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What inspired you to start writing?
I don't know. One day when I was eleven or twelve years old it popped into my mind to write a book about a pilot in WW2. I wrote three pages and didn't write another word of fiction for three years, when I'd been reading some really good books and it came to me again, hey, I can do that.
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Can you tell us a little about your latest book?
Everything We Had is the first in the series, No Merciful War. I'm working on the ninth book, Nos Credimus: a Novel of the Air War May-July 1943, and hope to release before Christmas. Nos Credimus follows the survivors of the characters appearing in Everything We Had, and some new characters who are necessary to the story as it unfolds.
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How do you create your characters?
You'll have to ask them. It's less "creation" than "discovery." Sometimes it starts when I figure out I need a character who does a certain job. If I already know what the job entails, often enough the character appears ready to roll except for backstory. If I don't know much about the job, the character develops more or less spontaneously as I research what the job is.
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What does your typical writing day look like?
You've probably seen that pie chart where writing is maybe 10% of what the writer does every day, and the rest of it is spent on video games or surfing the Internet or other forms of procrastination. Basically I try to set a word count goal. I find 1700 words works well. That comes from doing NaNoWriMo for a long time.
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What has been the most rewarding part of being an indie author?
Getting published at all! The trad part of the industry is almost impossible to break into, always has been, only it's worse now. I've been able to publish, gain a readership, and reach people I might not have been able to reach any other way.
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What’s one challenge you’ve faced in your writing journey?
Working in the face of discouragement. That can take different forms: a bad patch in personal relationships, poor sales, the cat doesn't like me, etc.
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Do you have any favorite writing tools or apps?
I started on a mechanical typewriter. Most of what I do on Word is the same thing I did on the typewriter. I have writer friends who swear by Scrivener, and it certainly looks attractive, but for me the learning curve is a bit much. I'll probably try it on my next book. Oh, Final Draft can be fun, especially the Beat Board feature. That's great for spitballing ideas.
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What advice would you give to new or aspiring indie authors?
First, read. Don't read crap, either. If you want to write in a genre, I'd populate a reading list with books that were popular in the genre 30-50 years back. The prose style, or the craft aspect of writing, if you will, was much better then. Read Mark Twain or Shakespeare or Ernest Hemingway or Nevil Shute or Andrew Wareham (well, he's contemporary, but a great writer) or C.S. Forester or Patrick O'Brian. But more important, write every day, even if it's a paragraph. Even if it's a sentence.
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How do you handle book promotion as an indie author?
I cross my fingers and spend money on advertising. I don't do it myself. There are writers who can but I'm not one of them.
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What’s next for you? Are you working on a new book?
On several, but the book I hope to release next is Nos Credimus, as noted above. The tenth and eleventh books in the series are also in the planning stage; respectively, that's Schweinfurt: a Novel of the European Air War August-October 1943 and ARGUMENT: a Novel of the European Air War February-April 1944. Then someday I'd like to write science fiction, but that's some years off.
