Bellatrix Lestrange asked Michael Grant:

Is there anything that you do to get yourself inspired?

Michael Grant Well, I start by never using the word inspiration. "Inspiration" is part of the great Authors Self-Aggrandizement Project. We just love to act as if our books are being whispered into our ears by angels or mystical forces or at least by the ghost of Bill Shakespeare.

It's a job. It happens to be a job I enjoy, but it's a job. Inspiration is bullshit. We are programmed by DNA and experience. We are very sophisticated neural nets, but just as Google's Deep Dream neural net can't get over dogs, eyeballs and pagodas, we each have our own underlying patterns, and that is what passes for "inspiration." But calling it "inspiration" allows us to feel ever-so-special and superior. If you enjoy my books, I've done my job well; if you don't, then I haven't. That's how I look at it.

More than 150 times I've sat down at a keyboard and typed, "Chapter One." And 150 times out of 150 tries, I delivered a publishable (and published) manuscript, on-spec, on-time. That's not about waiting for mystical forces to whisper sweet nothings in my ear, it's about sitting down and typing all the words between "Chapter One" and "The End."

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