Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
“Chasing Time” will be my eleventh published story, though one is just an omnibus of a three-part serial. I’ve published a mix of short stories, novellas, and full-length novels.
Science Fiction is my main genre, one that I’ve devoured in books, movies, TV shows, and video games as far back as I can remember. I was four when Star Wars hit the big screen in Idaho, and seven when Empire Strikes Back came out. You can imagine what it did to my psyche. My friends and I spent years bashing each other’s heads and fingers with homemade lightsabers. When we weren’t doing that, we were playing with Tie Fighters, X-Wings, so many action figures that I can’t even guess at, even my older brother’s Millenium Falcon (which would enrage him when he caught me playing with it haha).
I found “The Forever War” in a ‘junk pile’ at a local book store one day. I read that book from cover to cover without eating, going to the bathroom, nothing. It’s the first book I can remember that made my brain light up like a fireworks show, and I thought about the concepts of the story for months after reading it.
I do also write Adult Fiction, but those stories are a bit darker, as they are fictionalized parts of my life growing up, which was far from a pleasant experience. I dabble in Horror, in fact I’m working on a short story / novella right now in that genre, Sports (I love hockey!), and Humor.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
“Chasing Time” is my most recently published story (I don’t like to call them ‘books’ anymore, as ebooks have really changed the meaning of such things since I can publish a short story as quickly and as easily as I can a Game of Thrones length epic).
I tend to write a lot of darker, grittier stories, and every so often I kind of depress myself because of it. So I tend to write something a bit lighter, usually (hopefully) humorous to sort of recharge. “Chasing Time” is just my version of a snarky, suspicious black ops agent who gets sent back in time to kill an egghead scientist before the guy can alter history too radically.
I love time travel, especially when it gets into the confusion of how small of an event can cause how large a variation down the road. If you’ve ever seen The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VI, where he gets his hand stuck in the time traveling toaster, you can see a little inside my mind.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I’m a graveyard writer. I love being awake and writing from 10AM to 6AM. The world is dead, no one will knock on our door (unless it’s an emergency or the cops bringing back my uncle, the town drunk, but that only happens in 50’s TV shows), no one will call me, and I’ll get very few emails to distract me.
It works out great as my wife teaches high school, and just as she’s waking up to get ready for work, I’m heading to bed. She gets home from school right around the time I wake up, so we get to maximize our time together.
I’m not sure if it is unusual, but I have four different computers I write at, all networked together so Scrivener is current no matter which one I’m using. I’ve even purchased a wireless mouse and keyboard and use the 55″ TV and my recliner sometimes. That’s much harder to write in because when I occupy it, it attracts cats. It’s tough to get any work done with three or four of them bugging me to play with them.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
“The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman – still the best book I’ve ever read. I just read it again for at least the thirtieth time a few days ago, and you can start to sense how dated some of the stuff in it is. The social aspects of the story especially, though the physics and even the technology is still what I’d consider very viable and current.
“Hyperion” by Dan Simmons. This is a four-book series, and all I can say is that if you’ve never read it, you simply must. The first book starts out a little slow for the first fifty or hundred pages, then it sucks you in like a black hole. The overall story has AI, FTL travel, portals, a machine god vs the human god… read it. All of it.
“Old Man’s War” by John Scalzi – for me, this is a new instant classic. SciFi had become very stale for me for about a decade until I found this book.
“It” by Stephen King. Okay. I read this when I was thirteen. This book was the only book I’d ever read that could scare me that wasn’t titled “The Exorcist”. By the time I’d read this, I had devoured every Stephen King book in print. He’s still my favorite author by far. “It” scared the you know what out of me back then.
“The Exorcist” by William Peter Blatty – I don’t know what possessed me to read this book at age nine. Any time I hear what sounds like little feet scurrying around above me, I can only think of this story.
“Superfudge” and “Ramona Quimby” and “The Great Brain” and anything by Shel Silverstein and “The Chronicles of Narnia” and I don’t even remember how many more. We always see authors talking about their favorite books, but how often to they refer to the books that got them really, really into reading? “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Where the Red Fern Grows” and “Flowers in the Attic” and Dr. Seuss… “How the Eat Fried Worms”???
I’m going to regret going to Amazon after this interview.
What are you working on now?
I currently have four, maybe five full-length novels in progress right now.
“Diabolus” – Two Vatican priests are dispatched to Brussles to confront a malfunctioning AI, one who controls all of NATO’s nuclear forces, and claims it is Satan incarnate, come back into the world to bring about Armageddon. It’s kind of a mix between “Skynet meets The Exorcist meets The Matrix”.
“Convict” – In the future, there are no prisons. If you’re convicted of a crime, you are sentenced to a color, then injected with millions of nanos that turn your skin and hair the color of your crime. Discrimination is legal against conviction colors, and for anyone unfortunate enough to commit a second crime while serving a conviction, their color becomes gray, and there are no laws at all to protect them.
