No. Definitely not. I know maybe eight people on a really close basis, which includes the five people in my immediate family. If I only based my characters on real life people, I'd have to recycle the same eight, and they wouldn't be interesting at all. I create characters based on who I would like to know in real life but don't have the cojones to ever seek out.

My bladder does a pretty good job of it.

Drawing, sleeping, cooking, and cruising the internet about nothing important.

I was eight years old and in third grade. I had watched the cartoon Mighty Ducks and because I grew up on Power Rangers, I liked the idea of a group of people fighting evil. This was how I came up with Lost Stars, a story that's still in the works today. Granted, it doesn't have five girls changing into cat people and fighting an evil dog alien on the moon, but the five girls remain, and it's what sparked my love of writing.

I don't have one. As much as I'd love to say I visit an old Guatemalan village to sip coffee made of a rare bean harvested high in the mountains, I mostly just sit down at my computer when I'm in the mood and write. I think a lot of authors overexaggerate how difficult it is, maybe to keep out the competition, ha.

I have been blessed with an artistic ability, so I've been able to make my own cover designs. What I really dislike about romance is all the terrible cliché covers of half naked people embracing. Considering that nearly every other cover looks just like that, it's important to stand out without making the cover look lame. Because I'm cheap, I try to avoid using stock photography, and I think people are much more drawn to actual art than they are stock photography anyway. With Until It Hurts, I had to combine several elements: BDSM, drag queens, Grindr, and tech. How to fit that onto one cover? The good news is, I avoided having to depict half naked people, so I consider it a success in that regard.

I grew up on a farm in Pennsyltucky, which influenced in both negative and positive ways. Positive in that I had access to animals growing up, and these days when I write fantasy, I'm better able to know what kind of injury might make a horse lame, or what kind of tack they might have. Also, because I was in the middle of nowhere, I didn't have many friends beyond the animals, so I wrote in order to create my own friends.

It affected me negatively in that I was very different from the kids I grew up around. My dad is a professor, my mother a Spanish teacher who travels extensively. Many of the kids I grew up around have never left the state. Racism, sexism, and homophobia ran rampant, which has encouraged me over the years to have vastly diverse casts that strive to represent everyone.

Junk. Junk everywhere. I even did an art project in college of the junk on my desk. It is legendary.

Usually when I start a book, I start with several core ideas and then try to make them fit. There is a huge void in the mxm genre when it comes to power bottoms, and for me this ties into sexism-- how everyone assumes that the bottom (often coded as female) must be deferential and submissive to the top (often coded as male). I wanted to flip this script and show someone who could be feminine and a bottom while also being extremely dominant. I also wanted to reject the stereotype of Asian men as hyperfeminine and Latino men as hypermasculine. This is what I set out to do with Until It Hurts, while adding other elements in, such as an estranged ex, drug dealers, abuse, etc.

I live a pretty dull life, and lately it's been sucky. I am thankful every day that I have my writing and my characters to fall back on. Every time I feel myself sliding down that sad slope into mental anguish, I can switch my brain over to the fantasy world, where every problem is fixable and controllable. The characters are always interesting, and more often than not they're clever, kind, compassionate, and accepting, even if they're flawed in their own ways.

I always have a few ideas in the works. Right now I have two main stories I've been mulling over, one called "Wanagi" and another "May the Blood Run Pure". They're vastly different from one another. "Wanagi" is about a medium who travels to South Dakota to "despook" a lady's haunted house, only to find out about its terrible history involving a serial killer and the multiple women he victimized. It's set on the edge of the Rosebud Lakota/Sioux Reservation, so there are a lot of themes revolving around Lakota culture. It blended well, because the Lakota have a rich tradition of telling stories, many of them involving ghosts.

May the Blood Run Pure is a fantasy story about a demoralized slave named "Nothing" who finds himself a captive of cannibalistic warlords. That... about sums it up, really.