My first story was a novel by Ben Bova called "Mars". It had been left behind by one of my step mothers but was useless to my father because he was illiterate. English was not my first language and I didn't learn to speak it correctly until I was about eleven but I've been able to read English for as long as I can remember. I was probably about six or seven when I read "Mars" and it made me fall in love with the red planet and science and the Hopi people of North America. Even now when I don't currently have a copy of the book in my home, I have a big map of Mars on my wall and I know where Jamie Fox Waterman landed. If a film or a book has Mars in it, I've seen it or read it.

One thing about the book that always stuck with me was the kinky sex subplot but later scifi like "Rendezvous with Rama" showed me that this was not completely isolated to "Mars". I also read how other writers would go through long tortured loops to avoid spelling out a sex scene but I didn't see the big deal if it was actually part of the plot. Where trashy romance novels are basically just porn, "Mars" offered a more sophisticated take that was about more than just describing body parts and sexual positions. Romance novels are bit like the old comic books from the silver age, where a hero was basically a power drawn in human form but without an independent character. Change the name, change the backstory and nothing really changed at all with the comic because it was never about the character, just what they could do. Compare that to comics from the 180's and you see that they can make a comic work even with a character with no powers because it was about the character, their hopes and dreams, what they thought, how they felt, and where they drew the line.

I will always be thankful for that little book from the science fiction book club that got me into reading. It helped me answer a question about scurvy when I was in second grade. It helped me know that space is really big. It helped me know that the weird red star that keeps moving around in the sky is an actual place that maybe we'll go visit one day.

The first step is to not write a thing. I actively avoid the keyboard while the story is trying to draft itself in my head. Random thoughts that are unrelated get linked together while I'm driving or riding the train. A wisp of a premise emerges and then of course characters are born. Sometime my plot requires that the characters do or say certain things but as the story develops in my head my characters do not always comply with what I want as if they had a mind of their own. Once I have a strong idea of who the characters are, they start to talk to each other in my brain while I'm doing other things. There are also the odd occasions when I make sure no one is around and I go full rakugo mode and start to act out the various characters and their interactions. I often do that in the shower actually.

Once the story is something that I want to tell, THEN I sit down at the keyboard and just let it flow out of me. I've been a touch type since I was in middle school and my job requires that I do a lot of writing so I can easily punch out about 10,000 words a day. Most of my stories I finish in one sitting.

I usually don't do much editing once the story is written but sometimes I cut things out or add a line I think I need here or there. The major thing that happens after I write the story is I have to proofread. I'm still not the best at that as I've memorized the story so well, my brain fills in what should be there and ignores what my eyes actually see. To compensate for that, I use Text To Speech and have the computer or my phone read the story to me. Even then, I don't catch everything but I'm working on it.

A lot of people write to me asking why I haven't made a part two or a part three of a series. Sequels are both an easy thing and a hard thing to do. I often feel that the premise of the story is finished. Sure, I might have created some characters that people like and want to see more of but in my head they lose their energy until I find a new premise that they would want to explore. A lot of my characters are very stubborn. I have often written more to a story and found that while the series is very nice in itself, nothing afterwards matches the initial premise in tone or quality and if I do anything, I really want to create nice stories that people really want to read.

I have no money to hire professional people to do my covers so I've used two strategies. One is to use 3dhome software to create a 3d image and then use Gimp to add the other elements I need. I liked the end result but that process was time consuming. The next method and the one I still currently use is to use LibreOffice Draw. I use fontworks to do the title and change the background on the page. I use freely usable clip art to add images if there are any to add. I want to give a hint about what's in the book and set a certain mood.

I'm often jealous of the covers on other books and maybe one day I'll get there.

In no specific order. I'll assume books here refers to fictional novels as my favorite non fiction books and my favorite plays would all be lists in and of themselves.

Tobit: This book is awesome. A demon is murdering every man that a particular woman marries but she is so pretty that even when the men know what will happen, they are lined up to marry her anyway. Our hero Tobit shows up with his buddy Raphael, who is an angel in disguise, and a wild battle ensues as they have an epic battle and then chase the demon from roof top to roof top all over the city until ... Seriously, why has this not been made into a movie?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Mostly Harmless. Nuff said.

Ender's Game: You thought it was a simulation but in fact you just committed ge.... SPOILERS!

Mars: Years before "The Martian" we had Waterman.

