Deadly Secrets - Author Interview

1.) How long have you been writing?

Officially, I would say 1998. That was when I dreamt up Deadly Secrets and started working on it.

Actually though, I can remember typing out short stories back in grade school. Try to picture a short scrawny kid wrestling a heavy electric typewriter up onto a high kitchen table, that was me.

After high school in 1992, I started messing around with some serious storylines (And moved up to a portable word-processor-Whoa!). My first one falls dead in middle of the everlasting vampire theme.


2.) What initiated your interest in Armorica as a region?

Interestingly enough, there is a passage in The New Arthurian Encyclopedia regarding Claudas’s own son, Dorien. From these tiny bits, I torqued and twisted them into my little tall tale.


3.) The book was well-researched. Tell me something about your research efforts.

Whoever said that truth is stranger than fiction nailed my life on the head.

Truthfully, when I started writing seriously, I never thought about doing an Arthurian novel. At the time, I wanted to but I wanted to do something unique. So, I just pushed it off to the back of my mind.

As Fate would have it, though, my muse streaked right in front of me.

One day, my friend and I went over to his house. When we first got there, we had gone down into the basement. I needed to use the bathroom so I went upstairs. I reached the top of the stairs and halted. My friend’s wife (TT-the muse of Sabrina) stood naked in their living room. For a moment, she had no clue that she was no longer home alone.

Honestly, I believe adultery is wrong and nothing ever happen between us. But, she is beautiful and my thoughts did run wild. In that state of mind, I wondered what could ever justify a supposed friend having an affair with his friend’s wife. With this burning question in mind, I forged the greatest tragedy of Deadly Secrets.

As I worked on Deadly Secrets, I started thinking that the name ‘Sabrina’ was not French enough. During my trip back from the Armoric countryside, though, I met a French girl working in the Metro. Coincidence or not, her name was Sabrina, she had black hair and olive skin though. She helped me catch the right train leaving France.

Though I cannot speak French, most people were extremely helpful there. The one time when I was on the westside of Belle Ile hiking back to catch the boat to the mainland, an old guy in a rusty yellow mini-truck stopped and gave me a ride to the harbor. I offered him money but only accepted my thanks.

That trip in April of 99 was priceless.

The mini-bibliography covers several of the books utilized in my research.

One more quick oddity, I must mention. I work as an investigator at a law firm doing the 9 to 5 grind. I find out how our clients were exposed to asbestos. This carcinogenic, fire-resistant fiber has been utilized since antiquity. I used this knowledge in forming the fire-eating fabric of Darian’s cloak, Merlin’s and the dragon-riders’s robes.


4.) Are you working on a new project?Tell me something about it.

When I am not trying to make a living as a traveling book salesman, I have been hammering out a few new ideas and polishing up some old.

In the grand scheme of things, I am planning on releasing a collection of short stories and the first novel of my vampire series within the next two years.

The vampire novel is the first full-length story I ever wrote. I saw and still see a vast potential for spin-off stories. One of the short stories I have finished is just that. This is the reason I shelved my first book and polished up Deadly Secrets. At the time, I didn’t want to rush it. I didn’t want
to type myself into a corner that I couldn’t white-out.

With just about everything I write, I try to base it on some sort of truth. In Deadly Secrets, I tried to describe the dragon as if it were a dinosaur. In my first novel, I tried to make my vampires realistic so I based them out of Mexico instead of Egypt. I fused together facts about real vampire bats and Mesoamerican mythology to create my own breed of blood-suckers. I love the work by Anne Rice and Brain Lumley but did not want to copy them.


5.) I'm wondering about a particular style choice you made, specifically the use of "U" for you.
     What's behind the choice?

It’s funny that U ask this question. The day I received your questions, a girl that saw Deadly Secrets for the first time asked me the same question. I told her it was to lower my chances of developing carpal tunnel.

Actually, it is kind of a philosophical thing. In the U2 song ‘One’, there is a line that goes like - “U and I are one but not the same”. Hopefully, that’s clear as mud.

If it is not apparent, I’m into music quite heavily and get a lot from it, directly and indirectly. So much so that I have finished the first draft of a short story based on two tunes by The Doors. It’s a horror story. I hope Jim don’t mind.

In addition, I composed and performed a guitar duet to go with the prologue of Deadly Secrets. I posted it at www.erieharbor.com on the web page - ‘Prologue and Music’.

If Deadly Secrets was ever turned into a movie and needed a song track, it would have to contain: