Storytelling has been a lifelong passion, especially when devising something fantastic to spin my way out of trouble—which was never successful—but I considered myself a “real” writer my junior year in high school when I took Creative Writing with Miss Doyle and wrote my first short story. I finished my first, full-length manuscript my senior year in college, and it wasn’t until then that I really considered myself an author.

The first book I ever published was actually my third full-length novel I’d ever written, and it was The City Beneath, Night Blood #1, in April 2015.

I’ve always been a huge fan of the vampire genre, especially the darker classics, like Anne Rice, and her contemporaries, like Laurell K. Hamilton’s early Anita Blake novels. I wanted to bring something fresh to the table, in a world parallel to our own. So many vampire novels are either based on vampires already being “out of the closet” or a secret that the main character agrees to protect. I wanted to create a world in which the main character was desperate to expose their existence; Cassidy’s struggle to protect her loved ones, protect herself and act with honor and truth has been a delicate journey I’ve very much enjoyed weaving.

Meredith resembles me in many ways: I prefer to separate myself from life in books and behind a computer the way she does behind a camera and with her computer software. We’re both passionate about out work, quick to forgive, and we cherish our friendships. I often feel like life is nothing but running on a hamster wheel; the faster I run, the harder I work, the more tired I become, no matter that I haven’t actually moved. I don’t think vampires are erasing my memory and making me start from scratch, like Meredith, but beside that minor detail, we certainly have a lot in common.

I’ve always been interested in storytelling. Even at a young age I was pretty active in storytelling, especially making up fables for my parents when I tried to get out of trouble.

As far as trying to be professional, I would say about a decade ago. I started with a book titled Autumn of Man. Absolutely loved it. It snowballed from there.

It was a short story called The Lighthouse on Mermaid Row. The story eventually ended up being the foundation for five more short stories that formed my first novel, The Lighthouse Keeper. Mermaid Row was actually submitted to be part of an anthology for Scarlet Galleon’s Fearful Fathoms, but it wasn’t quite horrific enough. I decided to go ahead and release it.

It was after a conversation with a late friend of mine. He was a Vietnam veteran. One day we started talking in the gym. I’m not sure exactly how we got on the subject, but he broached the subject of his time in the service. Something really changed in his demeanor. There was a void there, a loss that only a soldier who has experienced war can understand. I wanted to explore that in writing.

I want to make clear that My Lai is not a book about war. Far from it. It’s about fear, survival, the line between man/animal, and redemption.

Apparently, when I was very young. I have a notebook full of sloppy kid handwriting featuring stories about rainbows. I don’t know why, but I was really fascinated with rainbows as a kid.

This one, actually.

The book came to me one summer while I was working as a student in a library. I was tasked with pulling old checkout cards out of the backs of the books. I still have a stack of cards with the original story written out on them.

I have been interested in storytelling since the age of 3 if not younger and I started out making up rhymes that didn’t rhyme and telling stories only I found interesting. As I got older, I moved on to writing songs and poems, telling short stories through them and around the age of eight, I developed a love for script writing and stories told through plays and movies. That kept me happy for a good few years and still does, but when I discovered Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton around the age of none or ten, I also fell in love with the stories carved in the pages of a book where the characters and places are made in my imagination, different and delightful for each and every person.

The first book I published was a children’s story called ‘Shania Streep wanted to Sleep’ about a little girl who goes on a nighttime adventure trying to identify a strange sound that is keeping her awake. It is book one in a ten book series called Wanted, but I have put book 2, ‘Emma Creet wanted a Sweet’ on hold, to pursue my novels.

I was watching TV one day, a long, long time ago and I suddenly got a scene in my head: the opening scene. I didn’t know who the girl in my head was or why what was happening was happening but I saw it clearly. I wrote the scene down and then eventually forgot about it. Years later, when browsing through my computer, I came across this opening scene and was hooked. It was like the story had been simmering in my subconscious over the years because suddenly I knew who this girl was and why things were happening and the story evolved from there.

