1. Tell me about yourself. I’m a writer who also works full-time as a high school teacher in New Hampshire. I’ve been writing fiction since I was twenty seven years old. I worked as a journalist in Mexico, Central and South America. I met my wife in Venezuela where we were both working as journalists. We moved to England where she is from, then we moved to Ireland. Then we came back to the States and had our first child. I took my wife’s job teaching Spanish when she wanted to stay home with our son. We had two more children, sold the house we had built in Ireland, bought a run down farmhouse and fixed it up. Now we have sheep, chickens, a dog and three kids and the oldest boy is in high school. I kept writing the whole time and finally found a publisher after twenty five years of sending stuff out. That’s got to be close to a record for either stupidity or persistence.
2. How were you inspired to write Savior? The main inspiration came while I was on a family holiday and trying to surf with my son and I had the idea for a father and son adventure battling the forces of evil attempting to destroy the world as we know it.
3. What inspired you to write? From the beginning the idea of writing was to help me discover things about the world I did not know. It’s like teaching is the best way to learn things except writing is even better.
4. What is something interesting about you not many people know? I was an extra in Dune, the David Lynch cult classic.
5. What genre do you like to write in? I have mainly written literary or contemporary fiction, but am finding myself working on a sequel to Savior also in a dystopian, science fiction mode.
6. Have you ever encountered writer’s block? If so, how did you overcome it? No. Working as a journalist is good training and discipline to teach yourself to write on demand.
7. Summarise your novel. Here is my back cover blurb which I am sticking to because it’s pretty good. Al and Ricky, father and son, plan a surfing getaway in Guatemala, the perfect place to bond and reconnect after the death of Mary, the woman who held their lives together. But the Santos Muertos are taking over Guatemala, and when the gang discovers that Ricky has the Chocomal, the Mayan tablet which carries the secret code they need to take over the world with their fearsome Resonator, all hell breaks loose. An unwilling hero, all-American teenager Ricky must find and rescue his father and in the process save us all from utter destruction. Will he learn how to be a real man along the way?
8. Tell me about your characters. Al and Ricky are the main characters. Al is a forty something guy who dotes on his family and is devastated when his wife dies and leaves him in charge of raising his semi-estranged son Ricky. Ricky is an adventurous kid who would rather surf than play football, rather hang out on the beach in Florida with his girlfriend than be in school, but learns that he needs his father more than he thought and devotes himself to finding him after he’s been kidnapped by the Santos Muertos.
9. Tell me about your publishing journey. My previous three books have been self-published. I’ve been getting better at the publishing and marketing process with each book, but with Savior I received interest from a small press and decided to go with a publisher rather than self-publish just to see if it helped the book find a larger audience.
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