1: What is the most productive time of the day for you to write?
Mid-afternoon or early evening is usually the best.
2: Do you start your projects writing with paper and pen or is it all on the computer?
I’m a child of the Internet generation and not even I can read my handwriting. So, I’ve found it’s best to start on the computer.
3: What do you draw inspiration from?
Everything. Tales of the Dim Knight parodies a lot of superhero stories and conventions which I’ve drawn from my childhood vegging in front of the TV, which I guess I can now categorize as research. However, other elements of Tales of the Dim Knight make fun of some self-help books and some “keeping up with the Joneses” behavior I’ve seen.
For my Rise of the Judge series of short stories, I used my experience working in a call center to create the structure for a futuristic army intelligence operation that monitors the e-mails of citizens in the hope of catching potential “terrorists.” I actually wrote two science fiction short stories two straight weeks in a row based on a small part of a sermon I heard on Sunday morning. A writer really has to keep the eyes and ears of their imagination open.
4: Do you set goals for yourself when you sit down to write such as word count?
Not usually.
5: Are you a published or a self published author and how do you come up with your cover art?
Thankfully, I’m published and cover art was actually something where we were approached by Holly Heisey who volunteered to do our cover and just did a great job on it. So for this release it was pretty easy to get the cover art.
6: What drives you to choose the career of being a writer?
I’ve always loved to tell stories and to create, and I continually more story ideas all the time. So, I’m eager to get these stories out.
7: Do you own an ebook reading device?
I don’t own a standalone E-reader yet. However, I do have the Kindle for Ipod App and I’ve read several books on my Ipod that way. I also got an App in the Apple Store that allows easy access to hundreds of thousands of free public domain books with the Ipod.
8: Who are some of your favorite authors and What are you reading now?
A lot of the classics. I love G..K. Chesterton. He has a fantastic voice as a writer, even if his style is a bit old fashioned. His way with words was just amazing. Also, I’ve really become a big fan of Rex Stout and what he was able to create with the Nero Wolfe stories in blending the world of hard boiled and soft boiled fiction to produce amazing mysteries driven by characters we really could care about. Right now, I’m unattached in terms of a current book. I went through a period of about a week and a half after Christmas when I read The League of Frightened Men (2nd Nero Wolfe novel), Mysterious Affair at Styles (first Poirot Novel), Study in Scarlet, and then Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Then I got a stomach flu and didn’t feel much like reading. Don’t know what I’ll pick up next.
9: What do you think of book trailers and do you have any plans to have any?
We do have a book trailer (embed if you can.) I’m very proud of what we came up with for our superhero parody. That said, I’m still a bit of a book trailer skeptic. All the current advice on book promotion says to have one, but I have yet to hear of people buying a book or even beginning the process of buying a book as a result of seeing the book trailer. I tend to be of the mind that good excerpts and good reviews are probably more important, but if not I’m glad we’ve got an interesting book trailer.
10: How did you come up with the title of your latest book?
As it was a parody book about a dim-witted superhero, the title of the book itself is a parody of the title, “Tales of the Dark Knight.”
11: What are you working on now that you can talk about?
Everything is in really early stages. I’m thinking of doing a parody/homage of Detective Stories, working title is “Case Files of the Selfish Detective.” Also, I may take up a more serious superhero story in completing the origin tale for my eighteen-inch high superhero, Small Packages.
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