A: It's difficult to do that. Since I co-own and co-operate Awe-Struck E-Books I find myself immersed in writing. If not my own, then someone else's. I was a math and chemistry teacher for the past 36 years, the last 23 of them in a community college. But I retired from all that on December the 20^th, 2003, and now I can devote all my time to the Awe-Struck business. And I do, everyday, including Saturday's and Sunday's. And I wouldn't want it any other way. I love to write, I love to edit, I love to design and keep up the website. It's the dream career I always longed for but never knew I'd be so lucky to have.

Q: What made you start writing and when did you start?

A: When I was very young--seven--eight, maybe--I would listen to programs on the radio like Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, Sky King, The Lone Ranger, etc. These programs would always be selling something for us kid listeners. To get the spy ring or the secret decoder, or--drum roll...the pen that writes underwater! <g>, we would have to send in a boxtop from whatever breakfast cereal they were selling, along with 25 cents and a note that told them what you wanted. My mom would always write the note for me, but she would ask me what she should say. And she would say it in different ways so I could make choices. It would be the simplest kind of note, like, "Please send me the Sky King secret decoder ring," or something like that. This was tough going for me at my age, but Mom would persist until she got what she wanted out of me. And that was my first foray into writing. When I got a bit older, my dad helped me with vocabulary and sentence construction. Between the two of them they gave me my writing wings. I've been flappin' ever since.

Q: What type of books do you write? Is there a reason you write about what you do?

A: I write science-fiction romance and paranormal romance. There are reasons why this is so. I have strong interests in science. And I've also read extensively into the alien phenomena which I find fascinating and all consuming. The two go together well. Skeptics would say otherwise, but I ignore skeptics and write from my own point of view. I've had spectacular paranormal experiences in my life, and when I write my books, I write from the platform of reality and direct experience rather than wild imagination.

I try to make my characters realistic as well as entertaining. When I was five, I caught Polio, and that experience has colored every facet of my life. Many of my characters are physically disabled. I've been asked if I give characters disabilities because I want to show the world that disabled people are "normal" in the sense that they are fully capable of doing great things just as able-bodied people are. Well, yeah. But there's another reason I give my characters these "strengths". Living with a disability is tough going. I don't mean to make more of it than is there, but when you fight and live with a disability every nanosecond of your waking existence you soon learn to rise above it, because you can either rise above it or you can go down in defeat. My characters with disabilities NEVER go down in defeat. And they never will. Is this realistic? It can be if you want it to be. My characters fight the bad guys and win. They reach out for love and win. We're all winners, one way or another. Some of us just don't know it. Hopefully, my stories will help wake some of us up to the fact that there can be victory in everything we do, regardless of our particular set of circumstances.

Q: How do you come up with the idea for a book? Once you have an idea, do you plot it out, fly by the seat of your pants, or what?

A: Writing is the most mysterious process you can imagine. Sometimes I sit and write when the words simply fly off my keyboard and I have no idea where the ideas come from. Sometimes my characters take on a life of their own and go in directions I never even considered when I began a particular story. Sometimes I just sit back and gasp at what I've written. Where are the ideas coming from? Is all this in my brain? Is my brain so brilliant that it just puts all these ideas together and it just seems like my writing comes from nowhere? Or is there an outside entity telling me what to write? Before you laugh too loudly at this last idea, many authors think they are chanelling their material. I'm one of them. Certainly not all of my writing goes down this way. You've got to be in a semi meditational state for the big guns to move in. <g> But when it happens it's glorious. I only wish everyone could experience what I so often experience. This is why writing is so addictive. You're always going for the "high", and the more you write, the more often you experience it. Fledgling writers often ask me how hard it is to write a book. It's hard if that's what you want to do without first developing your writing talents. It's like playing the banjo. (I've given more banjo lessons in my time than I care to go into.) My students soon learned that if you don't learn the patterns and rolls first, you'll never get to Foggy Mountain Breakdown. But once you learn the basics, once you can sit down and not constantly think about grammar, syntax, spelling, etc., Foggy Mountain Breakdown is yours!

Q: What one thing do you like the most about being a writer, and why? What do you like the least?

A: I like building my own worlds. While I'm writing, I live in that world. It's mine to do what I please. But there can be danger in that attitude, too. You can overdo a character, or a scene, when you don't have a partner telling you you've gone too far. You can become so immersed in your world, you just lose it and write things that sound terrible when you read it the next day. Sometimes when I channel material I find that the ideas are always exactly what I want. But then I'll go back and try to make it better. This is often my "overdoing it" stage, and I have to be careful to rewrite until it sits right. Sometimes it takes days and sometimes weeks before I'm satisfied that everything fits and works.