“Search Terms” – Tyler ordered the best computer parts possible to have the most badass gaming computer possible. The parts that arrived weren’t what he expected, and when his curiosity overpowers his disappointment, he builds the computer anyway. His surprise that the computer can be controlled via voice commands and access the internet without any networking hardware is soon replaced by both fantasy and nightmare when he discovers the computer has a web browser that can pull up pages from the future. And it isn’t looking like a bright future.
“Extraction” – This is the one I’m working the hardest on, and the one I’ll probably finish without working on anything else. Then I plan on writing two more sequels. This is my ‘epic space opera’ I guess. This story is the one I’m the least forthcoming about. I’ll only say that it seems like a standard ‘First Contact’ and ‘Alien Invasion’ story at first, but what it becomes is far more shocking.
“Enforcer” – Connor Dunsmore is a once-great hockey player that is now toiling away the remaining years of his career as a tough guy for a minor league hockey team in Boise, Idaho. He also moonlights as a street enforcer for the team’s owner, a small-time Romanian mobster named Costache Ojacarcu. When Connor becomes an unwilling accomplice to murder, his life begins to spiral out of control. When he rescues an abused prostitute from one of Ojacarcu’s dealers, he begins to understand just how deeply he’s entrenched. (Enforcer will be published sometime in the first two weeks of March!)
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Honestly? AwesomeGang is one of the first two places I’ve ever actually ‘promoted’ anything. I have a Twitter account and a Facebook public page, plus my own website, but the truth is, when I release a book, I tweet/post about it once, maybe twice, then I don’t bother anymore.
I’ve annoyed enough of my friends and family, and that experience taught me not to annoy my potential readers who maybe aren’t as forgiving as my friends and family, who are used to be thoroughly annoyed by me for almost forty years. No one likes a spammer.
I’ve always believed that if I write a good book that readers want to read, that is the best kind of promotion there is. But I’ve also decided that I’ll try a little promo here and there with services like AG that seem to have engaged readers.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write the stories you want to read that no one else is writing. That’s it. Don’t write to make money. Don’t write to fill a genre, or to catch the money windfall from whatever genre is popular. Write because you love to write.
Money is nice, and helps pay the mortgage, but it isn’t everything, and stories that come from the heart with passion are always produce a better reader experience (well, mostly… everyone writes a stinker, and I’m no different).
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Pretty much anything Joe Konrath, Barry Eisler, and Hugh Howey have ever said. Which mostly has to do with the business side of writing (like avoiding bad contracts, rights grabs, etc.).
As for writing advice… I don’t know. I don’t listen to anyone’s advice when it comes to my writing/style. I write what I want to write, and I don’t let anything else influence it, even when it has to do with touchy, taboo, controversial, or hot-button topics.
What are you reading now?
“The Mask” by C.C. Kelley
“Measures of Absolution” by Marko Kloos (I’m REALLY looking forward to “Lines of Departure” but I haven’t had a chance to get to it yet)
“NOS4A2” by Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son)
What’s next for you as a writer?
I’ve got this grand plan where my wife and I ride the Amtrak to every NHL city in America and Canada (whatever Canada’s version of Amtrak is, anyway) and watch a professional hockey game. Thirty cities, thirty games, thousands of interactions with human beings of all stripes.
I want to write two books from this experience. One is the experience of riding across the continent on a train, something that is lost to just about everyone not in the Northeast. When is the last time you rode a real train to get somewhere other than to work or to home?
The second book is about the experience of visiting all thirty NHL cities, touring their facilities, interviewing random persons as well as players, coaches, management, etc.
I’m actually thinking about trying Kickstarter to see if I can get a little funding for this, maybe some attention and get a little help from Amtrak and the NHL. I can’t imagine trying to plot out 30 different stops over the course of a couple of months, making sure there’s an NHL game happening at each stop. And I’m sure the arena security guys won’t be too keen on my trying to get into locker rooms and such.
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?
“The Forever War” because I will probably read this at least one hundred times in my lifetime. I never get tired of it.
“The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” not because I’m a weird skinhead type, but because this book is HUGE. I might actually make it to the end of the book by the time I was rescued, which might be never, so go figure… I’m still only halfway through this book, but it is probably the most complete look at Hitler and Germany’s rise to power. I almost became a history teacher, and my wife does teach history, so you can imagine we have a ton of nerdy, boring books like this. That we love!
“The Gunslinger” by Stephen King (anything by King, really). Such a great, great story.
“Deathlands” by James Axler. This is actually a huge Men’s Adventure series, sort of like pulpy post-nuclear war stuff. I’ve read probably sixty of them so far. I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War, so nuclear war is a really huge part of my imagination.
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