My father and my mother broke down at different points in my life. That awoke my writing. My father caught lung cancer from the asbestos coming out of the walls at his office in Michigan. He survived being a POW in the Korean War, but was being murdered by fibers in the form of a microscopic powder that attacked his lungs. Employees around him at work were dying from the inside out. Chemotherapy, fluid build up in his lungs, X rays, his lungs had to be drained. There was no room for oxygen. My parents took me out of elementary school so we could travel to different hospitals. I read books as my Dad was given a death sentence by doctors, "Winter is coming. You will die when the snow gets here. You have a few months to live unless you move to California. Milder climate. Dry. No snow." Life is a sleep. Death an awakening. We moved from hospital to hospital. He read a lot in the hospital bed. I copied him and read as many books as I could get in the gift shop. Every hospital had one. I watched people in the lobby suffer, wait, read books. Eventually I moved on to reading comic books and drawing animated pictures with stories. I wrote text at the bottom of the white pages. My father and mother liked my stories. This encouraged me to write more. Writing put a smile on my Dad's face. DIstracted my mother from thinking about the hospital rooms. We ate in the hospitals. Slept in the waiting rooms. As a young kid, I started writing stories about Bigfoot, UFOs, and Loch Ness Monsters. I drew super heroes with rocket like vehicles that could fly away into space. I sat cross legged with my father's college type writer and a dictionary on the floor. This amused my Dad. He enjoyed watching me write. He kept reading giant thick books which I admired like All The President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's political material was too complicated for me, but their big book style pushed me as an impressionable elementary school student. The paperback books made an impression so that when I got older I wanted to read large, important books that made people think out of the box they way my dad liked his books. I used to challenge myself by reading big books like my father. Big epic novels like Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Eventually I followed the Russian novelists after graduating from San Francisco State University. I studied in Egypt, China, France, and moved to live in Prague, Czechoslovakia after the Fall of Communism in Moscow. Czechoslovakia was the closest I could get to Russia, but I took buses to war zones in Serbia during the War in Yugoslavia. Ended up in Istanbul, Turkey and cities throughout Western and Eastern Europe. As a boy entering junior high, I continued typing about elephants, rhinos, animals and subjects I found interesting in the pages within the dictionary. I always carried a dictionary. In Asia and Europe, I had dictionaries in multiple languages. My father died when I was in junior high. A few years later before entering high school, my mother had a nervous break down in her car on her way to work. She earned a Master's Degree in Mathematics while my father had cancer. At the time of her break down, my mother was a Algebra, Mathematics and Computer Science Teacher. My mother quit school that day to search for a way out of her heartbreak. She missed my dad. She was raising children as a single mom all alone. She was raising other people's children at her teaching job with a full time work schedule in a busy school facing lots of growth. The city was expanding rapidly and the school district wanted her to be the Union Treasurer as well as Chairman of the Math Department for her entire school. Her relatives were far away on the other side of the country. No mother, no father, no brothers, no sisters, we were all alone. My mother bought airplane travel tickets to Europe and left me alone with my little brother who was ten years younger than I was. I had learned to drive just a few weeks earlier before she flew off to find herself in the cities of Europe. London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Florence, Germany, Italy, Switzerland; My mother wrote. I wrote as soon as she left the house. I bought a notepad at the local Seven-Eleven grocery store. I wrote day and night as my brother cried and wondered what happened to his mom. My mom traveled so I traveled. Traveling on the road distracted by little brother. He slept. Woke up at a camp ground in Yosemite Village. He passed out asleep. Woke up under the Golden Gate Bridge. We played video games at casino arcades in Reno and Tahoe, Nevada. I load up our van with food and supplies and took my little brother on a road trip with a pen and paper to write with. We slept under giant redwood trees next to rivers in the van. Slept in parking lots throughout San Francisco Bay Area, Avenue of the Giants near the Oregon border and drove into Los Angeles and throughout Southern California. I wrote books.

