Currently, my writing gets me out of bed every day. I get up every morning at 5:00 a.m., make breakfast, eat, sit at my tablet with a heaping cup of tea and get to work. I write best in the mornings when my mind is fresh, and I’m relaxed.

I have the writing style of a pantser, but the plan and goal for a given work have a foundation lying somewhere in my mind. It’s there, I just have to bring it to the surface by crafting my narrative. Concerning my writing environment, I write at my best while out in the world, or alternatively, a location with lots of light. I draw from my experience, thoughts, feelings, and imagination. I have heard that a writer must write of which he knows. That being said, no one knows everything, yet I’ve discovered that one of my greatest joys of writing is learning more about myself and the world around me, so that I may broaden the worlds I create and dig into the depths of human motivations. That’s a never-ending process, and I find new and exciting things to learn about people.

I enjoy creating objects on my computer that have meaning to the story and incorporate them onto the cover. I appreciate book covers more simplistic and iconic in design.

I grew up an outsider in East Tennessee. I still live there, and I remain that outsider. Having been the son of an Army father, I have lived in many places, but primarily in East Tennessee. I’ve had a hard life, there’s no other way to describe it. In my youth, I didn’t understand how difficult I had it. I just took things as they came, but it’s not good for someone to move 52 times in their life. It limits their interpersonal skills and inhibits the establishment of the foundational roots which become something people rely upon as they get older. I suffered as a bullied child, and while we shouldn’t thank your bullies (because they deserve no appreciation or the attention), my collective experiences have made me the person I am today, including those of being bullied. I have a heightened sense of justice and a considerable amount of compassion, and this dramatically influences my writing.

I was 12 years old, and writing interested me a great deal. I have always been someone who tended to live inside himself, and I knew I had a great many thoughts that I wanted to express. It seemed a natural fit for me to write them.

I am working on the sequel to The Journey of Rick Heiden. I expect it to take quite a while. We’ll see how it goes.

We have a market flooded with books and new authors. Professional publishers control their author’s product to a certain extent, especially new ones. They insist you write something marketable. I had no interest in writing for a dictator.

Creation. I love to create, and writing is, in a sense, world building. You are limited only by your imagination.

I don’t measure my creative endeavors on the metric of successes and failures. A writer writes, and Smashwords has allowed me to get my work out into the world, and that allowed me to meet a goal, despite that I didn’t initially have a goal in mind. So, in that sense, I consider Smashwords an excellent site, and I highly recommend it.