Featured Interview With Alan Bayles

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Born in Hartlepool, England in 1970, along with my twin brother. I was raised in Langley Park, Durham, England up until 2006, where I moved to Northern Ireland married my wife, Monica in 2007 (still very much happily married). We don’t have any pets or children (my wife says she doesn’t need children when she has me!).

Much to my wife’s dismay, I’m a huge science fiction and comics fan. Love all forms of sci-fi, from Star Trek, Doctor Who, Blake’s 7 etc and I have been a massive Marvel comics fan for over 40 odd years. I am also a Sunderland AFC, even though I am not able to get to the games I still proudly listen to them on the radio.

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My fascination with books probably began when I was around 6 or 7 years of age. I blame my mum for this. She was a voracious reader, and was a big fan of Catherine Cookson. One day she thought I appeared to enjoy reading comics (not just looking at the pictures), so she encouraged me to read by getting me my first library ticket.

The very first book I loaned from the library was Doctor Who and Death To The Daleks. After that I slowly moved onto reading some of the books my mum had. I have a fond memory of reading Catherine Cookson’s The Fifteen Streets and enjoying it.

I first started to write when I was 14, when I was given an assignment by my English Teacher to write a prologue for a story. Even though, I enjoyed the experience and wanted to to write a book, I didn’t think I was good enough, so put it to one side. It wasn’t until I approaching my 50th birthday, when I decided that I was going to write. I felt if I wouldn’t do it now I may never do it, so down to write the story I had been putting off for 30 odd years.

I self-published my first book in June 2021 – Double Jeopardy, the first book in my mirror wars series.

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favourite authors are James Herbert, Clive Cussler, Stephen King, David Eddings, Dean Koontz, Neil Gaiman and Audrey Niffenegger.

My favourite genres to read are science fiction and fantasy books. I also enjoy reading action & adventure novels and the odd biography. I also occasionally read crime thrillers.

I was around 10 or 11 when I first read James Herbert’s The Rats and being so terrified by it, but still ended up reading the next book! His writing was so vivid and engrossing, to this day I still retain certain scenes in my head from that book. I then moved onto Dean Koontz and Stephen King. Along the way I also fell in love with Clive Cussler’s books. I was also introduced to the fantasy genre when I came across Alan Dean Foster’s The Spellsinger series.

I would have to say it was my mum who inspired me to write. If she hadn’t given me my first library ticket, then that would not have sparked my imagination and set me off on a journey exploring literary worlds. She was very proud when I published my first book. Even though she admitted she was too terrified to read it, she still could not help tell everyone she knew every time she bumped into them in the street or whenever she visited the hospital etc that I had published a book.

Unfortunately she passed away on June 2023, so she did not get to see the release of my second book.

Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book was released on 1st January 2024. It is called Oracle’s Vision and it is the second book in my Mirror Wars series. It is a science fiction thriller with a wee smidge of horror thrown in for good measure. The story follows on from Double Jeopardy and follows the antagonist, Oracle who was revealed towards the end of book one. She is an insane AI who has delusions of ruling over all organic life across the multiverse (hence the title).

The book’s main protagonist is Dave Barnes, the world weary 50-something Detective Inspector from book one. After uncovering a global conspiracy and its ties to a parallel world, he is forced to make an alliance with his manipulative doppelgänger from counter-Earth; Colonel David Barnes. After learning Counter-Earth and its population are now under the control of Oracle, both men realise they must set aside their distrust for another if they to have any chance in stopping Oracle, or Earth Prime will be the next to fall.

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Featured Interview With Jo-Anne Duffett

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I am a naturalized Capetonian having lived here longer than anywhere else, but I grew up in Johannesburg and spent my early teens in the Amazon where my parents were medical missionaries. I am married for 18 years. We have a tank full of tropical fish and feed the wild birds but regularly have to chase the guineafowl out as they scratch up the garden. No lion’s do not roam the streets in Africa, but we are blessed with many national parks where you can find them and the elusive leopard. I love travel, running and photography. You will find photos of RSA and my travels on SmugMug.

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
As a kid I mostly read non-fiction to satisfy my insatiable curiosity. It was only after I finished my masters degree that I discovered the joy of fiction and then I was hooked. I read copiously. I have published a number of scientific articles in the field of sports medicine, but Surf n Turf is my first fiction work.

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love historical romances to escape. No cars, no phones and lots of horses is the best. Jane Austen is my all time favourite but I also enjoy Georgette Heyer, Barbara Cartland for a quick read, and Julia Quinn, Erica Ridley, Glynnis Campbell and Bree Wolf.
In other genres, I love James Herriot and Gerald Durrell; if you want to laugh till your sides hurt read “Rosy is a relative.” For mystery Ellis Peters and for classic Sci Fi cum Fantasy Edgar Rice Burroughs. There are so many amazing authors past and present.

