Questions and Answers

Q: Where do you get your ideas?

A: Ah, the holy grail of questions…where do the strange ideas come from?  The stock answer I use when I don’t want to get into this question is “I spend a lot of time alone.”  Being alone helps one think more; my mind will wander and before you know it, I’m coming up with characters and situations and playing the “What if…?” game.  However, a more truthful answer would be, “I don’t know.”  Creativity is a piece of the imagination and it’s been fueled in me by reading a ton, watching movies and television, and imaging weird situations and possibilities.  My first novel, The Centurion: The Balance of the Soul War, for instance, came around because I had spent a few days working on piece of serious fiction about a kid who wasn’t killed in World War II, but felt he should have been.  After about twenty pages of text, I realized that I had nowhere to go with this story, so I went back and thought about the idea of death…and what if it wasn’t an option.  Quickly, the idea of someone born without a soul came into my mind and I began to structure a story around that character.  Pieces fell into place as I was writing.  I also get a lot of story ideas from sentences.  For whatever reason, I'll think of a sentence and the way the words fall together and that will appeal to me.  It'll play around in my head for days, weeks, maybe more, and eventually, that sentence will take root on a page and start to expand.  

Q: Where do your characters come from?

A: Well, a stork tends to show up in the night...But, seriously, most of my characters are amalgams of people I know.  A lot of my main characters in the short stories and novels I wrote prior to The Centurion were basically variations of myself.  I think every author throws a bit of themselves in their main character.  Jericho, the protagonist of The Centurion, is probably the first protagonist I wrote with whom I don't identify.

Q: How do you write?

A: Erratically.  I hate writing longhand.  Everything I do is on a keyboard, whether on my computer at home or on my laptop (when I go to the library to write).  I try to work every day, but it’s not always on the same story.  Sometimes, I have to take a break from what I’m working on because I start to get frustrated.  I’ll start a new work in order to cleanse the palate, so to speak, and then I’ll go back to the first piece.  I write in bursts.  Sometimes, it will take a day to get through one page.  Other times, I’ll forego sleep because pages are flowing.  There’s no mystery or secret to writing—just sit down and do it.  That’s all you have to do.

Q: What appeals to you about being a writer?

A: I can’t answer that.  I’m sure there’s some traditional, stock-type answer that makes a lot of sense, but for me, there isn’t an appeal to being a writer.  It’s just what I do.  It’s like asking someone, what’s the appeal of being American?  It’s just something you are.  I never “chose” to write.  It chose me.  If I don’t write, I don’t function.  I would love to be able to spend more time writing.  If I had my druthers (and who doesn't want their own druthers, honestly?), I would rather sit in my basement ten hours a day hacking out the tons of stories in my head, rather than going to some job.  

Q: How did you get started in writing?

A: That goes back to second grade.  Mrs. Norselien’s class.  She was a great teacher.  She had this massive stack of lined newsprint for us to practice our handwriting.  I used to take multiple sheets at a time and rather than writing “a” over and over like everyone else, I started writing some crappy, hack stories about my best friend Marcus Hefty and I hunting ghosts.  (We were both really into ghosts.)  From there, I realized that the process of creation was something that I enjoyed.  I excelled at it.  Throughout grade school and junior high, I loved my English classes.  By the time I got to high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer.  I wrote my first novel in high school.  (And it was god-awful.)  I wrote several more books in college—none of which will ever see the light of day because they’re horrible.  I just kept working at churning out something that someone would want to read.  I was very critical of myself the entire time.  It took me many, many attempts to get something that I felt was worth publishing.

Q:  Were you ever discouraged in your craft?  What kept you writing?

A: I don’t know a writer who doesn’t get discouraged.  For me, a few years ago, I completed a fantasy novel that I thought was okay.  It wasn’t my best work, but I felt it might be good.  I sent a sample to an agent who just shredded it, and then told me that I didn’t have what it took to be a writer.  I think I walked away from my keyboard that day.  I don’t think I started writing for three or four months after that response.  The only thing that kept me going was that the ideas were still there.  Ephemeral images transfixed and solidified in my mind and became words again.  Writing is the only creative outlet I am any good at.  I am a horrible guitar player.  I’m not that good at woodworking.  I construct with words.  Nowadays, when I need to get recharged, I go into a Barnes & Noble or a Borders bookstore and I look at the shelves of people who have been successfully published and say, "Why not me?"  I'm capable of doing what they do...I just need a break.

    Also, when I first started out after college, I worked as a journalist, but journalism is a pretty mind-numbing form of writing when you're not covering Watergate or sports, so I became very burned out from writing and really didn't want to do it for a long time.

Q: What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?

A: I’ve received a ton of good advice.  I don’t know if there’s a “best.”  I had a professor in college, Dr. Emilio Degrazia, and he gave me a semester’s worth of good advice in an Advanced Creative Writing class.  I give him a lot of credit for helping me improve as a writer.  Of course, he studied under the great John Gardner, so I think he knew a thing or two.  Since I’ve published, the best advice I’ve gotten is to concentrate more on promotion and don’t worry about reviews. 

Q: If you can't find a publisher, will you continue to self-publish?

A: If I must.  I'm not someone who thinks the world will come to me and lay down at my feet.  I've struggled a lot in life.  I will, most likely, continue to struggle.  If it takes my own money to publish my work, so be it.  It's frustrating though, because I read things all the time and I know my work is better.  It's just a matter of catching a break, I suppose.