My readers and listeners have asked to know a bit more about me, as a writer. I’m generally tight with revealing any personal details. I’ve had stalkers (one ex, one overly enthusiastic fan of my books), but ask me questions about writing, and you probably won’t get me to shut up.

So, here goes.

And these questions are ones I’ve received via email, comments on social media, or DMs.

What do you like to read and how does that influence your writing?

I’m an eclectic reader in both fiction and nonfiction. My fiction reading trends toward mysteries, psychological thrillers, and, yes, espionage fiction. My nonfiction reading is history, most any era, politics—there’s no escaping that lately—and biographies. I also read how-to-write books by other authors: Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, and Ursula K. LeGuin are some of my favorites.

That nonfiction reading often includes research for my historical espionage fiction, but I’m a history nerd anyway, so I’d read history even if it wasn’t research. Most of my political reading is for a political book club, but even that works its way into my fiction.

When I read fiction, what influences my writing is how the story is told, i.e., what point of view is used, what tense, how has the author elevated the action? So, yeah, sometimes reading fiction is more an exercise in improving one’s writing instead of enjoying the book.

What are your writing habits?

I try to write every day. Quite often, I start out in the morning re-reading something I’ve written the day before then shake my head at how bad it is. After fixing that, I move on to write the next scene or chapter. Or I may switch projects. Sometimes that gives me perspective on what might be wrong in another project.

I generally write for an hour to two hours in the morning and most days, an hour or so in the afternoons. On occasion when I can’t get to sleep, I’ve done some midnight writing.

I guess what I’m saying in a far too convoluted way is that my writing habits are to place butt in chair and write.

What is your favorite place to write?

That depends on my mood. I’d say about 75% of my writing happens in my home office, where I have a terrific view of the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains beyond.

I also enjoy coffee shop writing. I’m the rare extrovert writer. I’m energized by people, so the hustle and bustle of a coffee shop helps with my creativity. When COVID meant coffee shop writing wasn’t available, I often played “coffee shop” sound effects on my phone while writing.

I do like writing by the water for the serenity and beautiful views, though I haven’t done that much lately. Another favorite place is a writers retreat called Porches in Nelson County, Virginia. This is an old farmhouse, redone as writing suites. Four writer friends and I try to go there every year for a week. We write, fix great food together, and critique what we’ve written. And, uh, maybe drink a bit too much whiskey. But, hey, keeping up the writer stereotype.

What is something you really want to write about?

Something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time is write a novel about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. It’s the whole ancestors thing for me, and The Troubles shaped my attitudes toward Ireland and Great Britain when I was younger.

So, a few years ago, I wrote that novel, set it aside, edited it, set it aside, rewrote it, rewrote it again, and just this past February, it went out to my group of beta readers for critique.

I can check that box, then.

What do you look for when choosing a setting for a scene?

I love choosing some place I’ve never been, then learning as much as I can about that place so I feel as if I can write about it accurately, as if I’d been there.

Remember Google Earth (now Google Maps)? I once set a series in Belgrade in then-Yugoslavia and got a feel for the city and its history by using street-level view Google Earth. I also wrote a car chase scene that way. A reader of that series once asked me when I was in Belgrade. He’d worked there for the State Department and said that he felt as if he were back there. Made my day.

I know it’s a thing to hate on Google right now, but Google Maps works well for authors like me who would go into deep debt from traveling to places we want to write about.

What was your favorite book as a child?

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. It was the first book ever gifted to me by a relative, and I was rather young, maybe first or second grade. I read it from cover to cover, though, more than once. I still have it, though it lost its front cover somewhere along the way. It was the book that made me want to be a writer.

How do you put yourself in the head of a character?

That’s both easy and difficult. Easy because I created the character. I know their back story. I know their values, what they love, what they fear, how they think.

But it’s difficult when the character is so different from you. My protagonist, Mai Fisher, is an unflappable, unperturbable, unemotional spy. I’ve been none of those things, though pilot training helped me be unflappable and unperturbable to a certain degree, so I could extrapolate. My other protagonist, Alexei Bukharin, is a man, and I’m not, so I had to take positive characteristics, and a few negative ones, from men I knew—my dad, my ex, my male colleagues—to flesh him out.

What’s scary is when your fictional characters talk to you in a dream and tell you what they don’t like about what you’ve written. I kid you not.

Have you ever written anything you’d be embarrassed to publish?

Of course! I have two manuscripts which I’ve marked as “do not publish” once I’m dead.

Inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune, in college I wrote what, in my head, was an equivalent science fiction epic. People who read bits of it weren’t so sure, and after putting it aside for literally decades, I found it again after I moved to where I live now. It’s beyond awful, so awful, I carried the manuscript to the trash bin. But I couldn’t toss it. I remembered the hours and hours I’d put into it, and I realized that it was a normal first step for a fledgling writer. So I hid it, with that disclaimer.

The second manuscript was my first year doing National Novel Writing Month—2008. This was barely two years after my ex became my ex, I was in a rut at work, and a few years before my only brother died. I was a mess. What I wrote was a series of vignettes (50,000 words worth) about my life. Some good stuff but mostly bad stuff. I titled it Semi-Autobiographical because I’d altered some details to spare people’s feelings. I intended to pitch it to agents, but after a re-read, I realized it was too self-centered and maudlin. I have mined it for a couple of short stories that were published in journals. Again, I can’t bring myself to delete it.

What was the last scene you wrote and how did you like it?

It was an interrogation scene where my character Mai Fisher had to convince a woman to tell what she knew about the bad guys, but Mai had to do it in a non-violent way. Mai uses logic but also appeals to the woman’s insecurities and flips her. I really like it, but of course, it’s up to my beta readers and my editor to declare it worthy enough to publish.

What’s the next book percolating in your head?

It’s actually two. My next Ewington Mystery, number 3, tentatively titled Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters—about a famous rap musician who comes back anonymously to his home town to find who killed his sister.

In the current series I’m rewriting and prepping for beta readers, I’m somewhat wrapping up Mai and Alexei’s story. (Don’t fuss at me. It’s time.) Then, the thought came into my head: You’ve never written about their first mission together. I have, actually, but it was only backstory, fleshing out the characters. So I thought. Every now and then, a scene pops into my head for The First Mission, and I break off and write it.

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You know, each writer is unique, their characters are unique, their style is unique, but the writing life is almost universal. Ask any author these same questions, and you’ll find out how similar we are.