Tell us a little about your latest book?
Surf n Turf is set in South Africa between Cape Town (surf) and the Karoo (turf). London born Sarah’s mother was from the Karoo but she never visited it while her mom lived. She is feeling confused by a hasty marriage proposal from her boyfriend who works for her dad and is desperate for a friendly neutral viewpoint, but her best friend hates Blakes guts.
The girls holiday in Cape Town and Sarah sets off by bicycle to find her heritage and her heart. It’s 600km to the place she thinks her mom came from. As she peddles along she keeps thinking about a surfer she saw in Cape Town but did not even talk to. This frustrates her no end.
She is nearly at her destination when disaster strikes and Sarah loses her memory as well as identification documents. She is rescued by a handsome sheep farmer Luan (pronounced Loo-Ahn) who seems to be haunted with pain.
If you love sweet, clean romances with a HEA this is for you.
The karoo is a large arid region in South Africa’s interior and provides the tastiest mutton in the world! At the time of writing, my sister owned a sheep farm in the klein-karoo.
Working full time as a medical doctor means I get very little time to write, sometimes just a sentence or a paragraph at a time. That said my work is my inspiration.

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Jo-Anne Duffett’s Website

Featured Interview With Jo Szewczyk

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Jo is a post-modern reject who spent most of their time writing jokes only Norm Macdonald, Thomas Pynchon, and Rachel get.

Much to his amusement, his newest book, the controversial “Surviving Gen X”, has been banned by churches, certain nation states, and from his mother’s house.

When not being the top-ranked feline whisperer of Minnesota, Jo juggles his time between academia, his podcasts What’s Kraken? and Streamin’ Demons, and his websites of HauntedMTL.com, a haven for horror enthusiasts, and Czykmate.com, a platform dedicated to the art of writing and helping others find their voice.

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
My aunt was my first book dealer. She was an avid Stephen King reader and forgot her copy of The Stand when she visited us for Christmas. I snuck it into my room and read it within a week. I was five.

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I have a love for a large spread of genres. Stephen King, Isaac Thorne, and Clive Barker are my horror go-tos; nobody beats Agatha Christie for mystery; and I’ll read every Jaimee Colbert book, then immediately get depressed because I know I won’t be as good as she is.

Tell us a little about your latest book?
Surviving Gen X is a post-modern biography of an era that started with the space shuttle exploding and ended with a televised terrorist attack on US soil. We saw the advent of the internet in all its dial-up screeching glory and ended up with most of our icons dead by suicide, drugs, or general misadventure.

The book is an experience that delves into the desolation of a generation caught amidst the disintegration of societal norms, searching for meaning in a world that seems to have forgotten them.

It’s a journey through a decade marked by upheaval and transformation and discover a tale that is once a testament to the indomitable spirit of Generation X and a haunting reflection on the universal human quest for connection.

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Featured Interview With Mark David Gerson

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in Montreal and attended Concordia University, one of the largest universities in Canada. Back then, I never imagined becoming a writer. I had no idea what I might want to do with my life. So after switching majors a bunch of times, I settled on a business degree as the most practical option for someone as indecisive as I was at the time. As it turned out, it was my first two jobs after graduation, in public relations, that unexpectedly paved the way for my writing journey.

Speaking of journeys, it was an even more convoluted one that carried me from Montreal to LA, my current home. Over the years, I have lived in three Canadian provinces (Quebec, Ontario, and Nova Scotia) and, now, five US states (Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico, Oregon, and California), several of them multiple times!

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
As I’ve already mentioned, I never wanted to be a writer. Even back in school, all I wanted was to get through English class and its writing burdens as painlessly as possible. My Muse, however, had other plans…

My Muse had always had other plans. How else can you explain my first typewriter? A gift in my freshman year of high school, it was a sleek, green Hermes — an unusual brand. Hermes, of course, was the Greek god of communication…and, thus, writers.

And how can you explain why I agreed, a few years later, to be in charge of publicity for the senior high school musical? It was out-of-character for me to take on anything that involved not only writing but making my writing public.

I like to joke that my Muse tricked me into becoming a writer, and that’s how it began — with that typewriter and the publicity gig.

From high school musical press releases, I graduated into college musical press releases, gaining enough local renown that I found myself freelancing as a theater publicist. Suddenly, I was being paid to write!

From college, I went to work at a dynamic p.r. startup. It was still mostly press releases, but I was writing. Unfortunately, the startup wasn’t dynamic enough. Less than a year later, I was laid off.

