As I’m back to work on Astrid Maxxim and her Undersea Dome, I thought I would write a bit about my inspirations and creative decisions on the Astrid Maxxim series.

One day I was talking about my inspirations for Princess of Amathar (which of course were the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs).  I remember standing by the bookcase and pointing out that the books that had really made me a reader, before I discovered Burroughs and other science fiction books, were the Tom Swift Jr. Books.

I was staying with my grandparents over the summer when I was nine when I discovered the Tom Swift books that had belonged to my uncle George, who had died the year before in the Viet Nam war.  George was a medic and was killed in action, valiently trying to save others and was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star.

He had about a dozen Tom Swift Jr. books and I read them all summer, and when I got back home in the fall, I started ordering my own series.  I was thinking about all this, as I was talking that day about writing, and I thought– I should make my own series like Tom Swift Jr.