Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I’m a middle aged guy who has managed to keep most of his hair and hopefully a bit of fire in his belly. I live in Wisconsin at the edge of the Driftless region with a very patient wife, my many sons and animals, and a basement full of books.

I’ve been writing pretty much my entire life, as long as I can remember, although almost all of it has been remarkably unproductive. The landfills of northern Kentucky where I grew up are filled with half finished and overwritten outlines and little notebooks stuffed with characters, story hooks, and badly drawn maps. I am permanently in love with the idea of writing and can write endless thousands of words about a story idea. Actually writing the damn story is kind of a new wrinkle for me.

It was my wife who finally got tired of listening to me explain story ideas that I wasn’t writing and convinced me to finish something. This was right when Jason Carney was starting up the idea for Whetstone magazine and was doing these little flash fiction prompts. These were tiny little weekly prompts, a few hundred words. My wife encouraged me to write a little submission for every one of them. The act of finishing something, even something that small, was electric. It changed everything. When the submissions for the first issue went live, I wrote a story for it, and that got accepted. Jason reached out and asked me to come on as an associate editor, and then we started the Whetstone discord channel, and things just kind of steamrolled on from there. I wasn’t just a guy in love with the idea of writing any more. I was writing.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
My significant influences would end up just being a list of almost every horror, fantasy, and science fiction author I’ve read. Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, T.E.D. Klein, Ramsey Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Michael Moorcock, Michael Shea, Richard Tierney, David C. Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, Charles Saunders, Matt Stover, a few hundred more. Any dozen of them might be my biggest influences at any particular moment.

One of my influences that is outside the usual suspects for speculative fiction is Charles Bukowski. He is both beloved and despised, usually by people more concerned with what other people will think about their opinion than with his actual writing. I think that his novels in particular were a huge and often unseen pillar that underlies the best of what would become grimdark, with characters at the bottom of the social ladder, living their lives by drifting from one distraction to the next, doing what was necessary to survive just long enough to get to the next bottle, the next lay, the next excuse to not improve circumstances that just couldn’t be improved. Those people were not constructed or embellished to the point of becoming characters. They were just people. They were true in a way that you might not like, but what’s true isn’t always pretty. Other authors did it too, and maybe earlier and better, but Bukowski was the one that did it for me.

As far as being derivative goes, I can only hope that the cynical equation of derivative work minus the original author’s talent equals new and original story holds true. I have a friend, Cinque Smith, who is a fantastic artist, and I remember once telling him not to paint better than everyone else, but to paint what only he could paint. It’s easy to say that since I can’t paint worth a damn. Everything I write is probably derivative in some fashion, so I try to add enough of myself to make it interesting. There is a difference in having influences and having a crib sheet. I hope I come in on the right side of that difference.

Many authors say marketing is one of their biggest challenges. What tactics have you found to be most effective for getting your name out there?
I’m honestly not doing any kind of marketing at all yet, but I really do need to start thinking about it. I will post on Facebook to support authors I know if they have a book come out, or for projects that I like. I would venture to say that my name isn’t really out there as of yet, although I certainly hope it will be someday. For now, I’m trying to build up a stable of short stories so that if someone likes my work, they can find more. All the marketing in the world won’t make any difference if I don’t have the stories.

How much do your audience’s expectations factor in to what you write? Does this ever cause you to hold back from experimenting?
I’m in the realm of not having much of an audience to be concerned about, but should I manage to get there, I still think of myself as my main audience. Trying to work out what other people do or don’t like is a tricky business. If I write what I like, and write it well, then hopefully someone else out there likes it enough to read it. The nice thing about that is that I can experiment whenever and however I want, as it occurs to me, and if I don’t like it, I can just try something else.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
Aside from my Turkael stories in the first five issues of Whetstone, I am working on a pretty wide spread of horror and fantasy short stories to build up my presence a bit. I have a Turkael story in the Rogues in the House anthology A Book of Blades. I have a few longer stories for him that I am preparing to submit out and about, and the beginnings of what should become an Hour of the Dragon-sized novella. I also have several half finished horror stories that need some sharpening that will hopefully find a home somewhere. I have a story in the anthology SNAFU: Holy War that features my character Beloved of Arrows who will certainly be appearing in more stories and may lead into a full length horror novel.

Name one newer and one older book you have read and enjoyed recently. (Newer meaning from the past year or so, and older meaning written before 1980.)
I will say that one of the most recent things I’ve read absolutely surprised the living hell out of me. The Locked Tomb books, by Tamsyn Muir, did not look or sound like books that I would be interested in, but a friend recommended them to me, and they were fantastic. It’s like Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun and Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora had a baby, and that baby was a gothic space castle lesbian necromancer murder mystery with swords. I had an absolute blast reading the three books so far, and can’t wait for the final volume.

As for older books I just reread The Stainless Steel Rat, by Harry Harrison, as I do every few years, and that book is still one of the most fun things ever written. So many books just aren’t fun, but the story of James Bolivar diGriz thieving his way through the far future with a smile, a drinking problem, and as many credits as he can possibly cram into an explosive briefcase will never fail to leave me laughing. It’s the perfect cure for everything wrong with the world, no matter what you think that might be.

Any final words?
This is a fantastic time to be a Sword and Sorcery fan. From DMR, The Magician’s Skull, Whetstone and The New Edge, to big publishers like BAEN giving Howard Andrew Jones a five book deal and looking to publish more like him, there is Sword and Sorcery to fit everyone’s tastes, and more of it than we have ever had. Go forth and purchase, and read, and celebrate (and review!) the finest stories you can find, because they are out there, and there’s more to come!