Over one hundred people crammed into Studio 1 at the Sydney Writers’ Festival ‘This Is Thriller’ event today to hear myself, John M Green and Cathy Cole discuss how thriller authors tap into the hot issues of our time and how the stories reflect people’s fears and worries. We discussed techniques to engage and hold the reader, the importance of never preaching in fiction, how to be selective about the research used so that it drives the action of the story and used my hacker conference story to illustrate the point, which had the audience laughing. I even had time to talk about ‘Thirst’ and my trip to Antarctica. Seems this next book is already getting a lot of interest. The audience was superb and asked great questions. What a wonderful session, and thank you, Chip, for inviting me along.