So here’s a new game for the blog. I’m going to get all sorts of interesting people to finish the same five sentences for me in their own way. It’s exciting for me because I have absolutely no idea what anyone will say. Hopefully they will all be very different.

First up is Jonathan Pinnock, who is having rather an exciting publishing time at the moment.

His first novel, Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens, which has been called “probably the strangest and most refreshing Austen sequel”, was published by Proxima Books in September 2011, and his Scott Prize-winning short story collection Dot(.), Dash(-) will be published by Salt in 2012. In the meantime, he’s been winning competitions, getting stories published, tweeting up a storm, issuing challenges to P D James and running a software company. He’s also very nice.

Here are his completed sentences (after the pin-up, never let it be said we don’t do glamour on this blog…):

When you were small, you wanted to be… a writer. Really, I did. Although it seems to have taken me an inordinately long time to get here.

The one thing you can never resist is… hold on, only one thing? This is tricky. Could be anything from another glass of wine (just one more, twist my arm) to yet another unnecessary King Crimson live CD. Or a double chocolate chip cookie. Actually, I’ll go for the cookie. Since you’re asking.

You may not say it aloud but… The Thompson Twins were pretty good, really.

The last time you went ‘WOOP’ with excitement was …when I found out that Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens was going to be on promotion in WHSmith. Somehow the idea of the book appearing in the chart section of a high street store made it seem real.

Your five favourite words are … tentacle, concomitant, flugelhorn, asymptotic and lemma. Actually, those were just five cool words from the top of my head. It would be a lot easier to give you five words that I really hate. Or five hundred, in fact, starting with “webinar”. There is no punishment harsh enough for the person that came up with that one.

Do you know, I might add another sentence for my guests actually which is to make a sentence themselves using all five of their favourite words. Or perhaps I should make it into a competition for readers of this blog. Anyone want to give it a go? I promise not to make losers go to a webinar. Or laugh at you (well, not much…)

But in the meantime, THANK YOU JONATHAN for starting us off so well. And here’s a little something for you, although ooops… you’re right. Double chocolate chip cookies ARE hard to resist…x