My coworkers. Who doesn’t want to share their work hours with sorcerers, train pirates, rebellious clones, devious artificial intelligences and world-renowned thieves?

As trite an answer as it may be, I write. For me, writer’s block is a mental distraction when your mind is trying to simultaneously edit while writing. I’ve found that I have to ignore the question of how good my writing is on a first draft and simply focus on completing my story. Even if I hit a section that isn’t working, I keep going. An unfinished story is useless. A badly written story, however, is fixable.

The Clockwork Caterpillar was inspired by the curious enthusiasm of a close friend when she was perusing the exhibit of trains at the Canada Museum of Science and Technology. Her visible glee as she climbed over the massive engines and inspected each nook and cranny made me consider just how strange and wonderful these machines must have been when they were first invented. Perhaps some people wouldn’t find the cramped cabins confining but liberating. The romanticism of the Golden Age of Piracy was an easy analog and my mind began racing to create a world that could justify as silly a concept as train pirates. The rest simply fell into place.

Several projects, actually. I’m writing the Red Sabre Saga which follows a crew of steampunk train pirates along a New World frontier. I also have several science fiction novels in the works looking at upcoming tech developments and the potential for them to completely change the face of society.