Writing…mostly. Ponies (I really like ponies), birds (my home is a sanctuary), coffee though my doc tells me to lighten up, bad weather (my day will start in the middle of the night if it's crazy enough!), my husband (that is a dance I cannot even come CLOSE to describing) and YOU! I am eternally infatuated with the human spirit. You are terrible, broken, unorthodox, brilliant, corrupt, divine, and the BEST reason why I believe the world must go on. I love you.)

Messing with my pony. It is wonderful, dirty, slobbery, happy time! Oh, and hanging with Daryl (my husband). We are like peas and carrots. He calls me Birdy (says I look like I'm riding a chicken cuz of my legs…really skinny and really long). Oh, and my kids; I have three grown boys who all live in Spokane. I'm a sucker for long walks, love to sit at the kitchen bar and jabber while Daryl cooks (He does all the cooking), and am obsessed with my birds, making sure the feeders and homes are just right. Daryl calls them "Fat little cows" cuz they'll jump in a feeder and toss seeds out like, "I'm so rich, I can fling food!" He's been know to stand at the kitchen sink with a cup of coffee in hand and mumble, "Look at those (insert expletive here) fat little cows."

Sadly, reading is a guilty pleasure for me. When I read, I start to write like the author I am reading, which makes my writing time a complete waste. So, I read very little, other than the classics. The few ebooks I read are generally gifted to me by other authors. I'll seldom venture beyond and always wonder about those other books people talk about. But on vacation, I will binge!

Uhm…I remember submitting TONS of short stories to The National Enquirer. They never accepted a single one (whew!) I can't specifically remember them, but they were probably about horses and cowboys or some such nonsense. I do still have a poem I wrote in fourth grade called, "How I became an Alcoholic." I landed my folks a call by CPS, but it's really pretty good!

I get up, make the bed and arrange the menagerie (significant lovies I've accumulated over time). Then I make a coffee, feed my fish, and head to the studio (upstairs in my house). Then it's simple. Disable everything on my laptop that might disturb me, sit down, and let the movie pour out of my head onto the page. I'm a pantser. Not even that, I'm a stenographer. I simply take dictation as the story unfolds itself.

I remember reading Black Beauty when I was about eight years old. It affected me in many ways, not just because it was about a horse. (I was a horse nut even back then.) As a matter of fact, it's like saying Moby Dick is about a whale. I think Black Beauty began my love affair with humanity. How can we be so many things?

I have consigned covers by 99designs very successfully. I also spend a lot of time on deviantart.com looking for artworks/artists I like. I also have made a few really good graphic design artists friends over time. I am the worst about my covers, never really happy with them. ("It's me, not you," she says to her artists.)

I don't have five favorite books. It is like asking me to pick a favorite color horse. A great book is like a great horse, because of what it at the heart of it, and there are MANY great horses. I will say I am totally blown away by the fact that Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein (that's right folks, no laptops back then) when she was eighteen years old. The maturity of that is flat amazing.

Anything. I'll go hard Sci-Fi (think Asimov), adventure, thriller, romance (although the seriously harlequin feels somewhat redundant to me). I love dark humor, horror (yeah, I've read every overly descriptive paragraph Stephen King has ever written) and graphic comics. Don't really read erotica because I don't need to.

Hmmm… any that works and doesn't hurt my eyes. I write on a MAC, and so STRONGLY prefer to hold an actual book when I read for pleasure.

That is the million dollar question. Be real, be sincere, don't try too hard to go to your readers. Write well and your readers will come to you.

Oh, wow. Okay…Bose mini system, three orchids (one of them blooming), three stacks of books that support several pieces of art and photos, refillable bottle of water, two glass candlesticks (I don't know why), a daily bird calendar several years old that I still flip through just for the images, a small stick iron sculpture of a man holding a crystal ball that one of my sons made when he was in middle school, a box of Kleenex because, yes, I do make myself cry, and a stale, empty coffee cup. Oh, and a candle that I light when I've had black beans for lunch, not because I'm a sap.

I grew up all over the United States. Born in New York, raised in New York, Pennsylvania, Mississippi (during integration), Texas, Idaho, Washington. I think it made me well rounded in my belief system of the human condition. I don't think it was the areas so much as the people I met along the way who influenced my writing.