One day I was standing in my living room looking at the row of yellow spines on my collection of Tom Swift Jr. books.

In the summer of 1969, I discovered Tom Swift Jr. among the possessions of my Uncle George, who had died the year before in Viet Nam. I started reading them and was hooked. I was hooked on Tom Swift, on science fiction, and on reading.

My first book, Princess of Amathar had been an homage to the Edgar Rice Burroughs books I had loved in my teens.  So that day, looking at Tom Swift, I thought, “that’s the type of book I should write next.” I wanted to capture the same feeling of excitement and innocence that I found when I read Tom Swift Jr., but I wanted to update the stories and make them my own. I sat down and created the setting and the characters, and made a list of inventions that stories could be built around.

There were two things that I always had trouble with, as a reader of Tom Swift. First, time never passed. Tom was always 18. The second, his inventions never seemed to change the world, no matter how innovative and revolutionary they were. I decided that Astrid’s inventions would change the world and she would age as the series progressed.  So far I’ve written five Astrid Maxxim books and have outlines for two more and ideas for two more after that.  I’d like to write at least one per year.

I never really wanted to write a vampire book and I’m not a fan of Twilight (I read the first book and thought it was okay, but didn’t love it.) Urban fantasy really isn’t my cup of tea either. But my writers’ group used to meet in Borders and they would seat us right between two massive shelves of vampire books. We would always joke with each other that we should all be writing one. I always commented that my vampires wouldn’t be lovers. They would be the bad guys. I did finally relent and have a slightly good vampire, but she wasn’t really that good.

I started writing Blood Trade and got to the third chapter, when it took a really dark turn. I was describing not the Vegas that I knew, but one that was in rapid decay as the forces of darkness took over. I liked it. So I went back and rewrote the first two chapters and the whole book got much darker.

I had originally planned my heroine Xochitl to be a goth girl, but as with the rest of the story, her background and character got MUCH darker. I have to say, I really like how the story came out, but it is DARK.  Incidentally, the area that I describe where the detective agency was, looked just like real in Vegas, but about a year ago, they bulldozed that whole area for redevelopment.  The manhole where Xochitl dumps the bodies is right where I said it was, but now it’s just outside the very busy entrance of a big hotel casino.

I actually have the first two chapters of a sequel already written.  I will say this though, the sequel to Blood Trade (assuming I ever finish it) will be even darker than the first one.   I love the two chapters I’ve done.  I hope I can get around to the rest of it.

I got the idea for Women of Power from Feedbooks.com. Feedbooks was one of the early sites to get great ebook downloads (though I think it has suffered a bit since they went commercial). One of the great things among their original books back in 2009 (that lately seem to be all erotica) were fan-fiction commics– mini books with comic book covers that were prose inside. They were mostly based on DC characters like Batman and The Teen Titans. I decided to try my hand at writing one of those.

There was a whole club and web organization which assigned which books each writer was working on. That seemed like a whole lot of trouble to me. Plus I just like to go with my own characters, so that’s what I did. I made up All American Girl and Skygirl and patterned their descriptions after some cover art I purchased for the “comics.” I wrote and posted the first two “issues,” but by the time I had finished “issue” (read chapter) three. I decided that I wanted to make it a full novella. I set it aside and didn’t get back to it for two years.

On a side note, my son and I plotted a sequel to Women of Power, with some ideas that I just love. Unfortunately, I lost my outline for it.  I could probably recreate it, if I decide that it warrants a sequel.  I have so many other ideas that I’m working on, I may not get to it till I’m 85.

His Robot Wife was written for entirely different reasons than any other book I’ve written. All the other books were written because I thought I had a great story to tell and I wanted to tell it. You could say that I wrote His Robot Wife for money, though that’s not entirely accurate. I priced it an 99 cents even though I could have made more by pricing it higher. I wrote it because I knew it would sell.  My other books were just sitting on the virtual ebook shelves, and I needed a little validation.

I publish His Robot Girlfriend in 2008, and it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Many people wrote and asked for a sequel. This was a big deal for me. But I didn’t have a story. As far as I was concerned, the story of Mike and Patience was over. Still, people kept asking. It took me three years to come up with a story for them, and I think it’s probably one of my weakest plots (but HRG wasn’t popular for its plot, but rather its characters anyway). So in 2011 I wrote His Robot Wife. It is short, at 28,000 words, but it went easily enough, and it has sold almost 10,000 copies.

Patience continues to be very popular, so much that I got a lot of complaints when His Robot Girlfriend: Charity came out, because she isn’t in it.  I thought the title pretty much gave that away.  Anyway, more Patience and Mike are one the way.

The idea for Tesla’s Stepdaughters came while I was playing Rock Band 2. I was playing it a lot over the summer in 2009. As part of the game, you create your band, and the band I created became The Ladybugs. The original band name was actually Tesla’s Stepdaughters, but when I got around to writing the story, it just seemed to make more sense that the band standing in historically for The Beatles would have a similar name.

I am really pleased with Tesla’s Stepdaughters. I think I was successful in creating a setting for the story, without delving too deeply into it. I’m really happy with my mystery. I never really thought I would be able to write a mystery story, and while some might point out that the mystery is the weakest part of the story (and I wouldn’t argue that), for me, I’m pretty pleased.

Recently, Tesla’s Stepdaughters has been getting more and more interest.  It continues to slowly climb in sales and is the best selling of any of my single (non-series) books.