I was born in Brooklyn, NY and raised on the other side of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in Staten Island. SI is more diverse today but even when I went to high school I had friends who were Italian, Irish, Polish, Russian, Norwegians, Germans, Swedes, Syria, Greek, Korean, and elsewhere. There were Catholics and Jews and Protestants, Whites, Latinos, African-Americans, a few Asians, Arabs. In other words people with roots from all over. I started studying Spanish in middle school and continued in high school where I met the teacher who really expanded my horizons and world view, Eleanor Rosenbaum. She was born in India to German-Jewish refugees who fled the Nazis during WWII. She was my Spanish teacher and my German teacher. I also took Italian (different teacher). I also grew up in a family that was more Irish that anything else, we even had a NYPD cop in the family. We're also an extended family where I have relatives who are at least part Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, German, Italian, African-American, Armenian and Dutch. And then there was the military factor. Almost all my aunts and uncles were in one service or another, and both my mother and father were in the Navy. After college I joined the navy as a supply corps officer (Logistics). Oh, and I spend a semester at a satellite campus in Austria and traveled all over Europe. In the navy I got to go 20+ more countries on 6 continents.
So the result of all that is that to me having an international group of characters in my books is not simply something to make the story more interesting to a wider audience but a natural inclination to recognize the courage and fears and the strengths and weaknesses of people from all over including some who we may consider adversaries today but may be close allies someday in the not too distant future.

About six years ago. I wrote a few stories, more as practice and an experiment to see if I could do it. I never finished them but I learned a lot from them. I began working on the current series of books about five years ago, at first just working out the basic plot and story lines in my head.

So far I've finished the first eleven books in the series, they'll be 18 altogether. I'm working on books 12-18 right now. There are so many interconnections that I can't just work on one at a time. Sometimes I'll works on scenes for later books and these help determine what needs to happen in earlier books. This is the story of an alien invasion of Earth's first colony on another planet. The time is a little more than 100 years in the future when new technologies and discoveries become everyday facts of life but many of the same problems and problem areas still exist.
I reasoned that a project to start colonizing a new, relatively Earth-like planet would:
A) take time to get going. I'm not dropping intrepid individuals off just to see how long it would take for them to get eaten. A basic infrastructure would need to be put in place and that would take well-trained skilled people to build it and professional security personnel to keep them safe.
B) have to have a broad coalition of sponsors - one, because it would be tremendously expensive, far beyond even the richest countries to do on their own, and two, because any major countries left out would never allow it. Would we let the Russians or Chinese do it and leave us out? Or vice versa? There's no way that would happen without starting a war. The same could be said for India, Brazil, Germany, the UK, etc,
C) have to allow families to go there eventually if they wanted the colony to grow but at least in the early years small children need not apply. Only older children who could meet the same standards as their parents would be allowed - smart, able to handle stress well, able to function independently, very healthy both mentally and physically.
and D) we might not be the only species interested in the real estate, not even the first to put in a claim.

I've always wanted to write but never really had the time. I've had a book rejected and that process of waiting for months just to get a no, then rinse wash and repeat wasn't very appealing. I realized though that doing a one of for a first time author wasn't likely to set my book(s) apart regardless of how well good they might be.

We'll see! It certainly has given me an opportunity to be successful.

Actually its when I read some scene or chapter I wrote months earlier then reading it again almost like it was someone else's work and thinking "You know, this is really good!"

I'll let you know when I have some!

Books 12-18

I've been reading Sci-fi for a LONG time and of current authors I'd have to say David Weber, John Ringo, Tanya Huff, David Drake but I was raised on Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov.

A chance to move the story along or get the finished books to the next step. Or catch up on the Walking Dead.

I substitute teach in a school district that has a lot of Iraqi and Syrian refugees The kids are great and after not very long they're as American as the kids born here but they usually work harder in school.

I need to know where the story is headed so I can figure out how to get there. If you don't know where your going it's too easy to end up in a dead end. I try to decide what scenes I want and where in the overall story then write to them. I have a whole list of possible things that might happen, I use some, delete some, add more as I go along. It really helps avoid getting stuck!