I grew out of my childhood, but not necessarily "up", in rural Pennsylvania, Amish country to be specific. Being around earthy, sincere and very 'religious' people would later influence many of my stories and characters.

I've been writing since at least the age of ten, beginning with silly poems and unnecessarily long essays for homework.

Live Your Life In A Crap Free Zone was borne of realization that nearly everything that makes up our lives is the direct result of choices made by us. I originally wrote half of it as a humorous, dry wit look at life, mine in particular. A friend suggested I enter the manuscript in a 'contest', whereupon I found that I had to write nearly twice as many words as I had already written. (They wanted a minimum of 50,000 words, I had 28,000.) Thus the book came to fruition.

The simple fact that we are in an industry where one person, (an agent), who might be having a bad day after a fight with his wife, had the power to take years of your work and summarily throw it in the trash without so much as a first look. The Indie author is an empowered person, able, to some extent, to control their own actions and destiny in the pursuit of their dreams and goals.

Smashwords was a huge factor in the launch of my Indie career as it simplified, to a great extent, the process of publication and distribution to many outlets.

Having someone else read it, enjoy it or have it affect their life and outlook in some way.

I have two 'works in progress' at the moment, which I have never done before. Playing With Matches is a novel I started based on a man's complete frustration and hopelessness with single life and his attempts to better the situation through on-line match-making sites. My other WIP is titled 5:23. It is about a man who discovers how easy it is to cause widespread chaos, confusion and panic in an effort to wake people up to the path that current society is traveling.

Ray Bradbury, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, David Baldacci, Bruce Catton, Larry McMurtry

Life

Trying to make a living.

Yes, the first story I ever wrote was in the form of a humorous poem based on a dream I had about bedbugs and cockroaches playing baseball on the wall of my bedroom.

The process is to write whenever I am able and for as long as I am able. It is productive to know when the 'writer' in me should sit down and write or get up and go do something else. I never have writer's block; I simply know when it is time to write and when 'stuff' is ready to pour out of my fingertips.

I remember reading the Tarzan series from Edgar Rice Burroughs as a child and realizing that a writer could easily put you in a completely different world than the one you are accustomed to on a daily basis.

The same way I approach my nature photography, I already have the design in my head before I write the book.

Civil War history and great fiction.

My desk looks like a ten megaton bomb went off on it and I hired a maid at seventy nine cents an hour to 'clean it up'.