Though I admire a lot of authors, David Gemmell remains my favorite. Druss the Legend is an awesome book, but all his books are outstanding. Tolkien, of course, is high on my list.

I play computer games. I backed a number of game developers on Kickstarter and I play through most of those. I am currently playing the new version of Leisure Suit Larry, and I anxiously await the release of Wastelands 2. Besides computer games, I do write some apps for iOS and Droid, but I'm usually pretty far behind on those. And there's our garden... We have lovely plants - really, our tomato plants are over five feet tall and no tomatoes! What's with that?
And I read, of course...

Lately I've been grabbing a number of books from Humble Bundle or Story Bundle, but often my brothers will mention someone I need to read. I also belong to Goodreads and pay attention to what other people I know are reading.

Oh, my, yes. It was a short story. I was about six or eight. I wrote a story about the little donkey that Jesus rode into Bethlehem. It's awful, of course, but it was also the first story I ever typed up. Before that one I did write one about three elephants, but I think I just heard that one somewhere...

I have over a dozen stories in progress, mostly because something will happen to me during a day and trigger a story idea. I then write it down and usually a couple pages of dialogue. I almost always have dialogue in my head first. The plots form at once, then coalesce into something a bit more twisted and convoluted as I write the story.
What I need is a bit more discipline to FINISH the stories!

I prefer using Kindle software, and for a while I used one of the first generation Kindle devices. I gave that away when I got my iPad and put the Kindle app on it. I really like using the iPad. Sometimes I'll read on my iPhone - I especially like that the software keeps track of where I am. What a blessing!

I use a portable computer, so I can be sitting anywhere when I'm writing. When I write at my desk, though...

Okay, I'll just confess. My desk is a disaster. There are bits and pieces of notes and paper all over it, and I have maps pasted on the nearby bookshelves so I can refer to them as I write my stories. It's amazing I have room on the thing to write, actually.

I grew up all over the United States. My Dad was a career Navy man, but he was enlisted, so we never moved overseas, but lived in most of the coastal states with military bases. I was a shy kid (still am, actually) so moving was hard for me. I ended up watching people a lot, in a lot of different locales. All the different states - Northern, Southern, East and West - gave me a pretty good ear for how people talk in different areas, but also gave me a pretty good feel for how people are the same everywhere, the common things that bind us all together.

You want the plot of the one I'm working on? I can't tell you, because (of course) there's a twist at the end. A buddy of mine asked me to help develop a computer game. We never did do the game (that's a lot of HARD work) but he got me thinking and I wrote the first two chapters of one story and another chapter of a different story based on the game idea.
In the far future, you're a leonine alien humanoid. Suppose you wake up in a bare, cold room and you don't know who you are or what you're doing there? You escape, and now there are people who want you dead, and others you feel you should help - and you have vague memories that pop up to haunt you. And betrayal lies just around the corner, the same betrayal that captured you in the first place...