Egads. The story behind the book is dull. The story IN the book is awesome.

Try to write 10,000 words a day. Fall a little short. Hope the words are in English. Proof. Publish. Write the next book.

I don't market. Right now, I haven't got the time. My readers want to read more stories, not more marketing, so I have to prioritize that. Maybe when I have a decent number of items available, I'll start to market them. Right now, I've only got 20-some different things, all in different genres. I have very bare shelves to market right now.

Let me fill the shelves first!

When I was small, my grandmother lived just across the apple orchard from my house. Down our lawn and up her lawn, and there was her house. She had an old cistern outside her green mansion, overgrown and covered with a piece of plywood.

The first time I moved that wet wood and peered in, I learned the meaning of the word "dank." I dangled my little Zips down into the darkness, and breathed the choking stench of buried history. Now, it was mostly rotting sticks and broken glass - garbage. But that secret history, that black promise of recovery, was something that stayed with me.

Weird farmboy. That's what you are going to get when you read one of my books. Just rip off the rotten cover and take a look inside. You never know what you might recover. Maybe, if you are lucky, it will be your own soul.

I'm getting better at design. My entire approach to everything I write and design is: cut overhead with man-hours. I price my labor hour at something like $50 right now. Hopefully that goes up as I build inventory, but I'm not going to worry about it until I have at least a hundred novel-length books in print.

In any case: if I can design it myself, proof it myself, have it edited by someone in trade - I will do that. So I keep materials to a minimum. I try to spend less than $15/book on foundational art, and then make a professional design based off that. I have many covers that need updating to my improved methods, but I'll get to that when I get to it. The Prime Directive is: write and publish something new, now.

I love getting to read stories that no one else has discovered yet. The best way to do that is to steal the forbidden books from the heavily guarded catacombs of my own mind.

I'm raiding Pharaoh's tomb with every word.

When I was about 5, I was told Star Wars. No, I didn't see it in the theater first - that wouldn't be for another month or so. No, my sister saw it. She told it to me - the whole movie, characters, roles, action - from start to finish. I was totally captivated. Then I saw the movie and my little brain just exploded like a watermelon stuffed with C-4.

I think I ended up seeing the movie about 8 or 9 times during its first year in the theaters. I have no idea how. We didn't live in town. Maybe we got dropped off for matinees. Whatever, the point is that Star Wars was, first and foremost, a story that was told to me. The opening scroll of the movie only lent weight to this experience. I remember reading as many of the words in that scroll as I could...it starts in the middle of things ("A New Hope - a new one? what was the old one? were there movies before Star Wars?" It is a rare movie that provides a pre-schooler with metapoetics as a lead-in.)

It wasn't long after that experience that I began to write little stories and poems, thwarted only by the limits of vocabulary and a really gnarly pencil sharpener that, on occasion, would obliterate my writing device, rendering it unusable. I was somewhat uncoordinated, so I might have been cranking it with my left hand.

Yes, it was in the sixth grade - it was a short story about a man condemned to die who survives execution and walks free. It was the best short story ever written. It is now kept in a subterranean vault in Quantico, Virginia, for national security purposes.

Bonus - the first poem I ever wrote was in the 1st grade:

I love my kitty very much
I love to cuddle him
But when I squeeze him very tight
He grows very slim

Just like the plaid cowboy shirt and red corduroys I likely wore as I drafted that epic, what I lacked in style, I made up for in brute force. It is likely my core ethic as an author today.

How hasn't it contributed? Smashwords allows my publisher, Eortholic Press, to make my stories available to all readers in as many electronic formats as possible.

A core to my business as a storyseller is to make sure that I never have a single potential reader who would have bought my book but is unable to because it isn't available in their region or compatible with their preferred method of reading it.

That's also why I make sure that my digital books are available, in some format, in print as well. My madness and sense of adventure may not be contagious...but it is, above all things, inclusive. I don't want to be the guy who makes you fill out a waiver to have fun. If you want my book, I want you to have it, however you want it.

Smashwords operates that way - a chicken in every pot that wants a chicken. Now, i can't possibly speak for pots, and Smashwords doesn't even try. Together, we just provide the world's widest chicken distribution method possible - circling the globe, pouring chickens out of the back of a supersonic jet, so that any pot, anywhere, can turn from its life of toiling and boiling and clanging, and accept into its loving confines, a nice plump chicken.

Or ham, for those pots that are chicken intolerant.

This is a massive question. Because I try to write about six novel-lengthed works a year - in different genres and sometimes under different names, the straight answer is...

I don't remember.

If you look at what I've published so far, you will find hard science fiction, murder mystery, thriller, ghost stories, historical fiction, alternate history, and fantasy. Expect more of the same.

Probably my most accessible work for the widest audience is Dead Vault, an Arclight Adams Thriller. It is about a broke guy who goes looking for an old missing school teacher. My most popular book right now is Tales of the Haunted Titanic - which is a collection of historical ghost stories, set on the ill-fated ship. Every time a special about the ship airs, that one sells.