Pride and Prejudice: Poor Mary. She goes through that whole book being ignored, even by the writer.

For pleasure I find I read a lot of different things from academic journals to Grimm's fairy tales. I read and write so much I sometimes can't keep it straight what I'm reading for pleasure and what for work. Whatever I read, I'm always looking for quality. "Pride and Prejudice" was a wonderful book. "Emma" was garbage and I don't recommend it to anyone. (Seriously, Emma acts likes like she's 9 years old and then she marries a guy who 40. NOT COOL Austin. NOT COOL!)

I often find myself drawn to works from Britain or translations of works made by British translators. I love witty expressions, come backs, double meanings. Even in darker books like those of Shelley, there's a certain flow to the language that North American writers don't match. Ellison's "Invisible Man" for as good as it is, just jerks around, starting and stopping and never really building up to a payoff. Even Steven King can't seem to get the hang of letting a narrative swell and then burst. I blame Hawthorne.

So when I really just want to read and let my eyes enjoy the unadulterated words on the page, British English like that of Austin, Shakespeare, Shelley, and even more recent writers like Chesterton and Arthur C. Clarke; is what I'll go for. Japanese and Chinese literature often just wants to drag things out for too long past the point of caring and my beloved Ancient Latin is often just too blunt to sink your teeth into it. British English for the win, even though I've never been there and I'm very distrustful of most British people I meet. Weird.

For Ebooks, I use my computer or my phone. I can't stand using a browser to read a book so I'll use an epub app. I often listen to books using TTS while I'm driving, though if the epub hasn't been well made, that can be a jarring experience. I often wish I had the money to buy something like a Kindle Whitepaper but I don't so I wear yellow tinted glasses to protect my eyes from blue light.

As for marketing, I fully admit, I'm not very good at it. I started out just posting my stories for free on Literotica. Then I learned how to make an ebook and I tried several different ebook sites but I coudln't find success because I didn't know what I was doing. Now I've found Smashwords and I'm trying to learn what to do so that people would want to read my books can find them.

My desk is all wood and was built using traditional woodworking methods with no glue, nails or screws. On my desk I have books, a cup full of various keys, cups full of pens, and various electronics I'm working on. There are also candles which I light sometimes for religious reasons or just to warm my hands on cold nights when I can't pull myself away from the keyboard until the story is finished. I never met my mother but I have this little ceramic thing she made for me before I was born that I imagine looks like the tower of babel.

I grew up in poverty in the bible belt. We often had to move around, sometimes with no notice and there were many times when we lived in a car or a place with no electricity or other utilities. I learned to change my accent to match the people around me since southerners are very sensitive to accent and they'll quickly decide to trust you or dislike you based on what you sound like. (And look like but we're trying to get over that. Honest. Believe me. ... Ok, your'e right. We could try a little harder but if we have to do it, you northerners have to stop being racist too. Nah, don't look at me like that. You know what you did.) I'm one of those people who can pass for white from a distance but if you come up close you might notice that no, I'm not actually white and English was not my first language.

Growing up this way caused me to be a reader. The tv can't run on batteries but the radio did and I used to listen to radio dramas that were broadcast and imagine the stories happening in my head. Another thing I would do is read by candlelight since candles were cheap (or easily stolen. Sorry.) If I didn't have anything else, I would strain my eyes to see the words on the page by moonlight. Even if it wasn't English or my native language, I'd still be there looking over the letters and trying to work it out. I got my first taste of Latin this way, and then Ancient Slavic. I started to pick up Japanese and eventually Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. All from books I had no business knowing how to read in the first place. I had no toys besides sticks so books from the library were my playtime.

I had to grow up pretty fast. As a young child I carried a gun and knife almost all the time. I knew where to go fishing, hunting, which birds to shoot and which to leave alone. Oh, the little wild animal is just so cute? Sorry, I'm hungry and it's food. Besides that, violence was a constant part of life. I saw all of the worst that humanity had to offer and it happened so often that nothing was shocking, just sad and depressing again. Often I couldn't even find it in myself to ask the question why. There was no why. It just was. Robberies, shootings, rapes, running people over with a car, even just everyone always lying about every last thing even when telling the truth would have just been easier.

