I do remember the first story I wrote because my mother had it up on the fridge with a magnet for years and she still has a copy of it. Don't laugh! It was called "The Witch and the Bunny," but I hadn't learned to spell yet because I had basically taught myself to write by sounding out words. So it reads "The Wich and the Bune." It was illustrated and and folded the paper over and wrote "Th end" on the back. I was four.

When I write a short story I just sit down with the blank page and let inspiration flow: it just takes one little nugget of a feeling or an image to build an entire story. With a novel it's a bit more involved, but honestly every one has been different. Some series I do a lot of planning of plot points and arcs beforehand, others all the prep is in the worldbuilding and characters but I don't actually write out any of the plot. I've written over twenty novels now and each one has unique demands. As I often say, I know how to write a book, but each time I start anew, I have to learn how to write THAT book.

You have to go all the way back to Dr. Seuss for that. I remember being so intrigued by The Cat in the Hat and also The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. I thought there was more going on there than I understood. The first things I bought with my own money to read for myself, though, were comic books. Wonder Woman, Superboy and the Legion of the Super Heroes, and Superman Family were my favorites. I read them over and over again. I loved stories that were different from the real world in some way or that showed a side of things I didn't know about. That continues on into "real" books like Madeline L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME and Ray Bradbury's MARTIAN CHRONICLES. Bradbury's stories like "All Summer in a Day" and "The Veldt" cemented my early conviction that I was a writer and would someday be published, too.

For pleasure I try to read outside of the genres I write in. If I read an erotic romance or a paranormal, it's "work." So I read stuff like YA fantasy, which is so very different from what I write, and autobiographies of interesting people. Of course sometimes the autobiographies end up being research--like all the memoirs I've read by US Navy SEALs, as well as all the rock stars. Lots of rock stars in my books!

I read on my phone. It's always with me!

I was born in New York City and grew up in and around the city in the 1970s and '80s. This may be why I write urban fantasy and not small town romance! I grew up thinking every place was like Sesame Street and the Starship Enterprise, where people of all races and colors and ethnicities were all mixed together as normal. I think maybe I've always written what's now called "diverse" casts because to me that is just normal. Having everyone be white and straight feels very, very artificial to me.

I have published with every level of publisher, from the Big 5 to the cutting edge niche publishers to self-publishing, and I always have. I self-published my first book in 1992, and my first book with a big 5 publisher in 1998, and I've continued to sell different projects in different ways all along. At first I didn't want to self-publish, but it was better to self-publish the material that publishers would not touch than it was to try to write something "mainstream." When I was a young writer, if instead of self-publishing books like Telepaths Don't Need Safewords I had tried to chase after what publishers "wanted," I would not still be writing today. I would have burned out and probably given up. Instead, I found my own audience and proved that there was a readership for me, for BDSM, for erotica, and for erotic science fiction back when no publisher would touch it. Here we are over 25 years later and the world has finally caught up with me. So now I have some projects that are right for big publishers, some that are right for small publishers, and there are still some I indie publish for myself. Now I save those projects for the ones where I want complete control and don't want to compromise.

There's nothing like feeling a story come to life. You remember the old TV show, "The A Team," and at some point in every episode their leader would say "I love it when a plan comes together!" That's me while writing every book. It always seems like it's all going to fall apart of it's never going to be finished... and then you realize that the pieces are falling into place. Nothing feels better. Although sex is a close second.

My fans are everything. Without them I'm just shouting into the void. One of the best things about self-publishing is it has meant making connections with fans that I wouldn't have in the traditional publishing process. Like when I publish a serial online and the fans comment and build a community around it. That just wouldn't happen with a traditionally published novel.

When I'm not writing, you'll find me either eating in the best restaurant I can find or asleep. Eating and sleeping are underrated activities, and I am a champion of both.

My time is being split this year between two big projects, one that is ending, and one that is launching. I'm in the midst of writing what will be the final arc of Daron's Guitar Chronicles, a book series I originally launched here at Smashwords in 2009. The serial has been running for almost ten years! So there are a lot of threads to tie up in that one. The other one, the thing that is just starting, is The Vanished Chronicles. These books will be urban fantasy with sex magic and ritual BDSM instead of vampires. Book 1 is done but we're not going to launch until I have a full draft of book 2 to make sure we keep up the momentum. It's exciting.