Please introduce yourself and tell us about your background as a writer.
I'm a Minnesota native and live in a Minneapolis suburb. I'm an old man with a checkered past. I've been a radio announcer and an academic librarian among other things. Now I'm semi-retired and supplement my income by translating Norwegian movie and TV scripts to English. I started writing when I was in high school, and have written steadily ever since. I started my first novel just after I finished college, but knew it wasn't any good. I finished it anyway, just to be able to tell myself I could do the work. About 20 years later I started it all over and produced a book I thought might be saleable. Jim Baen of Baen Books finally acquired it. That was my novel, Wolf Time. So it only took about a quarter century to see the thing in print. Actually, the first book Jim bought was Erling’s Word, the first book of The Year of the Warrior, which ended up a double volume. That began the Saga of Erling Skjalgsson, a historical fantasy series, which continues still through four volumes. The fifth is coming out soon, as an e-book, and I'm working on the final volume now.

What are the most prominent influences on your writing? How do you incorporate those influences without being derivative?
J.R.R. Tolkien, of course. I marveled at Tolkien as a boy, but never believed I could scale those heights (still don't). But Robert E. Howard's Conan stories inspired me because I thought I might be able to do something on those lines. Over the years my favorite authors have included C.S. Lewis, John D. MacDonald, Dean Koontz, and Andrew Klavan. In terms of historical fiction, I love the sadly neglected Sigrid Undset and -- in an entirely different vein -- George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books. I really never worried a lot about being derivative. My experience (or my perception, anyway) has been that if you work at your craft -- just learn how to select words, fashion a serviceable sentence and paragraph, master the form of the story, your style will come along of its own accord. It's one of those things that only works if you concentrate on other matters.

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?
Still looking for the answer to that. I am famously unknown, celebrated among a very small public.

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 a Christian writer. I've had one novel published by a specifically Christian house; I tailored my next novel to fit their guidelines, but they turned it down. So I made some small changes in language; added a curse or two, and released it myself. However, my books are relatively mild in terms of language and subject matter, overall. I'm basically a small-town boy, and never aspired to be anything else. I write Christian fiction, but I always have the secular reader in mind. I take great pride in the fact that my first novels were sold to a mainstream publisher.

Have you had any new stories published recently? Are you currently working on any?
My fans have been waiting far too long for the fifth Erling Skjalgsson book, King of Rogaland. It's now in the pipeline for e-book release. Can't give a date yet; it depends on my facilitator's schedule. And I'm working, as I mentioned above, on the last book in the series, which will be the biggest and most ambitious of the lot. (Lars’ story “Magic’s Price” was also recently reprinted in Renegade Swords III.)

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 recently read Andrew Klavan’s latest book, A Strange Habit of Mind, which is a sequel to When Christmas Comes, which came out a year ago. It absolutely blew my mind, as we Boomers still insist on saying for some reason. Part of my response may be due to the fact that the story rings some of my personal bells. But Klavan is a story-wright like no other. I marvel at -- and envy -- his craftsmanship.

One older book I can never get over is Mark Helprin’s Winter's Tale. It's another work, like The Lord of the Rings, that I can only dream of emulating. Literally a wonderful book, in that it's full of wonder, and wonderfully done.

Any final words?
Speaking to other authors, I can't advise you how to be famous, because I'm clueless about that myself. About the craft, I could talk all day. The thing I tell people most often is some variation of, “Don't be afraid to write dreck.” You look at your day's work and you think, “This is crap.” So what? It's something. Something is better than nothing. For a writer, even dreck (and we don't always know what is or isn't dreck when we write it) is raw material. It's the clay we make good stories out of. Give yourself permission to be imperfect. The perfect (or at least the better) comes through endless refinement, not through spontaneous generation.