Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Hmmm. Message. There are lots of messages in Eviction Notice. For instance, remember the buddy system: Alice and Johnny, Clayton and Tyler, Barnaby and Gary, Sarah and Jenny, etc.; when the world is going to end, find your buddy.
Also, remember, the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray. I could give you a list, but basically, almost everything in Eviction Notice that's supposed to happen, doesn't.
Then there are other messages, about free will, nature, the universe, and the value of a good lawyer. So, yes, there are messages I want the reader to grasp, but I don't want to take away the fun of discovering them.
Is there any special method to your writing?
Eviction Notice began as a screenplay, and I had completed a finished first draft before I tried to write it as a book. Because of that I had a strong base of dialog and action, and then I just wrote and rewrote.
I'm slow and I have poor punctuation. I put everything in lists, and I don't trust commas. My first draft of Eviction Notice has 275 semicolons that I had to remove during edits.
Fortunately, (IMHO) Eviction Notice is a great story, and I had a great editor. (Anne Dubuisson.)
How many hours a day do you spend reading /writing?
I never have time to read other novels. I go through about one or two a year. It didn't used to be that way. But now I'm married, a dad, and run my own business, so gone are the days of spending a whole weekend wrapped up in a book.
I do drive a lot, and so I do audio books, which are excellent, but not the same as reading.
Also, almost all the reading I do these days is on science and technology. On that, I read mostly journal articles on the web, and usually about 30 minutes to an hour a day.
I write any chance I can get that I'm not exhausted at the end of the day. But that works out to a few hours a week.
What books have most influenced your life?
Influenced my life? The list is small: the Tao Te Ching, The Essene Gospel of Peace, the autobiography of Mohandas Gandhi, and Mark Twain's Letters From The Earth.
I'm not very well read as far as classic western literature goes. I have three main reading modes: philosophy, science, and escapism. Eviction Notice is a little bit of each, but mostly it's escapism.
If you could be the author of any novel, which would it be and why?
The Harry Potter series, without a doubt. It's brilliant, fun, moving, and an incredible accomplishment that any author would be thrilled to have completed. And it's loved by tens of millions of readers, and massively profitable. J.K. Rowling has done a wildly valuable service to the world by writing a book (the Sorcerers Stone) that young people simply devoured, and then made each successive book thicker and better. A whole generation grew up learning that reading can be awesome. Harry Potter changed reading across the world.
What are your current projects?
I'm writing the second book in the Eviction Notice series. That's taking up most of my writing time.