It was my next p.r. job that accelerated my transformation into a full-time writer. Not only did I prepare press releases, I wrote news and feature articles, something I had never done before. And thanks to the media contacts I gained on the job, I began freelancing on the side, thrilled to see my byline in major metropolitan dailies and national magazines. After a few years of that, I converted my side gig into a full-time one. To my astonishment, I was supporting myself as a self-taught writer and editor.

My writer’s story could have ended there, but it didn’t…nor did the behind-the-scenes machinations of my Muse.

You see, I still refused to see myself as creative. A skilled artisan with words, perhaps. But certainly not creative.

That changed one morning during a simple water-cooler conversation. I was working in Toronto as an in-house freelance magazine editor when one of the staffers corralled me.

“I’ve just taken this amazing creative writing workshop,” she gushed. “You’ve got to take it.”

In a moment as out-of-character as the one when I agreed to run publicity for my high school Hello, Dolly!, I said yes.

Nothing was ever the same for me after that workshop.

Thanks to the instructor — to both her workshops and her mentoring — I discovered that I was creative. I started to go deeper with my writing, to write from my heart instead of from my head. And soon I was teaching my writing workshops.

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I spent decades devouring fiction classics of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries as well as nonfiction titles on creativity and spirituality. These days, however, most of my reading leans toward contemporary novelists, especially those who craft page-turning stories around compelling characters. I have no particular favorites, possibly because I so enjoy discovering new authors.

Whenever I’m asked which author, living or dead, I would want to meet over dinner, I always pick Madeleine L’Engle. Although her spirituality was shaped by her Episcopal faith and mine is considerably broader, her work has not only touched me deeply, it has profoundly influenced how I live and write.

As with Madeleine L’Engle, everything I’ve read by Ursula K. Le Guin — fiction as well as nonfiction — has radically influenced my writing and my teaching of writing. In fact, her impact on my creative awakening was so profound that I sent her a copy of the first edition of The MoonQuest as a thank you!

Tell us a little about your latest book?
What if speaking or writing the words “once upon a time” got you jailed…or killed?

That’s the situation in Q’ntana, the land of The MoonQuest, where stories are banned, storytellers are exiled or executed, and the moon, saddened by the silence, has cried tears that have extinguished her light.

Now, one young bard must come out of hiding to embark on The MoonQuest, the long-prophesied journey to restore story to the land and light to the moon. He sets off reluctantly and with no clear direction, knowing only that it’s the stories he tells from his heart that will guide him and keep him and his companions safe, even as they’re relentlessly pursued by the King’s Men — black shirts, black masks and black mounts surging toward them through the black night.

I’d like to add that from the time the first edition of The MoonQuest was published in 2007 until now — with this newest edition that coincides with the current epidemic of book bannings — readers have consistently commented on how current and relevant they find the book to be. And not only American readers.

Perhaps it’s true. But I didn’t write the book with any political agenda, nor did I have any country or period in mind. I began writing The MoonQuest in 1994, and I wrote all drafts but the final one in a different country: my native Canada.

Whenever I coach writers or teach a writing workshop, I always insist that my books are smarter than I am. That The MoonQuest has turned out to be a story not only for our time but for all time proves that!

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Mark David Gerson’s Website

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Featured Interview With Nicole Sharp

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I live in the Pacific Northwest with no houseplants and 4 pink stovetop espresso makers.

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I had this idea that I wanted to be a writer in seventh grade, when no one else was really declaring such things. So I wrote in secret. But I wrote. My first book was influenced by the authors I was reading at the time: Ray Bradbury, Madeleine L’Engle and V. C. Andrews. Needless to say, the first book I wrote was tragic! But I loved the process and the words that came and creating something out of thin air. I was hooked.

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Life is rough sometimes, and I never wanted my readers to pick up one of my books only to find that they’d escaped into more misery. Instead I wanted them to find some humor and adventure of fearless women who were navigating the ridiculousness of the moment as best as they could. I’ve always like entertaining people and making them laugh.
I read a little bit of everything. The authors that helped shape my literary sensibilities were Madeleine L’Engle, Jane Austen, Stephen King, Hemingway and Julie Garwood. My go to authors are Carl Hiaasen, Jennifer Cruise and Bob Mayer. But more often, I have a book on my e-reader by some of my indie author friends, my favorite are Greta Rose West and Barbara Kellyn.

Tell us a little about your latest book?
I’m working on a standalone romantic comedy set in Italy right now. I love writing about Italy. I’m of Italian descent and my sister lives there; so having all these reasons to visit often and use the language and find new ways to write about the country has been quite fortuitous. And dreamy.

