I admire anyone that writes well, but my favorites would have to be Jose Saramago, Orhan Pamuk, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino -- the list just goes on.

I'm really never not writing in a way, since stuff is going on in my head that will continue on the page when I get to it, but I have to sleep, eat, shop. I have a life like most people. I travel when I can, I read, walk, swim, watch movies.

In a crossword puzzle I did recently the three-letter answer to the clue, 'Artists asset', was 'eye'. People often say that I have 'the eye'. I depend on it for many things but in designing my book covers I take a fairly formal approach. The content offers images that I have, alternatively, painted, as with "Master of the Stars" (a pastel and photograph montage), photographed (both of my Matt Grey murder mysteries), or used an existing painting of mine that seemed appropriate, as with "R. I. P." Making the cover for "The A to Z Book of Birds for Young Bird Lovers" gave me the opportunity to paint a couple of birds more than the alphabet's twenty-six.
For the titles, I have worked with computer-savvy friends to select fonts, sizes, to tweak colors and play around until I like what I see. I have posted alternatives on Facebook for feedback, but must confess I have already made my choice before they are posted (don't tell anyone).

Not having a studio in which to paint. I'm not a pleine aire painter and I've been moving around lately. I had to do something creative and ideas for stories started coming, so I started writing them down.

Hard to say. I was writing things when I wasn't aware I was writing: film proposals, film outlines, screenplays. I didn't think of myself as 'writing' until I started "Master of the Stars" in the 70's; it sat for a long time, then it was finished, finished again, and now it's ready to publish.

Finding that, as with painting, or for that matter, the other media in which I have worked, seeing the thing I started take off and create itself while I do the physical labor.

Unlike "Master of the Stars" and "Agla and Kevin", books that I started years ago and finished years later (both to be published soon), "Corpus" came out of nowhere, followed its own trajectory and came to its conclusion a short few months later. It's a detective story and there is a body. I don't even read detective stories! A friend who read it said that there was a formula, a template that detective stories followed, and that mine did not. If you are looking for a formulaic detective story, apparently you won't find it here, but it's a crime story that takes place in South Central Texas, specifically in Corpus Christi and Port Aransas, where I have spent some time, so you might at least learn something about that part of the world by giving "Corpus" a try.

I've taken up again a story I started in the 70's and has just sat until now. It's about a young boy who becomes lost in the Texas Hill Country and is taken in by a small band of Indians, the remains of a tribe that retreated into hiding when the Spanish Conquistadores invaded. It's contemporary.