The History of Rock Music. I traveled and wrote a book about the history of Rock and Roll from California to New York City; but the material was dry. The documentary needed excitement, spice, and I was crossing the nation from Florida to San Francisco when Marilyn Manson was the rage in all the underground nightclubs I covered South of Market Street. During college, I worked in notorious strip clubs where brothers Jim and Artie were involved in a homicide. My roommate screwed a manager that tried to have my stripper friend Bambi assassinated. My roommates boy toy got caught when the security guard with the gun turned her into detectives. We visited her at the police department in a pumpkin colored jail jumpsuit. Guns, sex clubs, drug induced pole dancers, all these experiences at a time when Anne Rice and Frances Ford Coppola were writing about vampires where I was being educated at San Francisco State University. Blood was the topic surrounding fear of AIDS, glory hole drug addicts in the Mission District, strippers that hired ex-convict killers with pistols, vampire novels, pole dancers along Harrison Street at an underground nightclub named Lipps turned into prostitutes overdosing after injecting heroine, club owners that shoot cocaine before blowing their brothers away with shot gun blasts, and then there were sex club dancers associated with the Church of Satan. The leader Anton LaVey ate at a restaurant near my apartment. My cousin was scared when we ran into him a few times. My live in girlfriend stole all my credit card accounts before turning herself into rehab after our windows broke during the San Francisco Earthquake of 1989. So I left San Francisco after graduation. I arrived to Manhattan two months before the World Trade Center was attacked in September. By the time I reached out to book publishers in New York City, I realized that no one was interested in my book on the History of Rock and Roll. My book needed fangs, a rock monster, and I was listening to CD audio books as I drove seven times across the United States from California's Pacific to the East Coast's Atlantic to write my book on the History of Rock. Thomas Harris' cannibal Hannibal Lecter was a popular read that I repeatedly listened to as I rode from El Paso to San Antonio, Texas For weeks, I listened to Harris' cassette books profiling beasts. Nude strippers in Houston and Jacksonville inspired characters in the novels coming out of my personal diaries as I traveled and woke up with strange women in different bedrooms from Orlando to Memphis. Marilyn Manson was all the rage. Each dancer moved to Manson's music. Maybe Nine Inch Nails, Korn, but mainly Marilyn Manson. I had money from a great paying job but no TV. No kitchen, no plates, dishes, heater. Naked lap dancers work for tips. I lived with erotic ladies that lap danced and ate at truck stops with them after work. Night into the early morning I listened to their stories as I programmed web portals for a business based out of Florida. A company from Santa Barbara, California hired me. I also worked on the side as a freelancer in Nashville and San Francisco. All the time screwing exotic dancers that wrapped their legs around my pole to Marilyn Manson's music. I ran into stories from strippers of Manson and Trent Reznor in New Orleans, Louisiana, especially in the Garden District near Trent's mansion around the corner from Anne Rice's museum. Then I got caught in a hurricane storm off the freeway in Mobile, Alabama. That is where my character Angela came alive with an ink pen on restaurant napkins. I had no paper, but I wrote the beginning of a horror novel about a serial killer that discovers America's story of Rock and Roll through a runaway stripper named Angela that travels to Marilyn Manson concerts from Memphis, Tennessee to Miami, Florida. I ran into Marilyn Manson in New York City. A few years later, I ran into MTV producers and writers at Fuse in a writing class near Central Park West. They were excited by my work. At Fuse, agents introduced me to Manson. I gave him the rough draft of the novel in a three ring binder full of thousands of pages. He was the perfect rock monster for my material. I combined the History of Rock and Roll into a detective novel about a rock monster that casts a spell on impressionable fans. About eight books came from the idea. Hollywood producers asked to write a screenplay with them at a studio named The Lot started by Charlie Chaplin. I couldn't buy a house in Hollywood so I moved to Las Vegas during the mortgage foreclosure crisis to buy house in Sin City, where I began writing books for showgirls, lap dancers, strippers, adult porn stars, and club managers involved in the sex industry.

