I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland is a hard working town with lots of great people. It's caught a few bad breaks over the years, but the people there have this great resolve which amazes me to this day. A lot of that resolve I try to bring out in some of my characters.

I first started writing when i was 6 years old. Even before I could write I can recall making up stories in my mind and sharing them with family and friends.

Edwin C. Gwynn is a lot like many of the people who I know now, and a lot like the people I mentioned in Cleveland where I grew up. He's hard-working with a good heart, but he's faced a lot of challenges; some personal, and some as a result of economic downturns. Edwin wants what most of us want; to love and be loved and return, and to make his life mean something special. Through The Methodical Ways of Edwin C. Gwynn we get an insider's view to Edwin's journey.

In my search for a publisher I found that the industry has changed a lot. There are some great things about belonging to some of the larger publishing houses, but at the end of the day most publishers want authors to take more of a vested interest in getting ourselves out there, promoting ourselves, and making things happen for ourselves. For me, if I have to do all that anyway I may as well at least have the right to kind of chart my own course and determine what I want to do with my writing while avoiding many of the creative conflicts that might arise in the type of partnerships you often find with outside publishers.

Smashwords has given me the platform and a lot of the guidance I need to make a success of my career. I've been able to connect with a lot of fans, and other writers in similar positions as myself, and receive a lot of expertise on how to be a successful writer in 2014.

The greatest joy of writing for me is creating the world in which my writers live. This may sound strange, but there are times I wish I could bring my characters to life - say Edwin, or even Trekker from my Legend of the Stone series. Uncle Pauly in Edwin's story is another one. I'd love to have coffee with that guy and see what else is in him that I haven't been able to quite tap into just yet. So for me it's creating a whole world that doesn't really exist, but then again actually could.

Fans are everything. I remember when I first started writing Legend back in the old MySpace days. I put a small sample on there, and this young kid about 13 wrote me this nice message about how interesting Trekker was for him. That meant the world to me!

I'm continuing to work on The Methodical Ways of Edwin C. Gwynn. Originally the intro came out in 2012, and the plan was to follow it up the next year with the complete version. It's taken longer than expected getting the quality story together that the fans deserve, and so one idea I have that I'll be making a decision on pretty soon is maybe releasing it in bunches like I've begun to do with the Legend series. People deserve to know what the next step in Edwin's journey is and if I can find a way of doing that creatively, and then maybe release a full complete version somewhere down the line, for this book that may be the best way to go.

Unfair question! The great late Ray Bradbury is possibly my overall favorite. His creativity and mind were off the charts. C.S. Lewis was such an inspirational writer for me, especially growing up. A lot of the poetry work that I've done has been inspired by Dr. Maya Angelou. I love her and would love to get to met her someday. I know this is a cardinal sin for a fiction writer but the more I find myself writing fiction the less I find myself reading it. I've never been the biggest reader in the world, anyway, which people find unbelievable, but writing is such a joy for me I rarely just take the time out to read like I probably should.

The ability to get out of bed. Some people don't get to. Some people can't walk, others wake up to conditions that most of us could never imagine. You always have a choice of what to focus on. I'm just blessed to know that many of my worst days are somebody else's best days, and that alone is a reason to rise each day.

I like to help people. I get to do community outreach with my church and it's why I live. I love that I get to be the person many of my friends call for help when they're hurting. I'm also a musician and I'll be releasing an EP this summer with some of the songs Edwin's journey has helped to inspire. I'm just a lover of life, and I'm glad I get to do what I get to do.