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Nicole Sharp’s Website

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Featured Interview With J. Michael Krivyanski

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in western Pennsylvania. I’ve also lived in California, Virginia and Nevada. I now live in western Pennsylvania. I do not have any pets.

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was fourteen. A friend of mine sold a joke to a magazine. I was fascinated that you could make money from selling things you had written. I was also inspired by a well-known writer who said “Being a writer is the closest thing any human will experience to being a god because you can create and destroy universes with the stroke of a pen.”

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite author is John Steinbeck. I also like Robert Penn Warren, Ayn Rand, Scott Turow, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and others.

Tell us a little about your latest book?
“The Best Cadet,” is a story that has elements of my childhood and the experience of others I grew up around. Writing it was an emotional journey.

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J. Michael Krivyanski’s Website

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Featured Interview With Max Vayne

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in the suburbs, where I still live, since I’m very close with my family. I am someone who loves nature but also loves a good staying in and watching series. And I manage to draw inspiration from both stuff I watch on a screen and also the outside, especially forests
I have had many pets, but currently I have a dog and a cat that I love very deeply, but of course the cat is not very friendly towards the dog

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I realized I liked writing when at school we were asked to write a story. I must have been 8 at the time. And about two years later, I started writing a book that very sadly got deleted because of a computer virus. That made me so angry and sad that I didn’t write again for a very long time, but I’m very glad that I started to once more

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
This is going to sound like a politically correct asnwer, but it’s the truth. I have loved many different books, from several different authors and nearly all genres, but the one thing that stays consistent is that I love fiction, I’m not much of a big fan of non-fiction books, while I do understand they appeal to some.

Tell us a little about your latest book?
The book I recently published is called “Charles and Her”. It is the story of Charles, a gambling addict who, after getting evicted, decides to risk it all once more at a casino. Turned down at it due to them knowing him, he goes to an illegal casino where he goes way over his head, ending in debt to serious criminals, who take his daughter Sienna as insurance.
With him fearing her being killed if he contacts the authorities, he goes to the criminal town known as “Arknley”, where he tries finding an assassin who will help him.
There, he meets an eccentric woman who won’t reveal her face nor name, and who seems to be either extremely smart or stupid, willing to kill as much as she is to make innapropriate sex jokes.
Charles, not an expert on criminals, decides to trust her with the fate of both him and his kid

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Max Vayne’s Website

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Featured Interview With David Allen

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I am a first time author! Growing up, I traveled around the country because my father was a pastor. We ended up in Cape Girardeau, MO were I ended up graduating high school. A fun fact is Cape Girardeau is the only inland Cape in America.
I graduated from the University of Missouri, Columbia with dual degrees in Philosophy and Economics and lived in Columbia every since.
A fun fact about me is that after college I repoed vacuums as a job for a year and a half. These days I read, write and hang out with my dog Dragon, a 23 pound terrier.

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
It started in 5th grade, when I wrote a sci fi story about time traveling kid detectives. My teachers encouraged my writing and I wrote different mini stories throughout school. St

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Stephen King
Comedy is surprisingly my favorite genre
My writings are inspired by my observations

Tell us a little about your latest book?
My book, Fury: A Cinderella Story, is a horror-comedy that is a modern twist on the classic tale. It is a love letter to the horror genre that takes many of the classic tropes and turns them on their head.
It took me 8 years to write it and it was a labor of love the entire time. The characters are vibrant and fun and the story is a great and gory ride that people will enjoy.

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Featured Interview With Kat Hausler

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in Northern Virginia and studied German in New York. I’ve now lived in Berlin for many years after I fell in love with it on a semester abroad. Both of my novels, RETROGRADE and WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JULY are set in Berlin. I write literary fiction, sometimes with crossovers to other genres as in WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JULY, which is character-driven literary fiction but also a mystery.

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I’ve loved books ever since I was able to read them, and I started writing as soon as I was able to. Learning what makes a story work for readers is a long process, but my emotional connection to words and stories has always been there.

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I have so many favorite authors it’s often whatever I’m reading at the moment! But I can always pick up anything by Daphne du Maurier and know that I’ll love it. I’ll read anything literary but I have a soft spot for literary thrillers and dystopias.

Tell us a little about your latest book?
In WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JULY, angsty Berlin musician Simon is struggling to get his life together and avoid the stalkery number-one fan he doesn’t feel famous enough to deal with. He’d do just about anything to get July out of his life – until she disappears on his tour and his obsession with finding her goes far beyond proving his own innocence.

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Kat Hausler’s Website

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