The need to lie. I think writing (or, originally, the urge to tell stories) stems from two basic needs, the need to explain things and the need to cover your ass. Since storytelling begins with the stories we tell children, they may both stem from the same urge.

We explain things to children by lying. Storks delivering babies, Santa Claus delivering presents, fairies, we parcel out lies as easily as pouring orange juice for breakfast.

My generation, a pitifully deluded generation, rebelled against our untruthful parents and decided to feed our children boring, so called "true" stories about sperm and eggs and gifts from parents. We thought we would raise a generation of empowered, introspective, self-reliant, autonomous free-thinkers.

Instead we raised a generation of neurotic self-centered Republicans waiting for the Rapture. They're starving for fiction. We did it in the same way we created wheat and nut intolerant children by denying them wheat and nuts. I think we need to return to the practice of raising our kids with lies to build up their bullshit immunities.

My dad was a Baptist minister and expected me to be on my best behavior because every little thing he thought I did would make him look like a failure to his congregation. I didn't particularly like being the model Baptist boy he envisioned so I learned to practice my lying early. I developed an addiction so severe I found myself spinning longer and longer lies. Soon I had to write them out to keep track of them, and those turned into stories and novels.

Like every addiction, I've never been able to break it and it drains my time and finances. Fortunately my wife enables me so I continue to pound away.

I first wrote seriously in 1969 in San Marcos, Texas, a college town (Southwest Texas State, the home of Lyndon Johnson). We lived thirty miles from the University of Texas. Richard Nixon had just ousted the favorite son from office and reneged on his promise to bring home our troops. My Baptist minister father moved us the summer before from Baytown, in the heart of the redneck Pasadena oil fields, to SWT, the Fort Apache of liberalism, surrounded on all sides by shit kickers.

When Austin stations played the Beatles on the radio, the DeeJays didn't make fun of them. We no longer picked up Conway Twitty and Patsy Kline, the Beach Boys and bland British pop, but , Jimi, Janis, and thanks to the campus station KUT, Monk and Miles. Even more to the point, I went to school with Negro kids and Mexican kids too. Only they didn't like being called Negros.

I drew a couple of truly awful comic books in junior high, and I even started a twelve page novel. But those were larks. My inspiration came during my freshman year when the principal accused me, the Baptist Preacher's Kid, of leftist leanings. I told him he was wrong but if he would introduce me to some leftists I would be glad to join.

The records office accidentally placed me into remedial classes when they switched my records with Stephen Phillips. My life was threatened by shit kickers every day, I rode the bus with Black kids for the first time, I was shaken down for lunch money for the first time, I suffered through my first "you're queer" jokes for the first dozen times, I joined the band and suffered through even more "you're queer" jokes, I saw my first student demonstration at the college which was only ten blocks from my house, got straight A's in my speech class and was recruited for the debate team which convinced my father had me on the road to hell because nothing breeds liberal commies like debate team.

Best of all, the national debate topic for my sophomore year was the Vietnam War and I loved it. My partner and I won our first two tournaments and I discovered that I’d declared war on my family, God and America and my high school administration. Without even knowing it.

Most of all I realized this shit was funny.

In my spare time I wrote an atrocious satire about a young radical who discovers the US government engineered the hippie movement to justify the CIA budget. He brings down the government, and realizes his new government is in bed with the guys who ran the old one. I still love the idea, but, let's face it, a high school sophomore, full of himself, with no creative writing training, couldn't write his way out of the joint he rolled that morning. And I couldn't. And, even worse, dope wouldn't make it to our high school until my junior year, so I didn't even have the excuse of being stoned.

I can honestly say that this small corridor of Texas—San Marco to Austin (where I later moved)—profoundly influenced my writing. Austin features a strong tradition of libertarian liberalism* standing in paradox to a bullheaded Bible belt mentality. I guess you could call it erudite bronco busting. Drive on I-35 any day and you'll see a Tesla Model S with a Darwin sticker on the bumper challenging a Ford F150 sporting "Honk if you love Jesus" for space in the same lane.

*No one wants to call it that, but it pretty much sums up old style Texas liberalism

An editor at Dell told me that Raising Hell was one of the funniest books she had ever read. In fact, she said she never believed anyone could make torture funny until my book crossed her desk. But she also told me the manuscript would be a difficult sale under any circumstances because marketing departments wouldn't know how to approach it.

