I grew up in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, surrounded by desert hills that I'd disappear into to get away from home stress, be alone and spin stories in my head. The wide-open desert inspired the setting for the God Mars series, and my old neighborhood and favorite hiking spot appear in Grayman Book Three. (Of course, I fled to the opposite--the rich green forests of the Pacific Northwest--as soon as I had the chance.)

First book I ever read, five years old: Gulliver's Travels. Really. (Followed by The Tales of King Arthur, written in Olde English.) Classic adventure, fantastic worlds (and pretty adult stuff). My parents got me a subscription to a scholastic book-of-the-month, and it was all classic adventure lit. I learned a lot about storytelling from those books, and a lot about writing, style, plot.

Classic scifi and modern graphic novelists: Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, Ben Bova, Alfred Bester, Phillip K Dick, William Gibson, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, Alan Moore--too many to name. I spent my summers growing up with paperbacks and comic books.

Officially at 13 (1975), scoring my first writing awards in high school. My first stories were super-pulpy sci-fi action with too-cool perfect heroes and comic book villains. My first five novels and two-dozen shorts were in ball point pen on notebook paper. I actually still use those characters and some of those early story lines to this day in both my series, but it's all gotten much darker with age and with the times. No more perfect heroes, no more moral clarity.

Oh yeah. Mike Ram versus aliens. Seriously. Five part series of novellas, hand written (in cursive, no less). I was 13. Awful stuff. But it marked the first appearances of many of my current characters: Mike Ram, Matt Burke, Lisa Ava, Rick Mann, Doc Becker, Amber Parry, Dave Manning...

Sixty rejections. Some came with high praise and great advice, but the agents were insisting that anything over 90,000 words wouldn't sell. (This is funny, because when I queried an early novel back in 1990, it was 90K words, and the publishers told me it was way too short.) Then a good friend told me about Smashwords. Now I can at least get my work read, get it out there (beyond my small circle of draft readers), and hopefully get something bigger going.

Plot it out (first in my head, then on page). Write down any particular details I think I want. Research. Start writing. Have it turn out completely different. (If it's working, the characters write themselves.) Go back every chapter or so and edit/rewrite (so it comes out in chunks). Push through until I hit a wall (stopping and setting it aside is a killer). Fix bits that are bugging me. Do a full read-through. Let it sit a few days. Do another read-through (preferably hard-copy--it reads differently on paper). Find some willing victims to inflict it on for feedback and to find errors I missed. Settle on the final version. Format. Somewhere in there obsess over the cover. Publish. Then start writing the next one because I get antsy fast with nothing to work on.

I write when I can, usually with my laptop, sitting wherever. Best times are early AM and late nights, though I ocassionally score a day off to do some serious work.

Self-publishing is a real boon to the process, because I know I can just get it done and get it out, and not sweat months to years in submissions. (Thank you, Smashwords!)

Working (I still have a demanding career in social work). Doing artwork (a lot of it for the books). Spending time with my children. Cooking (and eating good food). Watching a few favorite shows. Some martial endeavors (usually involving firearms these days). Not much sleeping.

I'm basically teaching myself as I go: What works best, what colors and fonts. I've so far concluded that red or light lettering on a dark background jumps out best in thumbnail size. And my busier covers didn't show well small, so now I go for a simpler iconic image rather than try to portray an actual scene in detail. In that, I think my God Mars covers work the best: single central subject that shocks a bit, makes the viewer go "What's that about?"

The God Mars series is based on stories I've been stewing since I was a teen, inspired by what I loved: pulp science fiction and comics, as well as some classic movies and TV shows from decades ago: Fantastic worlds, colorful characters, new cultures, big action, suspense. It's also got aspects of a series I started back in high school and college, about a world where humans become immortal and godlike through technology, so you've got that morality tale underneath it all. (The rather confusing title "The God Mars" is a play on words, like the Bike Shop or the Cowboy Bar--it's a Mars full of flawed humans with godlike powers.) Originally set up as a long ongoing serial with multiple parallel story lines and a massive cast (and mostly for my own enjoyment--I had no intention of publishing any of this), I'm condensing it into hopefully-coherent novels.

The God Mars series also shares characters and backstory with the Grayman series--the much darker work I started around the same time but actually intended for publishing. And while I will probably write more Grayman books, they are exhausting in their intensity, demanding in their detail, and take twice as long (or more) to write. God Mars books are, conversely, a blast to write, apparently (according to reader feedback) a lot more fun to read (and you don't need therapy afterwards), and my research probably gets less attention from Homeland Security (though I did just have to study nuclear weapon design and yield).

Grayman is a commentary on action heroes, and has evolved over the years as our cultural perceptions have. It started with perfect heroes taking on big evil, but the world isn't that simple anymore. So my heroes are now flawed, scarred, damaged, morally ambiguous, and they can't just walk away from the damage they do with a flashy grin and a snappy one-liner. And my villains are also more human. (It helps that I made a career in psychology.)

It also started with the Munich Olympics. Even then--as a kid--I could see the future, the wars we would be fighting and the enemies we would be facing. So I created an international team of perfect heroes with fancy new weapons to fight a dirty new war, and in the process, I accidentally predicted a lot of what we're dealing with today (it's just not so shiny as I expected). For instance, way back in the '70s, the stories were criticized because they portayed a world where civil and human rights were suspended in order to pursue the enemy--because that would never happen, we would never allow it to happen. What I could never have imagined is that it would come to be called the Patriot Act.

While the formal Grayman series is done, there are other stories to tell in that world, both during and after the events in that narrative. But for now, I'm focused on finishing another God Mars book (or three). It's a much more fun series to work on, and I've been meaning to get those stories out for a long time--they've been gelling since I was a teenager. Ideally, I hope to be publishing two or more new books per year. And I'm considering putting together some free "companion" books for each series with shorts, illustrations and background material. Stay tuned...