When did you first realize you'd like to become an author?

I’ve always been a great liar. No, strike that. I’ve always enjoyed telling grandiose stories. However, if you tell grandiose stories and people assume they’re true before they find out that they’re not, you will be labeled ‘liar’. And I’m not. I’m a confabulator (from Latin confabulatus, past participle of confabulari, from com- + fabulari to talk, from fabula story), someone who fill gaps in memory with fabrications. A storyteller, not with the explicit intention to deceive, but to amuse.
During a brief sojourn in unemployment and without the financial means to go out on the town, my friends and I told stories to amuse each other. My stories were praised and people told me I should write a book. Although I’m an avid reader, I didn’t really like writing essays at school, so I nixed the idea, but it hovered around in the back of my mind.
A few years later while working long boring night shifts as a security officer, I would often spend six hours out of every eight-hour shift reading and studying. I had an idea for a story and started writing, first in Dutch, later in English. At first I wrote on a typewriter, but when I received my vacationing money, I spend it on an Apple Powerbook 150, which I carried everywhere. From that moment on, I took myself seriously as a writer. As I couldn’t follow classes on writing crime fiction in Amsterdam, I bought self-help books for writers and became an autodidact.

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