This seemed to be the consensus of everyone I talked to at conferences and in the few reject letters where I could get responses that weren't automatic.

At the same time Carol and I spent thousands of dollars on writing conferences, sitting through seminars telling us the same message: Publishers expect you to do the work for them—build your brand, build your platform, hustle your book and do the marketing. When the speakers wouldn't come out and say it, I would pin them down in Q&A and they would admit it. Unless you could convince them you had the next blockbuster bestseller, publishing houses wouldn't spend a dime selling your book.

Then I learned about remainders and returns on advances and other horror stories and I realized that even though agents and editors were looking for authors to recruit, they still had no intention of investing money in our books beyond the writer's advance. As far as I was concerned this put me into a worse position than the pulp writers of the thirties, indentured servitude plus having to pay for my own marketing and distribution.

I knew Carol would never really understand what’s involved in writing and marketing as an Indie Writer. Just tonight, for example, after four hours blogging and social network promoting, she was convinced I was goofing off while she was making dinner and I didn't see the point in arguing otherwise. That being said, she would have a harder time if I received a publishing contract and I still wasn't selling books. It's a mental thing with family. They understand the words, but their mind don't really get it.

So I figured we would cope better as a family, and we would have less risk if I ventured out as an Indie writer and publisher.

I write best with distraction. Or, perhaps, I distract myself easily so I wouldn't know how to find an environment without distraction. Other than that I simply sit down and write. I would probably have been diagnosed with ADD if I went to high school ten years later and pumped full of drugs and psychoanalysis. Fortunately, I escaped all of that.

I spent more time working with John VandeZande at Northern Michigan University in Marquette than any other writer. He taught me two lessons, the most important being to start writing from whatever point in the story or poem your brain has framed. It doesn't matter how bad your writing is, just write. You can always fix it later. You can't fix what isn't on paper. (He also taught me the line between truth and fiction is too thin to think about, so I don't.)

I also took several journalism classes and trained as an editor. Vandezande was a master editor so I learned a lot about editing from him. I continued to take professional editing jobs before teaching at Austin Community College and continued to take free lance editing jobs after.

So I write. Most of it I throw away, but the part I keep is worth publishing. Ninety percent of the writing process is editing. Working each passage three, four, six times until it needs to go or it finally sounds just right.

I also reflect on what I write when I prepare to sleep, mulling over problems and possibilities and directions I should have taken or could possibly take.

Since my retirement, I've spent more time catching up on the films I never had the time to watch when I had to rise at 5 a.m. to beat morning traffic for early classes.

My reading interests vary widely, highly influenced by the things I was told not to read in school. In third grade I wanted to see the movie Frankenstein because all my friends had, but my Baptist parents wouldn't allow me to stay up and see it on late night television (you could only see it on the Saturday night Creature Features in the early sixties). So I checked out Shelly's Frankenstein from the school library.

A classmate found a woodcut print of a woman's breast on one of the pages and ratted me out to my teacher. This created a huge scandal, even though the book was in the school library. I got in no end of trouble for reading a book with a "lascivious" picture, not to mention being lectured for checking out a book intended for students in higher grades (as though it were my responsibility to monitor that). Well meaning adults removed the copy from the library, and my love for forbidden books and books above my "reading level" began to burn in my heart more deeply than the love of women.

Of course, I would outgrow that with puberty but I still found it easier to sneak books into the house than girlfriends.

I love philosophy, science (mostly physics), history and politics. In fiction I love general fiction, and lean toward noir, thrillers and occasionally science fiction in genre. I used to be a fan of paranormal and fantasy, but I find the themes and tropes to be passed around with too little new ground being broken. Fans of the genres will disagree with me, but when you read from a broader sampling pool it makes it easier to detect the limitations of a single genre.

I'm also a fan of a few graphic novels, Neil Gaiman's "Sandman," Bill Willingham's "Fables," and G. Willow Wilson's "Air," which was too short lived. I'll read pretty much anything by Garth Ennis and Alan Moore.

The top two are easy: Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins" and Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow." I fell in love with them in grad school and no two books have come close to knocking them out of their place. I consider them masterpieces of imagination and language.