The books turned into film screenplays. The history book on rock music began in 1997 in San Francisco. By the time I met publishers in Manhattan on a work holiday July 4, 2001, the editors invited me to move to New York City. I lived in the Harlem ten minutes from Columbia University between the spot where Malcolm X was assassinated and near the famous gangster hangout named Cotton Club. New York City was attacked September 11th, two months after I arrived. Book publishers distracted with the economic collapse following the World Trade Center began relocating to Washington, Boston, and Seattle to work for Amazon. Boston gave publishers a chance to return to graduate school or teach. Washington was always hiring political commentators to write. I visited Princeton, Harvard, Yale, MIT, taught English to visiting authors from the Chinese Central Government. I worked on computers for Wall Street lawyers, created e-commerce websites for costume shops supplying Saturday Night Live, MTV, Spin Magazine, and David Letterman with costumes, magic supplies, colored contact lenses called Marilyn Manson contacts. I met executives from MTV, especially when we sold $6 dollar Donald Trump wigs for $85 to Florida and Tel Avis, Israel. I traveled to the Holy Lands; Egypt, Palestine, Greece, Turkey and Israel. Retired Israelis paid me to manage a restaurant in Times Square next to Port Authority. I met Manson and presented my first rough draft of the novels to him at Fuse Network around the corner from my job. Film producers were turning to video. Film producers insisted, "A bad novel will sell better than an excellent screenplay. Write your novel. We are inundated with film scripts." Once I wrote a few novels, especially while visiting Ankara, Turkey, film producers found my website online and invited me to their studio in West Hollywood, where they tried to attract Manson's attention through his managers. Film producers, screenplay writers and casting directors on Santa Monica Boulevard met with his manager, but said that Manson was busy with a divorce from a burlesque celebrity, new relationship with an actress and a film about Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. I am hard worker. Without waiting around, I bought a house four hours east of Hollywood in Las Vegas and joined Emmy award winning screenplay writers to write films on the dozens of novels I had written in New York City and San Francisco, California. The book on rock music transitioned into three novels. The novels became screenplays. The screenplays are now being turned into movies using digital films, a combination of interviews with thousands of readers that I have collected across the web, and Las Vegas nightclubs where the locations are ideal for the mystery thrillers we are trying to capture on film. To earn money, I freelance by writing books for showgirls, strippers, dancers work for tips, and erotic performers have a lot of cash. They want to turn their stories into published books like Jenna Jameson, Traci Lords and Dixie Evans, who I interviewed in Lenwood, California before the famous Marilyn Monroe impersonator died near my house in Las Vegas. Las Vegas has characters, plot, personality. I worked for a famous filmmaker with his own film production company in a warehouse along Las Vegas Boulevard in the Arts District. He taught me about the evolution of VHS tapes to DVD. He experimented with digital media on the Internet. I volunteered to work twenty hours from 8:00 am to 4:00 am and never regretted what I was experiencing in the energized film environment. I interviewed thousands of performers, entertainers and strippers with audio files, video recorders and photographed female models that flew into Las Vegas to pose nude for my book covers. I learned each hour of each day working with these exciting characters. Las Vegas is my home. I write stories about locals each morning into the late evening and early morning. Many times I write outside along Charleston and Sahara in the Naked City District as night transitions into morning and the gamblers that lost that night ask me for food because they can't afford to eat breakfast or feed their family with crying infants at home. All the milk money was spent on slot machines. I want to publish true crime novels as I witness the hustlers push their cons, or the pimps in knife fights that bleed out at the front door of the store, or the prostitute that got hit by a DUI driver only feet from me, or the car theft that crashed on Charleston before he threw himself off the roof next to the nightclub I was at. He dove head first instead of returning to prison. I want to create films about true crimes involving local Las Vegas personalities worthy of being lead actresses in an Academy Awards Hollywood movie. Turn the characters into books. Turn the stories into films.

