The reality is that how I write is immaterial. I have written in the margins of books I happened to be reading, in the steam of shower mirrors, on my own skin, on the hard disk of a 12-inch Powerbook. I have written surrounded by my books in the basement of my then home in upstate New York, in the loneliness of the attic of a former hospital for Plague victims in Antwerp, caught up in the deep despair of wooing an unwooable woman in an ice-cold Berlin apartment, as well as in the blaze of a blossoming love -- it all didn't matter. What matters is the space you inhabit when you write -- you live within the setting and the characters and the truth of the story. All else is circumstance.

I keep forgetting to link to this Paul Verhaeghen interview at The Book Depository that Mark Thwaite tipped me (and you) off to back here.