A minute with JL Morin Award-winning author

Where do you live?
It’s complicated

What did you have for breakfast?
Banana blueberry pancakes with no flour: 2 eggs, 2 Cyprus bananas, blueberries, and walnuts. You have to roll instead of flipping them, but they’re as yummy as souflé, and they don’t make you hungry later on because they don’t have as many carbohydrates.

Describe your perfect day
Writing, swimming, cycling, talking to someone I love.

Best book ever read?
This changes, but at the moment, I’m keen on The Kybalion, published in 1908. Its wisdom has made such a difference at decisive moments in my life lately.

Best childhood memory?
Hugging my mommy. What a blissful feeling that was.

What is always in your fridge?
This is like a riddle: Baking soda. It soaks up the smells of any food that may come and go, so is the only thing that is always in my fridge.

What music do you listen to in the car at the moment?
The last music that I listened to was R&B, but more recently, I just listen to my own thoughts and meditate.

What’s your spirit animal?
It changes, but I’d say the phoenix, since I’m an evolved Scorpio.

What are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of my latest books, Drakohistorias, co-authored by Stephan Theophylactou, wherein delightful dragons lead the way through a diverse, rhyming poem for children to help them overcome childhood fears; my novel, Nature’s Confession, the tale of two teens in a fight to save a warming planet, the universe… and their love; and my cli-fi love story, Loveoid, that takes place amidst our current anthropocene. They represent the culmination of my life’s work as a writer.

What movie scene has really stayed with you?
The scene where Bruce Willis rips the homing device out of his mouth in 12 Monkeys to stay at that point in time with the woman he loves. The romance is flawed, but he does the best that he can, so human.

If you could pick anyone at all (alive or dead) to go out for the evening with, who would it be?
That’s easy, my mom.

If you could time travel when/where would you go?
If I was sure of getting back to this time immediately, I’d go back 164,000 years to the time when the oldest cave paintings were discovered in South Africa, forcing scientists to rewrite the history of evolution.

What is your greatest fear?
Missing the next episode of The Ignorant Angels – not.

What would you say to your 18-year-old self?
Hi. Life is good. You can experience bliss through meditation.

Name the one thing that would stop you dating someone
Lying. I try to put distance between me and people who would sacrifice the relationship to control me.

If the world were ending in 24 hours what would you do?
Go to Retro and dance the night back to the 1950s.