What I like the least about writing is I seldom have the time I need to write. When most of my time goes to holding up my end of Awe-Struck, I find myself short of writing time since Awe-Struck is far beyond a fulltime job. But I invested in a really clever keyboard a year or so ago that allows me to write in any circumstance. It's called the AlphaSmart keyboard, and it's light, completely self-contained, and runs on plain old batteries. The batteries are supposed to last for as long as a year, and I take the keyboard with me everywhere so when I have a few spare moments I can work on a chapter, or jot down ideas. When I have enough material that I want to transfer to my Mac, (it's also PC compatible), I plug it into my USB port via USB cable, press the Send key, and watch the stuff I've written literally print itself onto the screen of a new Word document. I couldn't write without it. I wrote my latest novel, Country Priestess, almost completely on the AlphaSmart keyboard, one chapter at a time.

Q: Tell us about the first time you got the call or the email from a publisher wanting to publish one of your books.

A: I honestly can't remember. I've been writing for a very long time, and I'm not even sure, now, what I had accepted first. Many authors tell me that they were ecstatic when they heard from us that we had accepted their book. I'm glad we make people happy. <g>

Q: If you include love scenes in your books, are they difficult for you to write? How do you decide whether to include a love scene at that point in the book, and if so, how explicit to make it?

A: When I began writing my first novel, ta'Sara's Gift, I found it weird to write that first love scene. But as I continued to write these kinds of scenes I found them liberating. Everyone wants to nurture and to be nurtured. Writing scenes like this gives me the chance to get these feelings out. As for how explicit I get, I think that the more I write, the braver I get. But I have my limits. I'm not interested in porn--nor is Awe-Struck. But regardless of how you write these scenes, some readers will want more explicitness, while others will be offended. There's no way to please everyone with something like this: you can only please yourself. What's most important is that the detail matches the story-line. You develop a feel for that as you become more experienced. I can tell you that some of our authors write very explicit love scenes. Holy cats, some of them are real barn burners! <G> But we leave those scenes as is. We, as a rule, don't tone down a love scene. It's the author's choice and good judgment that stays intact. Maybe I'm straying a bit from your original question, but I think it's important to know that the author will know what to do. And that includes me.

Q: Are your books something you alone create, or do you have trusted advisors, brainstorm partners, or first readers you rely on to help you get the story right?

A: The plots and characters are mine, and mine alone. The exceptions are the three books in the Dark Ships trilogy, and I was appreciative of the my writing partner on that particular project because the story was so big it needed two story tellers. Ordinarily, though, I don't allow others to share my world and my vision. I don't work well that way. I'm not a team player when I write. I almost never ask for another's opinion. (An exception was with my latest book, Country Priestess. I asked Mary Taffs for feedback, and she was so helpful I felt moved to put a thank you at the beginning of the book.) Joyce and Jim Lavene write all their books together. I couldn't do that: I'm too independent. I get a story idea and think about it for awhile. Sometimes I'll think about it for months before I write the first word. I have a little digital recorder that I talk ideas into. Sometimes I'll jot down ideas on my Palm Pilot. I immerse myself into the world I'm creating. As I stated earlier, sometimes the ideas literally spill from my fingers. Then I often find myself tearing out old scenes, old ideas, and rewriting them to be more compatible with the channeled material. It's great fun because you never know how the story will progress and resolve itself.

Q: Do you ever suffer from writer's block? Have you found any effective ways for dealing with it?

A: I never suffer from writer's block. I immerse myself so completely in the world I'm creating that I never find myself at a loss for words. When I first began writing I wrote non fiction--more often than not, educational material. I had writer's block quite often, then. I suspect it was because non fiction isn't my first love. Telling stories is my first love. And once I found it, writer's block became a thing of the past.

Q: Is any one of your books the book of your heart, a book you felt compelled to write? Tell us about it.

A: Although I really do love all my books, Love Signs holds a special place in my heart. When I was still teaching at the college level a young woman joined my algebra class. She was hearing impaired. I was so distraught, that at the end of the day I went to the nearest book store and bought a signing dictionary. I taught myself to sign on a conversational level in less than a semester. Through that experience I grew in emotional directions I couldn't have predicted. Love Signs was one of those directions. I wanted to write a book where the hearing person could look into the world of the hearing impaired individual. Love Signs, I feel, is still one of my finest efforts.

Q: Any final thoughts?

A: I would encourage everyone to write. It's great food for the soul. It allows the soul to take flight. Even if you never have your book published, you will have allowed yourself to step into a world of your own making. And when you step into that world, you will be given the chance to heal. All of us hurt, all of us desire. You can salve your wounds and satisfy your desires in a healthy way if you create a healthy world and live there for awhile. You'll know when it's time to return. I'm not suggesting you neglect the people in your real world. But if you live in a world of your own making, and if you can visit it every now and then, the real world will become something far more powerful than you can imagine. When your soul heals, you can move mountains--even in the real world...