When
did you start writing?
July 26th, 1993. I was on a 25-hour flight (4 planes, 3
layovers)
from Pusan, South Korea to Darwin, Australia. I started writing in my
journal. Instead of an entry about the trip, a short story grew from
beneath my pen. The story has long since been shredded, but that was
the day I really started writing.
When did you become an author?
I'm not an author. I'm a writer. Writers write, authors talk
about having written. (Sounds a bit obnoxious? No, it has pretty well
stood the test of time. Would that it weren't so.) One is a career
path, one is party conversation.
I started writing October 1st, 1995. The words that had started two
years before kept flowing. They demanded time. I'm a dedicated night
owl of long standing, yet that day I set my alarm clock for 6a.m. It
nearly
killed
me. Nothing in the world could make me get up that early . . . except
my writing. Two hours every morning before work. That's the day I
became a writer.
Why SF/F?
I was stuck in the land of Winnie-the-Pooh and "The Little
Engine that Could" until I hit that life-changing teacher. Mrs. Kaye,
3rd grade. If it hadn't been for her, I would not be any of the things
I am now. In one year, she booted my reading level from
1st to 9th grade, never mind what she did to my understanding of
fractions. One day, I saw Dad put down Arthur C.
Clarke's "The City and the Stars." I picked it up. I have reread that
book yearly for the last 4 decades. For 15 years I consumed
SF/F books. I kept inhaling books after that, I simply expanded out
into the classics and added a few others to my list: King, Cussler,
Patterson . . . but my first love is still SF/F.
What authors have influenced you the most?
How should I know? I'm too close to my writing to tell, to
close
to see it as anything but mine. I can tell you which authors have
driven
me to read their complete works cover to cover, the ones who drove me
to buy every book they'd written and read them in
chronological order. They still sit
on my shelves as complete sets: Arthur C. Clarke, Ayn Rand, Jack
London, Herman Hesse,
James Clavell, and most of Joseph Conrad. Bradbury, Le Guin, and
McCaffrey are not far behind. When I wish to revel, I pull
down my much-worn copy of Martin Gardner's "The Annotated Alice."
Reverend Charles Dodgson was a Genius, with a capital "G."
What drives your writing?
That's easy. It is posted on the wall right above my writing computer: To champion the human spirit, the
power of joy, and the wonder of love. If
it doesn't do this, I don't care to write it. If a story doesn't
interest, motivate, consume, evoke some drastic emotional response from
me, why should it do so in my reader? They can tell. They
can always
tell. I write what makes me passionate.
