Author Interviews

I was born and raised in Greece — a land where myth and reason, sea and sky, silence and song coexist. Growing up surrounded by history, light, and the vast horizon of the Aegean, I felt from an early age that life itself was a dialogue between the visible and the invisible. Greece taught me that existence is poetry — that behind every question lies a melody waiting to be heard.

I had a slightly different experience in that after I completed my maiden novel, Benign Flame: Saga of Love, the idea of Crossing the Mirage – Passing through youth, also a love story cropped up in my mind. However, so as to avoid the possible carry over effect on my muse, I worked with Jewel-less Crown: Saga of Life before I set out to cross the mirage.

My writing journey began unexpectedly when a dear friend, Chetan Singh, happened to read my personal journal. It was he who planted the seed for my first book, Version One and a Half. I often call myself an "accidental author" because if it weren’t for Chetan’s encouragement, I might never have ventured into creative writing. I owe it all to him.

I always knew I’d be a writer when I was a little girl.

I decided that I needed to write a book about 15 years ago, but I waited until the passing of my mother before I finally took the leap and self-published Hating Self by Boo Black. It was a healing process and the book was too personal for me to allow anyone else to publish, so I used Amazon/KDP to publish in November 2023. I have learned a lot about being an author by just taking the plunge and doing it. Most times, I'm googling to find out the meaning of words or requirements, but that's okay. I learn faster when I'm doing something versus waiting for someone to teach or guide me.

Unique among authors, I have an enormous wealth of varied experience and diverse education and I do indeed draw on that vast well. I’ve harvested grain across the Great Plains from the Red River to the Canadian border, decoded top secret electronic signals in the Arctic Circle, accomplished major projects on Air Force One and many other strategic and classified aircraft, built petrochemical equipment for the Middle East, driven transport trucks in Texas, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, picked lemons in California, picked cotton in Oklahoma, and built computers in Colorado and Kansas. I have skills and certifications to weld steel, fly airplanes, overhaul diesel engines...

I've always been a writer. I started writing books because of the pandemic. I was home, my kids were home, they were on their computers doing remote learning, and I was on call as tech support. I needed to do something to keep from going stir-crazy waiting for the wifi to go on the fritz.

I enjoyed writing short stories starting in my teens, but my few attempts to complete something longer always ran out of steam until I was in my mid-30s, when I had an idea for a book with a structure that made writing it easy: each chapter had six sections, involving six sets of characters who were being impacted by a sci-fi phenomenon pushing them into the same parallel universe. Until my main character from one group discovers these other groups, they are all mystified by these events. Once they connect, though, the plot is gradually revealed. What I liked about this is that the structure forced the writing, which helped keep me going. I completed the first draft relatively quickly, which...

I write spontaneously from the start of the book. The idea behind the book is usually only a sentence or two, outlining the main plot, e.g. A bank robbery.

It wasn't planned but as I was writing, Abby Rose did take on some familiar things. For example, she held a career in marketing and I was in marketing for 30 years. She lives in a small town and I grew up in a small town in Arkansas. She has a close family and my family still lives close to one another in the same town we grew up in.