I grew up with the Bible and I can't underestimate its effect on my writing, my life and American society, positively and, definitely, negatively. If people actually read it the way it was supposed to be read we might not be suffering some of the cultural paranoia and disruption we suffer. It was never meant to be read as a seamless piece of literature, but as a collection of works by different authors, some of which should be heard orally, some to be read as meditations and a couple as folktales. None were originally meant to be integrated into a larger work with a coherent message. Unfortunately, the overly faithful have been determined to correct God's little oversight ever since and convince us it never happened to start with.

Doris Lessing's "Shikasta" ("Re: Colonized Planet 5" of the "Canopos in Argos" series) may well be the finest piece of science fiction written. Ironically, in Lessing's attempt to create a Christless mythos she represents Christianity better than most modern Christians do.

I lump three books together in the fifth slot because I consider them all to epitomize the highlights of where I've been leaning philosophically more and more since leaving grad school. Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigation's," Derrida's "Of Grammatology," and a charming little book by french philosopher Michele Le Doeuff, "The Philosophical Imaginery."

None. I struggle to reach readers. I follow the advice in the marketing books—blogging, Twitter, building my brand. The problem is, I don't write with a series in mind, I write books from the inside out and then I'm done with them. Nor am I locked to a specific genre, which comes from my broad reading background.

In other words, I don't write books with a market in mind, I write books because a specific phrase or image so moves me that it blossoms into a novel. So marketing comes as an after product. Truthfully, I never really thought about marketing until retirement and we realized we needed to build a college fund for our grand daughters. Even now I feel like the money would be nice, but I'm really more interested in developing a fan base of readers.

I would probably give my books away except that I know readers don't value free books. I only charge $1 for the Raising Hell books because I deeply believed those books should be a gift to the world, whether the world values them or not. But I will ultimately be rereleasing a deluxe Raising Hell with color art and additional chapters at a higher price, keeping the earlier version at $1.

iPad, hands down. Primarily because it isn't a reading device. Carol and I had Palm Pilots for our e-books for years, and read e-books on our Macs, but we held out on Kindles and Nooks because the idea of a dedicated e-reader tablet made no sense to us. When the iPad came out, with it's ability to run Pages and other software, I finally had an excuse to buy a tablet-sized reader. I like the idea of paper white readers, but because I have books from every vendor, I'm sticking with my iPad.

My fans find the beauty or a sense of the craft and humor I put into my writing. We share a sense of community and that's important to me. My favorite review was my first review because the reviewer understood exactly what I wanted to accomplish with Cigerets. The reviewer said "his writing style doesn't get in the reader's way, the plot is engaging and fast-paced, and the dialogue is witty and totally believable." That sums up my approach to genre fiction in a nutshell. It's what I tried to teach fiction writing students when I was still giving classes.

I imagine my fans are the kind of readers who would have loved the old independent bookstores, where they could browse the shelves for hours for books they never imagined existed. Carol and I used to love Adventures in Crime and Space on Sixth Street in Austin, which had musty paperbacks and first editions as well as the latest from authors like Michael Moorcock and Joe Lonsdale or local writers Neal Barrett. Jr. and Don Webb. Many would be like Barnes & Noble with couches, but with dreadful coffee. The kind with real poetry readings where people sat anywhere instead of straight aisles of folding chairs.

(I'm not knocking Barnes & Noble. I spent many hours there with my MacBook Pro pulling reference books from their shelves and drinking Starbucks coffee after they and Borders shut the independent stores down. And I would have lively discussions with a Zoarastrian, a Urantian and a Baptist minister between jobs. But I could have gotten more writing done.)

As far as I'm concerned, however, my fans can be Southern Baptists, Libertarians, freethinkers, NRA members, opponents of the second amendment, Krishnas and Lesbians who bow hunt. If they love my writing, I love them and they're welcome to kick back over beers and argue anything as loudly as we want until someone starts tossing stereotype and invective. As long as the discourse focuses on reason, humor and innuendo, we're good.

I think my fans would understand the difference between thinking and even taking the moment to relish truly delicious slanderous and murderous thoughts and acting on them. But also, in the end, I would hope my fans would understand the time has to come when we set those thoughts aside and start planting the seeds for a better garden to serve our children (as wholesome as that may sound).

