The first story I ever wrote was probably an assignment in elementary school. I seem to remember being asked to write a story about early colonists and I wrote mine as a diary of a girl my age. My teacher asked to send it to Stone Soup, but if it ever appeared in the magazine I never knew it.

I went through a poetry phase in my early teens but returned to fiction. My first attempt at a novel was when I was around 12; I have it in a drawer even now, the handwriting on the wide-ruled paper is characteristically loopy. The story was inspired by an odd outbreak of polio in Switzerland that actually happened in the early 1980s. I was into the Omen books and movies then, and instead of an anti-Christ, I postulated that Hitler had never died and his son was now trying to take over by launching biological warfare that looked like random outbreaks. I rather doubt I'll finish that one, but who knows?

In college, I worked on a novel that reimagined my mother's life had she not stayed married to my father; that one got convoluted and turned into a weird murder mystery that rambles into nothingness.

Like most writers, I have several unfinished novels in files. That's just part of the game.

My upcoming book, Elegant Freefall, started because I read a lesbian romance with a protagonist who was a professor who got involved with a student. As a professor myself, I set out to get rid of the "teacher-student" trope (which frankly grosses me out) to explore an academic romance with two adult women who are peers. I didn't want any big coming-out moments, either.

The current draft is quite different from the original; in part these changes are due to an agent's advice that infidelity is hard to sell, but even more so the changes came about because I retired from teaching and am now taking time to revise the story so that it focuses less on plot-twists and more on authentic character development. The protagonist, Sylvia Townsend, has similar identity questions that I had late in my career as an academic, and the novel has been a good way for me to reflect on the difference between what she needs versus what she thinks she wants.

I do have a start on a spin-off of that book which features a minor character from Elegant Freefall, so I'm excited to see what folks think about Sylvia and the character of Andi.

When I published my first novel, I was in the midst of the high point of my academic career. My wife was also starting medical school, so I didn't really have time or energy to run a household, work a full-time teaching job, publish academically, and wait on an agent or publisher to like my work enough to print it. Indie publishing was a way to get my work out there, but more importantly, it was a way to show myself that I could set my own goals and validate my own efforts.

In the six years since that first release, I've watched friends and colleagues work with publishers and agents and they are still waiting to see their work come out. They are often persuaded to change their work to make it more marketable (by their agent or publisher-to-be's standards) and that leads to frustration on the author's part as the book becomes something else.

A friend who went with publishers for her first two books finally took the leap to go indie and has made more money that way and has more creative control. She's also doing more author brand development and directly interacting with fans in authentic ways. Another friend got an agent after having two books with traditional houses and still didn't sell well.

I read a good bit of horror, but I also read a lot of different things. I'm currently reading Thomas Harris' Red Dragon and really thinking about how it is so obviously an earlier book than Silence of the Lambs. You can tell that Harris had yet to hit his stride with pacing and narrative. Still a good story.

I also love Konrath's books for pleasure reading, but as a writer, even when I'm reading for pleasure, it's informing my own work in some way.

I am a subscriber to BookBub, but I also do a lot of browsing on my own using word clouds on Smashwords, for instance. Often, the library is my go-to place for discovering new books, but I also am an avid follower of a variety of websites and social media accounts. Word of mouth and GoodReads recommendations are also ways I find new ebooks.

I love my Kindle Paperwhite. I was heart-broken when my Kindle Keyboard screen cracked, and I thought I'd never love another eReader as much. I have a Kindle Fire that I also read on quite a bit, especially for PDFs and formats that don't work as well on the Paperwhite. I read on my iPhone, too, though.

Sarah Waters, Emma Donaghue, Suzy McKee Charnas, Bram Stoker, Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin Kiernan, Octavia Butler, J.A. Konrath, Eudora Welty.