I think the character that is most like me, would be Dezaray. Like her, I experienced the loss of a loved one at age thirteen and know how such a traumatic experience can alter such a young minds perception of life and their place in it. Like her, I believe there is so much more to the world and I am open to it. I also dream of magical realms and wouldn’t mind a Milo (Dezaray’s love interest) of my own.

There are quite a few little scenes that made me smile and gave me goosebumps whilst writing and I truly hope they do the same for my readers. I think my favourite scene… (this is always a tricky one) … would be the scene where Dezaray and Milo are in the woods being chased by an evil warlock because it starts out all heart pounding and terrifying but ends up being really romantic. You’ll understand when you read it, haha!

Writing to tell stories is a relatively new thing for me. I only started doing it about six or seven years ago. I did a lot of expository writing for academic journals and such through grad school and then I wrote and edited articles for fishing magazines for years after that, but storytelling of this kind is new for me.

Havoc Rising, the first book in the Metis Files series. It was published in June of 2015.

Someone described my first book as “Tom Clancy meets the Iliad,” and I wanted to write one that was more like “Jason Bourne meets Harry Potter.” I wanted one to write a story that was more nonstop action, something that moved from place to place in a hurry. Plus, there was the whole blackout thing that happened in San Diego and it seemed to make a perfect segue for a surreptitious chase scene.

I suppose the character most like me is Diomedes, but only in some of the ways where I’ve been able to develop his personality a bit more in depth. Obviously I didn’t invent him. There are dozens of myths and legends about him, including whole sections of the Iliad. I got to flesh out his character a bit more and I’d say that’s where you might run into similarities. I also have some similarities with Duma, too. Abraxos, Duma’s brother, is probably the least like me—he’s all action and no planning. As for exactly how I’m like Duma and Diomedes, well, readers will just have to speculate.

I have been writing stories since I was in elementary school. My best friend and I would have sleepovers and write short stories through the night. Her reaction to my writing encouraged me to become a writer. 

One of my favorite parts in this book is when Constance visits her sister's family for the weekend.

I’ve always enjoyed writing. Story telling was something that came easy to me and I used to talk out loud to myself while pretending to be different characters. I started writing poetry, then songs (my father was a song writer) and then fan fiction. After college and being married awhile, my son refused to go to the bookstore since he said none of the books had guys on it that looked like him. At that point, I wanted to write to his enjoyment.

Explorer X- Alpha was a middle grade science fiction novel. Where, for most kids, a trip to space camp is the trip of a lifetime—for Aadi it was life altering.

This story was inspired by a short story written by my husband twenty years ago for a college class. I was cleaning out some old boxes and found it. After reading it, I asked him if I could develop the story and change a few things. He gave me freedom to do so and collaborated with me on it.

I’ve loved reading ever since I learned how. By the time I was a teenager, I found myself favoring novels with anti-heroes for protagonists, many of these fictional characters themselves being writers. In my mid-teens I left my village home in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains and moved to Montreal, where I encountered ample opportunity to slip into my anti-hero persona, which often had me imagining I was a writer on the road to perdition.

I managed to get a fair way down the road to perdition, but I didn’t write any fiction till many years later. But the idea lurked there in the back of my mind the whole time.

I moved to Southeast Asia because the whole region stimulated me, and I thought that if I couldn’t write fiction here I couldn’t write it anywhere and I’d have to think about learning a trade. While I girded my literary loins, I taught writing in a Bangkok university, traveled, partied, scuba dived, and whatnot till one day a Thai colleague asked whether I’d ever considered modeling. A friend of hers ran a modeling agency and was looking for a Western male about my age to play a businessman in a series of ads for a hotel chain. Later, as I tried to describe this very interesting adventure in a letter to my parents, it got so long and, I believed, so amusing that I ended it by saying they could read the rest of it in the newspaper story to follow. And sure enough the Bangkok Post Sunday magazine section ran it over a full page or two as “My Career as a Model.”