Leo Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, Jack London, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, John Irving's Garp, Anne Rice, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Sammy Davis Jr, Milan Kundera, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Frank Herbert's Dune series, Nina Hartley inspired me to read all of Hunter S. Thompson's books on gonzo when I worked at her tanning spa and the nightclub Nina stripped at. History books written by Paul Johnson are read as I travel overseas, Bob Woodward's news makes for good audio books, Paul Krugman's economics is a favorite I picked up at graduate school. I read Snoopy by Peanuts, Bloom County, and Calvin and Hobbes. I love watching classic cartoons with children; Sniffles the Mouse, Daffy Duck, Pepe Le Pew and Bugs Bunny. At night, I read mostly history. Sylvia Browne is my favorite mystical author. Sylvia Browne went to San Francisco State University. She inspired me to read Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. My first book was a challenge to that interest, when I wrote a massive amount of literary material on The History of American Rock and Roll Music with research that took me across the nation and up the Mississippi River to the Blue Highway Route. I read Marilyn Manson's autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell about three times as I wrote in Florida, San Francisco and along the Blues Highway eventually leading into Marilyn Manson's hometown and high school within Canton, Ohio. I dance to the Cure, Evanescence, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Metallica, Cult, Sisters of Mercy and in Europe I find myself listening to a lot of Roxette. Roxette plays on every disco floor in every hotel nightclub from Amsterdam to Israel. I listen to David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Queen, Donna Summers, Rod Steward, Billy Joel, Elton John, Beatles, Pat Benatar, Stevie Nicks and Nikki Sixx. As a young boy, my father trained me to play the piano, violin and harmonica. He was a foreign language translator turned financial accountant from Korea. My mother taught Mathematics and Computer Science. Together my parents taught me Math with language skills that led to computer programming languages. I taught English at the first school of commerce in Central Europe known as the Academy of Economics in Prague when the country was still named Czechoslovakia instead of Czech Republic. I read my way through Europe and seventeen cities throughout China. In America, I worked on some of the first Internet advertising for Charles Schwab, Adobe Systems, Veeco, Digital Instruments and Digital Medical Systems in Nashville and San Francisco. The money I earned allowed me to write as I traveled to build web portals and administrative websites with advertising banners and e-commerce systems in Manhattan, New York City. I rarely spend time at home, so I never get a chance to watch TV; But I love the exciting shows when I get a chance to watch. I always carry a book with me. Four books in my car at all times and at least two CD audio books. I write at night to Mozart's Requiem, operas Don Giovanni, and Claude DeBussy Claire de Lune.

Writing. Writing has driven strippers mad for most of my life. I have had lovers walk into my apartment carrying heavy television sets in card board boxes because I climb out of bed right after climax to sit at my desk in the nude and write under a light until the early morning hours. The strippers get even more nervous when they realize I don't have cable, especially after dragging in these heavy mammoth TV sets. There was nothing for the naked lap dancers to do when I left bed to write. Every room in my house is surrounded by books that line the walls. There are books between the driver's seat and passenger seat of my car. Some of the lap dancers I wake up with can't read or write because they have been hustling the streets since they were kicked out of the house by their parents. Seriously, I am not complaining, but I write for many strippers because they can't write a paragraph. Writing is hard for people, especially in Las Vegas and Hollywood where I hang out at a lot of nightclubs when I am not at home whoring. My mother heard complains from the girls I was sleeping with. The ladies called her by phone to complain. I regret explaining to her the fact that, "Women are like books and I am an avid reader. I like a variety of books. I like a variety of women. When I am done with the books, I put them back up on the shelf and grab the next book." My mother got angry with me. With fury she screamed, "Books don't have emotions. These girls have feelings." Recently my film producer reminded me, "This is the Emotion Picture Business. Not the motion picture business. We build emotions." To answer the original question; What inspires you to get out of bed each day? I get out of bed each day to write. Writing is the way I help people. I might not be a good lover to the warm bodied lady lap dancers that treat like pillows more than plush toys, but I write novels, books, film screenplays; I love helping people write.

