If I'm not reading, looking up some random thing I'm curious about online, or trying to keep my cats from destroying the house, I'm playing fetch with my dog.

Frequently they're books I've had on my "To Read" list for ages that I'm just now getting around to buying, but sometimes I just start perusing genres I'm interested in and find something that really gets my attention.

According to my mother, I've been telling my own versions of things like Three Little Pigs since I was a toddler. The first time I remember WRITING a story, however, was in third grade when we had to do an assignment where we started with something that had really happened to us and then added to it. I wrote about trick or treating and . . . I forget what I had happen, I think we got attacked by a monster and had to run away or something.

1) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott -- I find new applicable life lessons in this book every time I read it, and I find Jo and Professor Bhaer's relationship one of the best love stories of all time.
2) These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder -- I like all the books in this series, but Laura and Almanzo's love story touches me every time I read it.
3) The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien -- It was the first fantasy novel I read and is still the best.
4) Imzadi by Peter David -- Look, Riker is willing to risk negating the existence of the timeline he's from to save the woman he loves. Can you get more romantic than that?
5) Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery -- Anne and I have far too much in common.

iPad

The latest published (Crown of Eldrete): I had a dream or daydream, I forget which, that was the first few scenes, and I just had to write to find out what was going on.

The one I'm currently most seriously working on (tentatively titled No More Lies): I had the first paragraph in my head out of the blue one day years ago, wrote it down, and then spent quite a while trying to figure out what the heck it had to do with anything. Then I started writing it intending it to be a 3,000 word story for an anthology thingy I was working on at the time, since abandoned. It wouldn't quit growing, so now I'm aiming for novel length.

I've always wanted to be an author; I went the indie route for two reasons: 1) I'm a control freak and the thought of not having total control over rights and such bothered me a lot, and 2) Hardly anyone is publishing space opera novellas these days.

Finding out what happens next. I'm not a planning sort of author, so I rarely have much more clue than the reader what the characters are about to do next until I get there.

Panic. I can never find images that are quite what I want and can't afford to commission ones that are, mostly because I'm insanely picky about art.

I have approximately 19 works-in-progress right now. Seventeen of them are in the same setting, Universal Nexus. One is a superhero story. One is a fantasy quest.