One day several years ago, my wife Jan returned from a trip to Hawaii, and she had an idea for a novel that was simple yet large in scope—as many great ideas are—a story about problems in the ocean that she’d been wanting to write for years. I spent some time brainstorming with her, and in a spiral notebook I made notes about the setting, characterizations, and plot.  Then I began typing it up—a story set in Hawaii that had the ocean (and its problems) in the background.  She read what I handed her, and then said, diplomatically, “This is...
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Hoping we can add a splash of something interesting on your Facebook and Twitter feeds for the upcoming release of CLOCKWORK LIVES on September 15. As I've said before (incessantly, some might call it), I am really very pleased with this book. It's a gorgeous volume, and I think some of the best storytelling I've done. Neil Peart called it the best thing of mine he's ever read (and he's read quite a lot) So how to draw attention above all the noise?  Here's a colorful idea: Change your social media avatar (Facebook or Twitter) to the lovely square image of the...
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When Kevin Anderson approached me about being part of the Storybundle for his Disasters collection, I was surprised – because I’d never thought of DRAGON VIRUS in that way before. I mean, disaster books are action-adventure stories, as a rule. DRAGON VIRUS has action, and it has adventure, and courage and tragedy and all that, but…a disaster story? Well, yes.  Once I’d thought about it, yes. dis·as·ter dəˈzastər/ noun a sudden event, such as an accident or a natural catastrophe, that causes great damage or loss of life. “159 people died in the disaster” denoting a genre of films that...
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Readers asked, so I answer: how my debut novel SEEDS came to be My inspiration for Seeds was two-fold: a “practical” inspiration and a creative one, but not in the order you might expect. The seed for both came in the form of a phone call that woke me from a dead sleep. Early one morning my husband phoned me on his way to work to tell me about a news story he’d heard on the radio. The story was about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a storage repository for crop seeds in Norway. My husband was convinced this “Doomsday...
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