When did you realize you wanted to write novels?
I was young when I started writing stories; I used a composition book to write the adventures of my action figures in grade school. I don’t think I had formed the idea of writing a novel until junior high school.
How long did it take you to realize your dream of publication?
Heh. A long time. Even in my engineering career, I wasn’t published until a few years after I graduated college. Once I started taking my novel seriously, it still took almost ten years.
Are you traditionally published, indie published, or a hybrid author?
Indie. But with my current horror project, I am querying for traditional publication.
Where do you write?
Almost anywhere if I have a notebook with me. And sometimes I still note ideas in my phone. But my dedicated writing editing is done in my home office.
Is silence golden, or do you need music to write by? What kind?
Occasionally I will write with music in the background. Usually movie soundtracks, like Lord of the Rings.
How much of your plots and characters are drawn from real life? From your life in particular?
Plots, none, aside from the way the human subconscious works, I suppose. But character traits, I use real people all the time. Either people I know, or ones I observe. Airports, restaurants, and bars are great places to people watch.
Describe your process for naming your character?
For fantasy setting characters, it’s a challenge. I try to find something that can be spoken smoothly but still feel unusual enough to evoke the setting. But for my modern work, I used to use a phone book—generally for surnames, as first names just come to me. Now it’s a little more difficult and I rely on odd internet searches, like “What are the most common Italian surnames in Nebraska?”
Real settings or fictional towns?
Fictional, with references to real places.
What’s the quirkiest quirk one of your characters has?
One of my character’s grandfathers has a belt buckle collection—you know, those over-the-top pewter, North American wildlife kind that you find at state fairs. An entire drawer of them.
What’s your quirkiest quirk?
I write my first draft longhand. I can’t seem to be as creative typing on a keyboard.
If you could have written any book (one that someone else has already written,) which one would it be? Why?
Elric of Melnibone. Or Foundation. Because I can only hope to come close to the scope of these stories and the characters in them.
Everyone at some point wishes for a do-over. What’s yours?
There are probably a thousand little things, but mainly they involve saying “yes” to something that was a new experience instead of being afraid to try it.
What’s your biggest pet peeve?
Being late.
Ocean or mountains?
Mountains.
City girl/guy or country girl/guy?
Country.
What’s on the horizon for you?
Last year I graduated from the Denver Lighthouse Writers Book Project program, and I am actively querying my horror project that I finished there. I am also working on my next horror novel, tentatively titled “The Metallurgist” which is a Cthulhu-homage that incorporates a lot of my experience in aerospace engineering and project management. I am looking forward to an upcoming writing retreat in Fairplay, CO this fall and hope to finish my first draft on that trip.
Jaeron thought he understood the streets of Islar. He thought he had come to accept his decision to follow his father’s plan for him, to become a thief in a city rife with corruption rather than pursue his own interest in the priesthood. Family came first. Then he and his siblings return home from their first ‘job’ to find their father dying–murdered–and a package stained in his blood. A package containing three exceptional wooden toys and a decade-old letter hinting at their lives prior to their adoption.
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