Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anne Rice, Isabel Allende, Janet Evanovich, just to mention a few...

The adult answer would be "money." The writer's answer is creativity. Every other minute of my waking hours my brain is bombarded with snippets of stories to come, or for those I'm currently working on; thus, I have to get out of bed to put those ideas on paper (or some other media —sometimes I text them to myself) before they flee to never come back. Age, baby. It's a real thing.

I watch TV a lot. I re-watch my favorite movies a lot too. I love to revisit things I love; thus, the usually full DVR and extensive DVDs and Blu-rays.
I have a Kindle and a Nook, but I still love the feeling of a paperback any day 'cause I abundantly read too hahahaha.

I don't do hype. I like very specific genres, and I try to stick with them. Now and then, I'd learn about a movie or a TV show based on a book and look for the book. But the thing I always do before choosing any eBook to read— is go to the reviews and check the one-stars. It's incredible the amount of information you could get there. When you really want to know if any book is good or not, find out why people didn't like it first. Many times, what others didn't like it's exactly what will make you want to read it (or not).

I don't know if it is a real thing or not because I came to the United States of America as an adult, but I've seen in movies children, in school, doing essays about their vacations; we didn't do that in Panama when I was of school age. Incidentally, my oldest memory of something I wrote is of a very special vacation I had away from my parents when I was about 15 years old. I'm not sure what propelled me to write about it, but it was kind of a break through, both for my writing in general, and for my specific genre. *wink*

I cannot call myself methodical, but I have some sort of structure to my writing process. Even though I don't have that thing others call "a method to their madness."

First of all, I need to have the title of the work. I know of writers who find their titles at the end or during the middle of the process, but if I don't have an actual final title the story doesn't flow for me. I go to my "Book of Titles" (interesting words or phrases I write down for later use) and choose one; story flows like a river afterward. The tittle might not be the trigger (although sometimes it is), but it is totally the bullet.

The ideas usually come as a scene (usually a dialog) for the story, and the whole thing is developed from there. I use the Three Act Structure as outline, and I work with a preliminary word count, between the three acts. This is my way to have an idea of what's going to happen in each chapter and how many words I can put there. This, of course, is not set in stone, but I like to have cohesion between my chapters; I don't see a reason to have a 1K chapter followed by a 3K chapter.

Even if my writing process appears linear, it's not truly so, because I can have a flash of a situation or a dialog happening in chapter 10 while I'm writing chapter 4, but it's precisely because I already have an idea of what should be happening by the time my characters reach chapter 10.

I also do characters' profiles, like DOBs, zodiac signs, and physical characteristics to know what sort of people they are, at least esoterically on paper. I've seen stories where characters have blue eyes in one chapter and brown three chapters later. That (to me) is shameful, and I think it's because the writer didn't take the time to write down what the character looked like in the first place to keep his features together. Preparation is everything.

Technology has given us the opportunity to share our stories with the world at large.

If people can air their dirty laundry on Social Media 24/7, why not put something worthy out there?

Well, I write about hot men doing hot things romantically. I have a 3D program, and I create the characters I'm going to write about as soon as I have an idea of what they should look like. After that, it's basically deciding their interaction on the cover. It isn't just about looking pretty, but what sort of emotion the cover should convey about the story.

Once I have that image (you know filtered, brightened, resized, etc.), I search for the right font and how it looks from afar and near because the cover is going to be in a little biddy square most of the times, and I like the title to be visible and clear always.

It's the love child of a three-way between a college student's desk, a Call Center cubicle, and a lunch box.

Panama (the Central America country) is a tropical crossroads, a melting pot of cultures. You can have your breakfast by the Atlantic Ocean, your lunch admiring the Pacific Ocean, and spend your night in a tropical jungle or a cold mountain. It's a place of contrast and contradiction, like all Latin-American countries, but perhaps a little more because we are festive people, who would fight dictatorship brandishing white handkerchiefs and striking pans like gongs. A Panamanian inside joke is that if we ever truly had a war, it would be only during weekdays and just from 9 to 5, because weekends are sacred, and the night is either to sleep or party.

I feel the biggest influence this has on my writing is the mixture of genres, the contradicting backgrounds of my characters, the lazy sensuality with which the face their love dilemmas. You can't be hasty in a tropical place, you sweat. You only need to be sweating while you're making love, not before or after...

When a reader choose one of my stories, even if it is out of their comfort zone, and it pays off.
It's always awesome when someone enjoys your work, but it's special in a very humbling way when they chance it and end up happy about it.