-I started writing NCIS Behind the Glory to both focus on and deal with the problems I was dealing with after my daughter's death and to right the wrong of malpractice against me by the Navy.

-My daughter, fifteen year old,is my inspiration.  She gives me ideas., She loves to read books online and tells me things, basic ideas, of what she thinks would be interesting and I expand on those ideas.

-Being from WV we have a strong history for the arts.  Seeing plays are an interesting way of developing books on.

-I love living in the country, in nature. Sometimes sitting on the back porch relaxing is a place I love to write.

-I have a vivid imagination which lends to a great writing process.  Sometimes I write about things I've experienced, in part, to add a dose of meaning and reality to my books.

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I've wanted to be a writer almost as far back as I can remember. I grew up watching shows like Star Trek and Doctor Who, and I think it was around the time my parents took me to see The Wrath of Khan that I started to become aware of people who wrote movies, TV shows, and books. They didn't just come into being on their own, I realized. I was around nine or ten at the time.

I started writing at around that time, and of course the results were awful. Even at that age, I knew it was bad, but I kept at it. Over the years, I'd get a few pages into a story, scrap it, and start over, trying out this idea and that, but nothing quite clicked. But I continued to improve.

I submitted my first story to a magazine when I was seventeen. It wasn't accepted, but I kept at it. I hadn't landed on the right combination of characters, setting, dialogue, and action, but I continued getting gradually closer. Things finally started coming together when I connected to the Internet for the first time, back in the late 1990s. I discovered more outlets for my writing, where I could get rapid feedback and experiment with ideas, characters, and so on. I continued writing, practicing, improving.

In early 2002, everything in my head clicked into place and I had the core of my first novel, a huge city a few decades in the future named Neon City. It had once been a collection of small towns that went bankrupt over the years and were all bought up by a group of mega-corporations. They rebuilt the towns,  filled in the empty stretches in between, and moved their headquarters, research-and-development and production facilities there. They used it as a test bed for bleeding-edge technology, and eventually the result was a population of fifty million humans, genetically-engineered "anthros," robots, and AI, along with all sorts of gadgets and weapons.

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