I am always writing. Always. I keep the ink business alive. Friends walk into my kitchen, office, car, and they find my ink pens dry. Empty. My children write just to be near me. My children began writing as toddlers as they started imitating me. My wife hates me a little. She hates writers and regrets ever marrying a writer. Watching my children write irritates her immensely. She travels to avoid me and teaches my children not to write. I return to strip clubs in Las Vegas to join kindred spirits that like to tell raunchy stories about the amazing people along Fremont Street, Art District, First Friday, Naked City and Las Vegas Boulevard resort casinos. I write at Cosmopolitan, Town Center, Caesars, Stratosphere, Golden Nugget, Plaza, El Cortez, and Bellagio. I began two novels at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. Simply sitting down with a cup of coffee amongst porn stars trying to charm rock celebrity musicians inspired my ink pen to begin writing two novels on Starbuck napkins. Las Vegas is a city for writers. Mario Puzo, Hunter S. Thompson, Nicholas Pileggi, you should come to Las Vegas if you want to write about serious characters that attract Hollywood filmmakers. Universities should start college courses called Las Vegas for psychology students, film students, advertising agents, crime fighters, and creative writing majors.

Word of mouth, especially in the nightclubs in Vegas. When I interview strippers, the girls tell me stories. The ladies often mention, "I want to write a book like this one I read." Then the readers pull up a book on their iPad. Bored bartenders reading ebooks off an iPhone became quite popular with the economy sank due to the recession in this country. These alcohol pimps tell drinkers what to read as they bend over serving booze at the bar. I hear a lot of books recommended because friends want to talk to me about literature. Not blackjack, slot machines or conventions and tradeshows, many of my friends wait to tell me what they read and how reading the book has changed their life. The cashier at the lingerie store wants to talk about science fiction. The stripper dressed in pink bikinis for her twelve hour shift wants to talk about whatever university students recommend at the college down the street where she studies in school. Many of the girls pick up books at the airport. Strippers fly into Las Vegas from San Diego, Salt Lake City, and Washington D.C. The strippers that drive from Phoenix, Arizona; Denver, Colorado; and Los Angeles, California read more ebooks than the fliers that read more paperback books on the planes. The recession hurt everybody. Tourism died. Disneyland, Grand Canyon National Park, and Las Vegas suffered great financial costs. Nightclubs stayed open, but with business down, the rooms were filled with boredom. Stores earning tens of thousands of dollars in a single day were lucky if they earned $200 during a day shift of eight hours from the cashier. Dancers turned to prostitution. Strippers went to school to earn certificates at certified massage therapists and personal trainer certificates. Health clubs employee personal trainers 24 hours per day in Las Vegas, Nevada. We are the world leader in plastic surgery. Looks are important in Las Vegas. Employees in clubs read ebooks on their smart phones and pretended they were answering calls behind the cocktail bar if the club owner or manager stepped inside the nightclub. Bikini clad go go dancers sitting around with a cigarette between their fingers waiting for their stage set are reading ebooks off tablets. Customers stop spending money. They just watch. Recently I saw the funniest site, a small stripper with short figure dragged a huge laptop into the nightclub that was bigger than her entire chest and shoulders combined - And the little hot curly haired brunette was known city wide for the talents attached to her chest. Yet this laptop keyboard and monitor were so enormous that the computer was bigger than her. The tiny stripper had to literally hug the computer to her chest as the power cord, mouse cord, all wrapped around her legs as she dragged this electronic appliance tool into the dressing room where she could play online when the nightclub turned cold and slow. She made two trips into the dressing room: One for her laptop. The second for her suitcase full of cosmetics, wigs, hair care, swimsuits, intimate corsets, stockings and club lingerie for the stage where men waited to throw tips. The girl earned over $4000 on a Friday night or Saturday night shift. She prefered to sit in the dressing room and read off the web on slow evenings Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesday.

