My 89-year-old mother recently broke her hip and was in a local rehab center for a while. (She's fine now!) When I visited her, I wondered how easy it would be for someone to slip medications into a patient's IV or pill container. That was the genesis for DOG HAVE MERCY, in which my hero, reformed computer hacker Steve Levitan, takes his golden retriever Rochester to visit patients at the local nursing home/rehab center.

After I finished the first of my golden retriever mysteries, IN DOG WE TRUST, I sent it to my agent, who turned it down because in his opinion there was no market for a cozy mystery with a male hero. I didn't believe him, so I began querying publishers and editors -- but they all said the same thing. Women are the bulk of cozy readers, and they want female protagonists. But I really believed in the characters and the book, so I published it myself. And here I am, on book six, with many, many satisfied readers!

The greatest joy in writing is being able to touch others through the ideas in my head. My characters become like real people to me, and I'm so delighted when a fan writes to say that he or she enjoyed a book and felt moved by it.

Fans are everything! I wrote for my own enjoyment for nearly thirty years before I began to be published regularly, and it is so heartening to heard that someone has liked a book or a character.

I have three. Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and Jimmy Buffett. I love Hemingway's style, Kerouac's passion, and Jimmy Buffett's laid-back attitude toward life. I'd like to be able to combine all three in my own writing and my life.

I have two dogs who need a morning walk and breakfast -- so about a hundred and fifty pounds of golden retriever climbing over me in bed is enough to get me up and started on my day!

In addition to my writing career, I'm a professor of English at a community college, so I spend a lot of time teaching, meeting with students and grading papers. My partner and my two dogs get the rest of my attention, though I do like to put together crossword puzzles, play word games, and of course read!

One of the first mystery stories I wrote grew out of my experience as a suburban teen. Our next door neighbor got a delivery from Charles Chips and I thought about how easy it would be for the delivery guy to jimmy someone's lock and walk in. Then steal a bunch of small items and put them right back in the empty can. An awful lot of my ideas come from observation -- I look at people around me, bumper stickers, T-shirt slogans and so on, and the stories spin out from there.

I begin with an idea, a situation, an image -- sometimes a first line or a title. Then I start writing, getting to know the characters and the situation. As the first pages come together I get a better idea of the story ahead of me, and begin thinking about plot points. What will happen about a third of the way through the story that will turn it in a different direction? I work my way up to that, often cutting and moving and replacing as I go. By the time I get there, I hope that I know the second plot point, and eventually the ending. The more I know about the story before I start, the fewer mistakes I make.

The first story that had a huge impact on me was A Separate Peace by John Knowles, which I read in tenth grade. The story moved me tremendously -- I wanted a friendship like the one between Finny and Gene! The movie version came out that year, and we took a class field trip to see it. Then our teacher asked us to reimagine the story as told from Finny's point of view. That really opened my eyes to the power of storytelling as a way to express my emotions, and I haven't stopped writing since.

For my Steve and Rochester series, I look for a great image of a golden doing something related to the plot -- perhaps performing in agility trials, or in a seasonal pose. Then I consider type face, style and position There's a lot of information to get out -- the subtitle of "a golden retriever mystery" and my name. And it all has to be readable at a small size! Sometimes I do ask for help from an experienced cover designer, though, when my own eye just isn't good enough. I hired a great designer to help with DOG HAVE MERCY and she came up with the idea of the snow globe, which was just perfect.