That gave me a real buzz, and I was inspired to write more, mostly humorous articles and then a few short stories under the penname Ham Fiske. I imagined my readership as Western ex-pats needing diversion from their Sunday morning hangovers. Soon these pieces became regular features, and friends were encouraging me to find someone to publish a collection. But there weren’t enough good ones to fill a book, plus I believed Ham Fiske could do better work than this. So I wrote a number of longer and meatier short stories to punctuate those I’d already had published. The result was Bangkok Knights, a collection of stories described instead as a novel by Asia Books, its last publisher, since the stories are linked by overlapping characters and an implicit plot development involving, surprisingly enough, the nameless narrator who hovers above all the farce and tragedy, the ironic old hand who himself comes to feature more and more in the stories till in the end he’s revealed to be as great a blunderer as any other in the story.

Over the years quite a number of people told me they thought these were merely a collection of anecdotes — that they were all “real” stories that “really” happened to me. Not so. It’s fiction. But I’m flattered that many chose to believe they came so freighted with verisimilitude. (I couldn’t resist that phrase. Sorry.)

Two of the longer stories I wrote to flesh out that book were too different in voice from the others, and I held them back. These gave birth to Kicking Dogs, my first proper novel and in some ways the most successful one, which had three different publishers over the years and is currently available on Amazon in digital and print-on-demand self-published versions. ... covers and https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Dogs-Collin-Piprell/dp/1452802726 ...

I had read about the “gray goo scenario,” something that might well follow the escape into the wild of just a single self-replicating nanobot. I couldn’t help wondering how anyone could survive a disaster than would turn the surface of the planet into a sea of microscopic robots within a matter of hours. The problem niggled at me till the outlines of a story started to emerge. I’d actually begun to draft the story before I realized I was writing a science fiction novel, something it hadn’t occurred to me I wanted to do.

I started songwriting when I was about 12, which is sort of like storytelling I guess. But I’ve always had a wild imagination, and Age Six Racer was a combination of that and life experiences.

AGE SIX RACER is my first!

Last summer I found a dead mouse in the garage. I made a joke about the mouse’s back story to my fiancé, who is an indie author, and she encouraged me to turn it into a book (haha).

I remember writing my first song when I was six years old!

My debut novel, “Celebration House,” was published by a small press in 2013. Last year, I bought the rights back to the book, revised, and republished it on March 1st. “Building Celebration House” is the first installment of this trilogy.

I woke from a dream with the characters and plot clear in my mind. I jotted down everything I could remember and began working. When I had a brief period of unemployment in 2013, I finished the book.

Most likely, it happened when I was young and sitting around with my siblings and friends. They were pretty much all scary stories.

My first work is Mark of Destiny, in the epic fantasy genre.

That is actually kind of a hard question to answer. There were so many contributing factors, but I knew that I really wanted to write a fantasy series and that was primarily my driving motivation.

I would definitely have to say that Eco is the least like me, although I believe almost everyone is a little crazy. Echo thirsts for power and control and I truly believe that these only bind and hamper one’s own freedom. Also, I don’t just randomly slay people who irritate me, otherwise the roads would be full of examples of my irritations.

Thank you for having me on your blog! I’m happy to be hanging out at Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer today.

Forever. I’ve written since I was a little kid, won contests in middle school and high school, and even majored in English writing. However, life took me in a very different direction (medicine) for many years. Until I could return to the writing again…which is why I’m here today!

I believe it was a short story in The Stokeley Review, an anthology of young writers in east Tennessee. Might have published something before then, but I can’t recall.

Hell’s Valley is my current paranormal western series. I don’t think there really is a paranormal western genre, so it’s possible that I made this genre up. The series has the rough-and-ready wild sense of ranchers and cowboys, but also the otherworldly forces and psychic powers integrated into the plot.

What inspired me to write this series was a brief mention in book #3 of my prior paranormal Hell to Pay series where characters wonder if the subtle powers seen in that book could be passed along to other generations. Then I started thinking of a family of siblings with odd powers and where they might live. And then I linked in the … well, you’ll have to read the series. If I explain the connections too much, it’ll spoil the story!