Bigfoot. Bigfoot came to Earth from a UFO out of the sky. During my elementary school years, my father drove my mother and I from San Francisco to Seattle, Washington. I saw a lot of stuff on Bigfoot as we passed through Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. My father encouraged me to write. I loved making him happy. He was sick with lung cancer. My elementary school teachers were big on books, because we lived in Santa Rosa, California with authors like Frank Herbert, Jack London, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Charles M. Schulz, Anne Rice, Francis Ford Coppola, and the San Francisco authors were only a short forty minute drive away. We were raised hearing about San Francisco based writers like Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, and the abundant authors that called Northern California their home. My neighbors also read a lot. One eccentric woman got a divorce. She drank a lot, emptied bottles each day, and would come out of the house to talk to us kids on the sidewalk about books while all boozed up and alone with no money to go anywhere. Her husband took the only car the family had. She bought books at the grocery store while we were in elementary school and for some reason, she gave the paperback books to me when I was around eight years old. The first book she gave me was John Irving's The World According to Garp. After I read Garp, the woman got excited. Next she gave me John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire. Later she gave me John Irving's novel, The Water Method Man. I guess I inspired my little brother to read. He was sharper than most teachers when he entered into junior high school. My little brother was reading paperback books by six. In high school, he asked me to drive him into San Francisco on Sunday afternoons so that he could buy books only to return to the city after reading the novels in a few days before the next Sunday rolled around to buy more books. I read more than anybody I know and he reads more than I do. He has worked for magazines in New York City. I won writing competitions hosted at the local shopping mall. I won an award for my writing in elementary school for the entire school district. This surprised my father who encouraged me to learn how to type on his college type writer. Him and my mom had huge college type writers from the Sixties era. The writing instructors at San Francisco State University really inspire me. They have inspired some of the best published writers. Anne Rice's husband Stan was Dean of the Creative Writing Department. Francis Ford Coppola's brother was a Dean in the Theater Department. Frances Mayes wrote Under the Tuscan Sun. Frances Mayes was Chair of the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. I got a part time job traveling with Ambassador Bill Lane's assistant to Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Israel, and Hawaii. We did a lot of travel business throughout the islands in Hawaii for hotel reviews, resort award shows, and restaurant reviews on the Hawaiian Islands of Oahu, Maui, Kauai. Bill Lane owned Lane Publishing, home to Sunset Magazine. I wrote about the Persian Gulf War from Cairo, Egypt with Lane Publishing when the first bombs dropped on Baghdad, Iraq after sailing up the Nile River from Luxor to my hotel room in Aswan, Egypt. We traveled to Germany, Czechoslovakia, and later I studied in Nice, France, where I travel and read alone throughout Europe with a Eurail Pass. After graduating from college, my mother paid for a college class to study in seventeen cities throughout mainland China. I was teaching English part time in the evenings in Downtown San Francisco. The school found me a job teaching in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Every four months I traveled some place new: Istanbul, Turkey, Berlin, Paris; Traveling through Europe was easy. Communism was finished. Single boys from Rome, Italy would gather in one car on the Friday afternoon and drive to Prague to meet Czech girls on the weekend. The girls were my English students. They helped me find rides to cities around Europe. I joined families as my students traveled to Italy, Germany and Poland. The bus to Istanbul was a day's drive. Prague embraced writers. I lived in an apartment above the bar where Jaroslav Hasek wrote his comedy The Good Soldier Svejk. Milan Kundera was poplar throughout San Francisco State University. Václav Havel was a poet before he became the last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic when I was living in town. People would go to dances and talk about Vaclav Havel's poetry. All the students wanted to read books that the Russian Communist did not allow. All the English speaking students read books because the foreigners didn't understand what was being said on the radio, television or newspapers. I probably wrote more while living in Prague than any other time of my life; But I read more books while studying at San Francisco State University. I never took a camera with me while living in Europe. In Vegas and New York I began filming