Walker Percy is my favorite, without a doubt. My graduate advisor, Earl Hilton at Northern Michigan introduced me to "Love in the Ruins" while I was doing my thesis on "Catch-22" and I fell in love with the book. Percy spoke to me as a Southern writer grappling with faith and philosophical discontent. The beauty of his language and his development of an ironic narrator with a flawed moral compass put a permanent stamp on my own writing style. Several books have come close, including his "Second Coming," but none have surpassed it.

Pynchon comes second. I read "Gravity's Rainbow" about the same time, along with "Lot 49" and "V" and was blown away. In fact, I think there were a stream of writers that heavily influenced my writing that I blew through that year, including Flannery O'Connor, Tom Robbins, Carlos Fuentes and Garcia Marquez, and, of course, my first crack at Joyce's "Ulysses." But the metaphors in "Rainbow"—especially Pynchon's attempt to marry the concept of interface with fiction in 1972—and his willingness to mix Stooges style slapstick with epic narrative floored me. It was like reading Faulkner stepping through a mirror into Wonderland.

O'Conner and Doris Lessing follow next. I taught "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" to all of my lit students as a model story for separating naive from discriminating readers. Naive readers believe the grandmother is the victim in the story; more discriminating readers understand she put her family in harms way with her own self-serving rationalizations. O'Connor is brilliant and witty, and every much the writer Percy is. I wish she'd written more.

Lessing's Shikasta series is my guilty pleasure. I actually think of it more fondly than her better known literary works such as the "Golden Notebooks." The books prove that science fiction doesn't have to be hack work, and never devolve to tired science fiction tropes. An avowed atheist, she lays out the Christian mission in her books better than Christians do. She is one of the defining voices of her generation.

Reading back a passage after a year and realizing I nailed it. This is probably why I have such a hard time promoting and marketing. To me writing is about getting the phrase on paper, whether it be pulp or the pixel on a screen. If I return to something I've written and still find the beauty in it, then I accomplished what I set out to do. The other guys can have the money and the fans.

Sure I would love to have readers and appreciation, and the money would be nice because it would make Carol happy, but artists owe the world a responsibility to create beauty. We have pop stars and merchants to make fans and money.

Ann Livi Andrews, author of the "Rehab for Super Heroes" series and "Hollow Towns" (which is being re-released in August), first posed this question to me, and I thought it excellent.

There is no ideal writing setting, and writers who wait for one to find their "space for writing" need to get over it. Writers need to learn to write wherever they are. I write pretty much when I find the time, regardless of the setting, and carry my iPad with me to make sure I can. I write in the doctor's office, at my sister's house, on the bathroom sink.

I could say the ideal space is my bed, but that's because I suffer from severe osteoarthritis and can barely walk. It also makes me an ideal target for cats, so "ideal" is a relative term. I read about Mark Twain writing from his bed when I was younger and thought, "I would love to be able to do that." It was a devil's bargain.

You read about the glamorous life of writing in cafes, and I was able to do that for a couple of years after retirement. I spent my days at Barnes & Noble where I could browse the stacks for any book I needed, but, truthfully, the books were a distraction as was the cafe. I also made friends with a Zoarastrian, an out-of-work Baptist minister and a theosophist who was immersing himself in the Urantia book. We held court so often, I didn't write as much as I wished.

I wrote just as much when I was working, and I was even teaching college classes in the evening as an adjunct. (In fact, as adjuncts know, we have to have real jobs to support our teaching) I learned to finish projects ahead of schedule so I could write on the boss' dime. The trick was to keep them in a drawer and turn them in on schedule so I didn't get saddled with additional projects (which still happened with one job).

You make a space for writing. Your kitchen table, your living room couch with a TV tray, your bedroom. Have your coffee pot or tea kettle handy. I would advise investing in some kind of portable device. I use my iPad and MacBook Pro, but if you're broke get a cheap used notebook laptop or a cheap tablet with cloud backup. Trust me, you want to backup your writing and be able to email your files. Then, as the opportunities appear, you work your way into your ideal space.

If you worry about the ideal space before you establish your writing, you won't establish your writing.

That being said, I had the ideal writing space for five years. It was an above ground swimming pool in our back yard with oak trees for shade. I could prop my laptop on a shelf next to the pool. I'd eat breakfast, type, swim, type, swim, read and type. But then the side rusted, the warranty expired and we were unable to get it replaced and now my osteoarthritis is so severe it doesn't matter. End of joy.

I write where I write.