I can still remember the day I hit Amazon’s “publish” button for the first time. Afterward, I told my wife, “If even one person reads this book and likes it, that’ll be enough for me.” That was in November of 2013. I’d just finished my first novel, a one-hundred-ten-thousand-word, year-and-a-half-long project that had been one…
About ten years ago, Doug visited a hypnotherapist, and while in an altered state, he experienced several past lives. Although I saw the same person, my experience was different: I didn’t experience much of anything. I have always been skeptical of such things, tending more toward the “if I can’t smell it, taste it, eat…
Why did I write The Angel Warriors series? That question, and any other question relating to writing, is never easy for me to answer because I never entertained the slightest notion of becoming a writer. Around 1974 or so, I became involved in various fandoms, and I wrote a fanzine story about a near-death experience.…
Many of the experiences that Neffie went through were a combination of the things that my great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers went through. Although my parents and grandparents couldn’t recall all the slave master names and the people who played a pivotal role in my great-grandmothers’ and great-great-grandmothers’ lives, I took what information was given to me…
You can’t see me, but I am here. I do believe I started mid-story. Please, forgive me; let me back up a bit. We are born with the ability to do great things. Will we be the next Beethoven, Shakespeare, or Joan of Arc and transform our darkness into something we can use to overcome…
Whether it be the 1910 horror film, Frankenstein, written and directed by J. Searle Dawley, or the 1974 comedy from Mel Brooks, Young Frankenstein, the image of the monster and his creator are forever etched into our minds. But with all the great adaptations to this fine story over nearly two centuries, we should not…
Who doesn’t like music? To say music is powerful is the understatement of the millennium. It activates our brain in ways nothing else can. It makes us feel emotions and remember times gone by. We know thousands—if not tens of thousands—of songs, but we think nothing of it. Music is an alphabet of twelve notes…
Over forty years ago, I embarked on an incredible journey: digging up the roots of my family tree. It whisked me away to such remote places of the world as the quaint hamlet of Porlock on the southwest coast of England, where I found myself among pirates and smugglers. It dragged me through the bloody…
One thing we authors often hear is “kill your darlings.” This usually refers to the parts of our books we really like but may not work in the larger context of the story. That could include certain elements, tropes, or favorite characters. But some authors take a different approach to this. I asked Andy Peloquin,…
I started writing when I was a kid. I always loved to read and would get lost in worlds that were so vivid in my imagination. When I was in fourth grade, I entered a young writers’ conference and placed second. After that, I started writing short stories in spiral notebooks and eventually had too…