My mother read books to me each night. My mother read a lot of stories from the Bible. I got in trouble asking my elementary school teacher questions about stories from the Bible. Questions about miracles, floods and King David made elementary school instructors nervous to the point that they would shout at me if I asked. The question is, "Do you remember the first story you ever read, and the impact it had on you?" And the answer may appear bizarre - even to me - But I tell relatives this when family members ask me about the novel that impacted me during Thanksgiving dinners when we are sitting around the table eating turkey. My English Literature Professor James Wilson had me come into his office in the Humanities Building for a private meeting and gave me a novel off his book shelf named Taras Bulba. That semester in 1987 in the early morning hours at 3:00 a.m. I read a passage from Taras Bulba that changed my life forever. I was studying Biology. My major was Biology. I changed my Major to English so that I could take more classes in Literature after reading that novel Taras Bulba. Later next novel with life changing significance was written by W. Somerset Maugham named The Razor's Edge. Between 1987 and 1988, Anne Rice was a hit in San Francisco. I went to school in France that summer and the French were talking about Anne Rice's vampire novels. Perfume by Patrick Suskind was huge in Paris. In 1989, I read Russian novels by Chekhov, Puskin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, my girlfriend took me to see a play at a famous theater for my birthday. The performance was based on the Turgenev novel named Fathers and Sons. That summer in 1989, I drove across the United States of America from San Francisco to New York City. Upon hearing that I was leaving for New York City, that Professor I mentioned earlier James Wilson gave me a challenge. He challenged me to read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I read all of Leo Tolstoy's books that summer, plus finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe and the series of detective novels with a Manhattan type blend of existentialism known as the New York Trilogy written by Paul Auster. In Las Vegas, the Dune series by Frank Herbert has become essential reading for travelers coming to town. I read more science fiction in Las Vegas. I was never interested in science fiction until I drove through Area 51. Plus fantasy and science fiction are immensely popular in Sin City.

Female models approach me from Miami to Salt Lake City, Utah. I was writing books about rock music. I was meeting girls. Dancers wanted to be on my books. I had posted an announcement in the form of a blog on MySpace about a new Rock and Roll novel surrounding a Marilyn Manson murder mystery. A female model working in Miami and Los Angeles volunteered to fly into Las Vegas, Nevada from where she was working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to pose for my book cover. Waitresses at Hooters ask to model for me. Famous showgirls on Las Vegas Boulevard billboards volunteer to model on my book covers at no cost. The nightclub managers have helped encourage my books. I got to add, I love Las Vegas. The girls here love to pose for photographers, especially when they can see themselves on a book cover. When I was young, I was always around my father and mother's seductive book covers. I remember quite well, my father and mother had a book called Fear of Flying by Erica Jong with an attractive nude girl on the book cover to highlight the erotic literature. My father read OUI and Penthouse. My brother read Playboy. My neighbor introduced me to John Irving's Garp while I was studying in elementary school. I wrote about that earlier in this interview. My father, brother, uncles had Playboy magazine sitting around the house in the bedroom, bathroom, and my brother presented me with a box full of Playboy magazines for Christmas before I entered high school. His wife insisted she was sick of being married to a perv. Plus my birthday is the same date as Hugh Hefner and Jenna Jameson, so I got reminded about that coincidence every year.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Modern Times by Paul Johnson
Roots by Alex Haley
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

Marilyn Manson's autobiography The Long Road Out of Hell
I am quite fond of Sammy Davis Jr''s autobiography titled Why Me?
Anything written by Anne Rice, D.H. Lawrence, Frank Herbert
Anything of historical significance written by Paul Johnson, Paul Krugman, and James Michener.