teaching in Devon, it
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had become a deserted cellar room (rather than a well-shaft) and the people trapped in it had
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become participants in a strange, twisted experiment devised by a charistmatic but psychotic
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schoolboy called Martyn. The anonymous figures at the bottom of the hole had developed names
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and personalities, and as I actually wrote the story, more detail and background got generated as
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the characters interacted on the page.
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Much the same has happened for both Sophie and The Dandelion Clock: an initial image sticks with
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me and snowballs into an increasingly complicated novel. Sometimes the process can take a long
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time; in the case of The Dandelion Clock, it was around eighteen months from the first glimmer or an
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idea through to starting to write. (It then took nine months to finish.) (Top)
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Aren't some of your ideas pretty disturbed?
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I suppose the ideas behind both After the Hole and Sophie are a little unsettling! At the time I wrote
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these stories I was very interested in human psychology (and to a large extent I still am). I'd studied
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psychology briefly at school, and read a few book, and was fascinated by the way that some people
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can seem on the surface to be normal, but actually be very abnormal when you get closer to them.
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After the Hole uses this idea with the character of Martyn, who seems like a wonderful guy until
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you're on the end of one of his 'jokes'. Something that the characters realise while they're trapped
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in the cellar (if you haven't read it yet, they go down there willingly because they think it's an
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'experiment with real life', but then Martyn never comes to release them) is that although they've
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always found Martyn's practical jokes very funny, that's only because they've always been played on
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other people. There are hints that he's actually traumatised several members of staff.
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When I was working on the idea for Sophie, I really wanted to take this idea of Martyn further. In After
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the Hole, Martyn is the character who gets the whole thing started: it's his idea. (Technically, Martyn
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is psychotic. He's just started young.) But we never really meet him in the story, because by chance
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as much as design the book ended up following the events in the Hole rather than dwelling on the
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background that builds up to them. We get to know Martyn through what people say about him,
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rather than in person - which admittedly does add to his aura of mystery and unreality.
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In Sophie, I decided to cover similar ground but from a different angle. Although the story in Sophie
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is (largely, at least) a first-person account from Mattie's point of view (Mattie is Sophie's younger
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brother), the central character is clearly Sophie herself. Again, Sophie is revealed as the book
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progresses as being an extremely disturbed and very dangerous personality. The difference is that
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this time we're very much closer to her. I wanted to build into the story more of a sense of why she
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gets to be this way, too, which is why we see some of the abuse that must have scarred Sophie's
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early childhood. Overall, I wanted to make Sophie a more understandable character than Martyn, so
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that even if the reader's conclusion is that she's a monster, it's still hard to blame her for it.
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The Dandelion Clock is, I think, rather different to Sophie and After the Hole. Instead of being a
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sinister portrayal of a twisted psychotic, it's instead more of a character story - which is to say that the
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book is driven less by plot than by the interaction of the three central characters. Though some
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scary and disturbing things do happen in the course of the novel, they are secondary to a principle
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storyline which is - if one has to sum it up - a love story. So this book was a change of direction for
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me, away from a relatively simple portrayal of an aberrant personality, and towards a more involved
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character-based structure. (It's probably a big influencing factor that there wer five years between
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Sophie and The Dandelion Clock. I just wasn't so interested in the territory of After the Hole and
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Sophie any more, and didn't want to cover it again.) (Top)
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Did you have an unhappy childhood?
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Friends who had known me for some time when the first book was published looked at me pretty
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weirdly for a while after they'd read it. 'But you seemed quite normal,' they'd say. Or, 'I didn't realise
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you were so... well, weird.'
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Which was, I suppose, understandable. But no, I've never been locked in a cellar or haunted by Ol'
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Grady. (Or Old Greedy, as Sophie points out.) My childhood was actually fairly happy. If I had to point
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to one aspect of it that perhaps contributed to my being a novelist today, it's that it was an isolated
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childhood.
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My parents run a day-school, which is housed in a big old Victorian building set in fairly substancial
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grounds. When I was little, this was my world, but it was a strangely empty world. The grounds were
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a tangle of overgrown rhododendron and the school was empty and creaky most of the time. When
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I was five, of course, I was going to school myself, but somewhere else (because the school my
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parents run is a girls' school so I would have been rather conspicuous). But even though the school
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day was full of people, evenings and weekends and holidays were still just me and the empty rooms
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and the rhododendrons. I think that, under these circumstances, it probably wasn't so strange that I
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started making up stories to occupy myself.
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I actually remember all this as a very happy time. I'm not a naturally gregarious person, so the
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isolation suited me very well (even now, all my hobbies are solitary ones). Imagination filled the gaps
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and I had what I remember as being a pretty good time, most of the time. Calvin (of Calvin and
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Hobbes) strikes me as remarkably similar in some ways: the over-imaginative weirdo who lives largely
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in his own head. (If you haven't read any Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strips, by Bill Watterson, you
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really really should.) (Top)
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Do you base your characters on people you know?
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Not in the sense that I would stick someone I knew down in a book! Actually, my characters are
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generally either composites of several people (often with some of me creeping inevitably into them)
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or they're completely made up. The more I've written, the more I've learned how rewarding it is to
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invent characters. You begin, admittedly, by creating them, but before long they've snowballed (it
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really is the right word for it) and are reacting in ways you'd never have predicted.
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In the same way that you can say of a friend or family member you know really well, 'Oh, so-and-so
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would never do that' or 'So-and-so would just love that film - it's exactly their kind of thing', so I end
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up being able to predict what my character would or wouldn't do, would or wouldn't say. After you've
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lived with a character in your head for a while, you don't have to think twice about how they'd
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respond to a given situation: you know as surely as you know how you would respond. When you
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get to that stage, your characters have what genuinely feels like a life of their own, and the writing of
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them almost takes care of itself. (It doesn't, of course - that would be too good to be true - but it's
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surprising how you can stick two characters in a situation and their dialogue just flows, as if you're
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overhearing a conversation and writing it down rather than desperatedly wracking your brains for
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something to fill the page.)
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Because of this, hardly any of the characters in The Dandelion Clock are based on real people. It
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was far more rewarding to come up with new people. (Top)
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