I spent my teenage years as a ward of the state. After everything I'd survived before this, being in foster care was what actually shocked me. Well meaning people treating me like a kid and telling me I wasn't old enough to hear or know about certain things shocked me. Foster parents who would invite me into their homes but then tire of me and send me back to the orphanage because I preferred to read instead of be a playmate or pseudo sibling for their other children shocked me. The fact that the government was all but demanding that I be a certain religion shocked me.

But for all the anger I have about aspects of the foster care system, I know I never would have finished high school, gone to college, or learned music if not for entering care. It did take a long time to acclimatize to the idea that when someone had a hand stretched out to me, it wasn't to strike me. Rules about turning lights off existed because in the morning they would still work. You don't have to plan what you're going to eat three or four days in advance because you now no longer had any choice at all what you would eat.

That all was probably more childhood back story than anyone wanted but believe me, I could have kept going and going and going so I'll consider the length I've already written a compromise. So how has that influence my writing? Not sure. I only know how to write what I write. I never knew my mother so my main characters often don't know their mothers or grew up in orphanages. That's what I know and when I try to write a real family relationship, I'm often just giving my interpretation of what I saw when I bounced from foster home to foster home. Besides that, I can remember the culture shock. I can remember what it was like to shoot a gun. I can remember being in real life danger and then needing to think my way out. I remember the urgency, panic, hunger of my childhood and I used that give characters motivation to press on. The daily struggle to just get enough to eat is nothing for people today but I remember how it was an epic adventure to just go ten miles down a forest path in search of game because there was no food and I needed to make a kill. I can remember all the hypocrisy of the social workers and the rage I felt when they looked at me like I was too young, too stupid, or too uneducated to know what they were talking about and then they'd call me too smart for my own good when I demonstrated they were wrong.

So now I'm an adult and I write with all of this flowing out of me. I already feel like an old man who just wants peace and quiet and no more negativity in my life.

I wrote my first story in second grade. It was a story about local 'people' being cared by some alien craft that lands nearby. They're scared of the aliens. They don't know what the aliens are doing. They can't communicate with the aliens. They don't understand how the technology the aliens have works. Everyone is kicked up into a frenzy and they go to kill off and rid themselves of these invaders. They think they get all the aliens but actually they missed on. When that alien sees what happened to his friends, he goes full Rambo mode and wipes out the locals that attacked. The twist at the end is that the 'aliens' were actually human explorers and the 'locals' were another species on another planet.

The story behind my most recent book? Do you mean the premise or how I got the idea?

I'll assume you want to know how I got the idea. Well, I was binge watching an old tv show and I saw an episode that I didn't like the conclusion to. I felt it could have been done better. So I took the setting, created some new characters to put into that setting, created the situation but because I set it up differently, it played out differently and I got much closer to the conclusion I wanted.

I have stories in my head that are all but demanding I write them down. I write primarily for my own enjoyment and satisfaction but if others enjoy my work I'm happy to share. When I think of an indie author, I think of someone who's actually trying to sell a lot of book and make some serious money and that just isn't me yet.

I'm allowed to publish more of my stories on Smashwords than other ebook sites so in turn I sell more book here than on other sites.

Every story starts out as something that is in me that wants to come out. There is great joy just in that process. I never have the reaction in mind when I'm writing. I just assumed most people would not like my work and that was fine with me. But then some people did like my work and that is immensely rewarding.

I get a lot of letters from readers and I read all of it. I often fell like I want come out of the shadows and have a closer connect to my fans but due to the kind of stories I write, that's not possible. Still, my stories help me and I'm very happy that some people out there enjoy what I write. I might not be feeling the heart of a story and it's not coming together but then I'll get an email from a fan and it motivates me to go back into that world of the story and let it play out so I can type it up and deliver.

My next story is a rewrite of an old story I lost. I can still remember the story so I typed it up again. After that I have a story about World War II and then I have future dystopia.

Austin
Shakespeare
Shelley
Plutarch
All my fellow writers on Literotica

I wasn't supposed to live to see 20 and now I'm over 20 so I've won. Why wouldn't I get out of bed? I've won.

Well, if you count thinking up a story, I'm literally always writing. If you don't count that, or working, or reading, then I'm usually making something with my hands. I do like the odd video game every now and then but I'll often be cutting wood or fitting pieces of a computer together.

As for ebooks, I'll hear about it somewhere else and specifically go looking for that book. I usually don't browse ebooks.

Yes. It was about this group of local people who see an alien ... I've answered this before I think.

Yes. It was about this group of local people who see an alien ... I've answered this before I think.