I’ve always been a storyteller, ask anyone that’s ever heard me tell them what I had for breakfast. It wasn’t until 2013 that I started writing down the stories in my head.

My first book was Love is a Fire and it was published May 2014.

Well, I was brainstorming with my friend, Dawn, about a Christmas story which led to The King and the Pawn. As I started writing Frankie’s story, her brother and sisters were introduced and I knew they each had to have their own stories as well.

Frankie is definitely like me. We’re both loud, independent, and tell it like it is!

Schooldays.

“The Torch”

In 2011 when American Seal Team Six hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden on presidential orders in Operation Neptune Spear in Abbadabad, Pakistan it was the final act in an ultra-secret CIA operation hailed by US president Barrack Obama as a huge success and was seen as the crowning achievement of his presidency. Yet according to Brigadier Shaukat Qadir who investigated Operation Neptune Spear for the Pakistan government, this was only achieved through Bin Laden’s betrayal by Al Qaeda itself, which, by completely deceiving the CIA, received the $25,000,000 cash bounty America had placed on their ailing leader’s head.

I’ve loved writing since I was a little girl. I didn’t just enjoy writing stories at school – I was always writing them at home too, letting my imagination run riot. When I became a journalist for my ‘day job’ it was like I wasn’t working at all because I enjoyed it so much. And then a friend of mine in the UK (also a journalist) got a two-book deal with a major publisher from out of nowhere and that made me think: “I wonder if I could do that too?” And so I started to write my first novel…

Lover in Law was my first published novel and actually, at the moment in both the US and the UK it’s still my bestselling book! I’m hoping that my current release A Call to Heaven will do better still, because this one is definitely the one that’s most special to me.

My mother (who sadly died way too young) came to me in a dream a couple of years ago. In that dream she gave me the premise for A Call to Heaven as well as its title. It was the most brilliant and inspiring way to come up with an idea and I really hope I’ve done my Mom proud.

I identify with the lead female character Amy in this book, but she really isn’t anything like me. How we’re similar is in our love for our lost mothers and how we’d do anything to be able to speak to them again. Amy’s also a great mom and I like to think that I am too. After that, Amy’s nothing like me. She married a man so odious that I don’t think I could have stayed with him. She’s also a great cook whilst I, by contrast, am woefully incompetent in the kitchen!

I started as a child telling stories to my younger sister. I remember staying up late at night with her, weaving tales of princesses and fairies. Then, as I matured, my stories evolved to include other subjects. I worked as a training manager in a corporation for twenty years, and often created stories (situational scenarios) to include in part of my classes. In my thirties, I had a hysterectomy and was homebound for six weeks. To help pass the time, I started writing my first novel. I haven’t stopped writing since.

My first story published was a short story for True Romance Magazine called The Princess Dress. Turns out, the stories in the magazine aren’t exactly true. LOL. But I was so ticked seeing my story in print. I ended up writing several stories for the magazine before contracting with a publishing house.

Fifty Shades of Grey. I have friends who are deep into the BDSM lifestyle (I am not.) When Fifty Shades came out, I overheard many conversations about how the book wasn’t quite accurate. As someone who isn’t in the lifestyle, I wondered what it would be like for two characters who also know little about the lifestyle to dip a toe into that world. One character, my hero, would be a stripper whose stage name is The Dom. My heroine would read erotic books and trying a little BDSM might be something she really wants to do. But I also wanted to educate the readers, just a bit, on what the lifestyle is about. I had several of my friends give me guidance regarding that education. In the end, I think the lack of knowledge/experience of my hero/heroine and the education they receive, made Unmasked Secrets a fun, great read.

Hannah Armstrong is the most like me. She’s a high school principal (something I actually went to college and got a Master’s degree to do), and she’s a bit of a type-A personality. She’s organized, proficient, smart and determined – all traits that I identify with, though I’m not as organized as I used to be.