SARA SHERIDAN

If I hadn't been able to get my first book published, I am not sure what I would have done.

I'm unique - a cosmopolitan mix.

Personally I estimate about a third of my time is spent on author events, social media and traditional publicity.

Most fledgling and mid-list writers are lucky to be offered a 4-figure sum and are not only expected to deliver copy that needs minimal editing but also take an active part in marketing and publicizing their work.

We're all so digital, but the '50s was the era of watches you had to wind. When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Everest in 1953, Hillary was equipped with a Rolex Oyster Perpetual.

How lucky am I? Quite often I speak at book festivals, and people ask me how I got published. There's people who have been working on a book for as long as ten years, and I feel like such a cow.

I always thought that bagels and lox was my soul food, but it turns out it's sushi.

Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.

Some matters are simply contentious. Sometimes you're never going to get it right.

My identity has always been confused. Born in Edinburgh of a Scottish/Russian/Jewish mother and an English/Irish/Catholic father, there is no form of guilt to which I was not subjected in my childhood. Members of my immediate family live all over the world - a diaspora of cousins, aunts, uncles and more in a dizzying mix.

Living in Edinburgh, I consider myself particularly lucky - we have the biggest book festival in the world, a plethora of fascinating libraries and museums, and some of the greatest architecture in Europe.

The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

I write fast. I'm one of the lucky ones.

We don't live in a society that has genuine equality, and every woman we know has experienced that.

The digital revolution has wrest a little control away from corporate publishers and white, male, middle-aged critics, but the financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

It's easy to laugh at etiquette, but in a hundred years, our children's grandchildren will almost certainly be laughing at us.

One of the great things about the Fifties is there are so many secrets - people who've come back from the war and done these terrible things that they don't want to think about, or can't say what they did because they signed the Official Secrets Act.

Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.

Something I notice speaking to writers from south of Hadrian's Wall is that the culture is different. At base, I think Scotland values its creative industries differently from England.

The cosmetic industry really took off in the 1950s.

It's interesting that, given our culture has so many words that refer to women in a truly derogatory fashion, it's 'lady' - a term that has conferred social respect on our gender for over a thousand years - that has women up in arms.

I am incredibly jammy. I really am.

I once did an event with Ian Rankin where he said he didn't really need to do much background research because his books are set in the present, and I just thought: 'You lucky, lucky beast!' because as a historical novelist, I live constantly on the edge of wondering whether tissues had been invented.

There are so many ways to do research - even watching old Ealing comedies, watching people getting on and off buses in London, looking at household interiors.

The world loves the 1950s.