Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
In addition to several children’s picture books and two short story collections, I have written four novels in the relatively new genre of Visionary Fiction. When I finished my first novel, The Eighth House, there was no such designation in the publishing industry. The book didn’t fit the fantasy, adventure or mystery molds, and so it waited on the shelf. It dealt with expanding awareness, meditation, visioning, divination, the return of the Divine Feminine, and evolution toward a unified humanity. Since then I have studied the esoteric teachings of various traditions, and worked to become a more conscious writer. As I write I seek to be an active participant in the exchange of energy and information between the mundane and ethereal worlds. My works focus on the interplay between these realms and the effect of transcendental experience on subjective reality.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My latest novel is Rosa Mundi. One inspiration for it was the time-honored theme of the otherworld. With so many problems facing the Earth and human civilization, is there an alternative? If so, how do we get there? Has anyone already made such a migration? Are there beings on the other side of ‘the veil’ that can help us? These are some of the questions I address in Rosa Mundi.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I think writing at all is a pretty unusual habit, and writing fiction particularly so. The author of fiction spends untold hours making up people and their stories to try and convey what they themselves have learned or experienced in their own life—as if living it has not convinced them of their own truths. As far as the physicality of it, I tend to write with my feet up on my desk and the laptop in my lap. As soon as I sit up straight and put the computer on the desk, I run out of ideas.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
We’re all influenced by every book we read. We either think “yeah, I want to write like that” or “I hope my writing is better than this”. Some authors just resonate with you and you want to read everything they’ve written. With others, even though they’re very good, one is enough. Some of the writers I most admire are Faulkner, Nabokov, Iris Murdoch, Dickens, Alice Bailey, Tolkien, Melville, Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Tolstoy, James Joyce, not necessarily in that order.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on promoting Rosa Mundi. I think 2020 has put a bit of a damper on my creative juices. No doubt this whole year will eventually ferment into a great flowering of ideas.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
I have yet to find a surefire marketing strategy. Try all and every seems to be a good tactic.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write for yourself, not others, but bear in mind what the reader’s experience is. Let your first draft steep for a few months before diving into the second pass. Don’t be afraid to drop something that’s not working. Don’t overestimate the memory of your reader; that clue you dropped on page 6 will be forgotten long before page 230. Read the work aloud to someone; if they can’t follow it listening, they won’t be able to reading either. Work up a glossary for your book— you might not need it to publish, but it will help you clarify and/or edit things in the text itself.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
I don’t know if it qualifies as advice, but I find this quote of Steinbeck’s an apt description of the main difficulty writers face.
“The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”
What are you reading now?
Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone. Great storytelling.
What’s next for you as a writer?
Don’t know—I haven’t written it yet.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Go Down Moses by Faulkner, The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, Ulysses by James Joyce. I could reread all of these indefinitely.
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