Author Interviews
About the author
Tell us your story? What made you start writing?
Long story short – I wasn’t getting enough sex in my marriage, so I wrote my husband a guide in the form of a romance novel. It didn’t improve my sex life, but I found I really enjoyed writing.
If you’re looking for a bit more: I’ve always been an avid reader. I wrote a terrible novel in high school (USA); my Dad and teachers were brutally honest about it. I was in the special education program because of dyslexia and a hearing impairment, so writing wasn’t easy for me. I put the concept out of my mind and focused on more attainable goals. Fast forward twenty years, I’m now a displaced classical clarinetist living in England – away from my family, my friends, and the orchestra (Symphonic Anime Orchestra) that I founded and wrote a ridiculous amount of music for every year.
I’d gone from a career-oriented woman with big goals to basically a decorator wife. It was fun for a bit, but wow, not having my creative outlet got really old, really fast. Which also messed with my marriage. In a fit of rage, I just barfed all my issues into a story and gave it to a friend, who was really encouraging. That led to another book, not about my issues, which led to my first trilogy. Writing words lights up the same happy creativity that music notes did in my brain.
I’m still married, my husband is super supportive, and yes, he read the original book.
What’s your favorite family tradition?
Playing Catchphrase with my family. We have no shame and are very competitive. It’s men against women. Winner takes all!
If you had a warning label, what would yours say?
Parental advisory, explicit lyrics, best ingested with liquor.
What do you remember most about your first job?
My first job was on a dude ranch when I was fourteen. I woke up my first morning with a horse eating the bed I’d made for myself in the barn. I cried I was so happy. It was a dream come true. I’d spent so much of my life wanting to work with horses. By the end of the summer, when I woke up with a horse eating my bed, I still cried, but for a different reason. I was about to spend the next three hours walking a fence line trying to figure out where the too-smart for-their-own-good bastards busted out. I worked that job every summer for six years. Love it.

About The Thorns of Charbon Institute trilogy:

I knew nothing but the touch of my master until the Magical Authorities killed him and set my world on fire.
Now, I’m a prisoner at an institute stressing students beyond their limits.
I’m a sorceress who can’t access her magic and wanted by wickedly handsome mages who all have their own agenda.
I spent my life following directions. Now I can make my own decisions, I don’t know the right ones. Why is saying ‘no’ so hard?
With the administration judging every action I take and weighing them on their uneven scales of morality, I must come to terms with my darkness to survive and, if I’m lucky, even gain my freedom.
Self studies is a fast burn, reverse harem, dark bully romance with M/M/F and M/F themes. The trilogy is a college-age academy setting, 18+. All three books are written and complete the story. Please be aware there may be triggers, see inside of book for the list.

Tell us a little about the book. How did you come up with the idea for the books?
This is an answer in two parts:
- I’d written a different trilogy and been submitting it to publishers. Book one of Kinnia’s trilogy got turned down for not having enough sex in it. So, I decided I wanted to see if I could write a book with a lot of sex in it, that still included the depth of plot and characters I enjoyed.
- I wrote Aphrodite’s story during the pandemic. I live in England, but my family spreads over six US states with radically different political views. Knowing what the ‘right’ thing to do was and is impossible in the eyes of so much diversity. I channeled my frustration into my writing. The books have nothing to do with the pandemic, but I think Aphrodite’s journey reflects what a lot of us feel. From little decisions to the big, is there truly a right answer?

I know it is hard to pick, especially in this case, but out of all the men in Aphrodite’s life, who is your favorite and why?
Ohh, this is really hard. RH is all about why choose. For Aphrodite, I think Ashe forced her to grow the most. Though they all grew together, Ashe had freedoms the others didn’t and could look beyond his situation and grow with her. I’m a big fan of tough love. Professor Garnet was the embodiment of that, but he didn’t get the opportunity to explore with her. I’m very excited to see how the group does when the roles are reversed. The follow-up trilogy will be in Colorado, outside of the rules and microcosm of the Institute. It will be an exciting swap of power.
Do you have a favorite scene or quote from the books? What is it?
The scene I can still picture when I close my eyes is the opening to the shower in Group Studies, where Ashe has just learned about Beryl’s existence. Ashe has his powerful arms resting above the door frame as he eyes Beryl, trying to figure out the correct action. For me, this moment is a culmination of the growth he and Aphy are going through. Regardless of Ashe’s job, emotions, or heart, he can’t see the object of his affections (Aphrodite) hidden in the steam. He only sees Beryl. A mage below him whose been making Aphrodite cry because she misses him so much. This mage could be his rival or his friend. What is the right thing to do? Go against everything he’s been taught? Or open himself up to a future he’s never even considered.
Given a chance to choose, what colour rims would your eyes have and what type of power would that signify?
Hands down blue for me. Blue is internal. My magic would only affect me. I am probably one of the least feminine women you will ever meet. I’ve been powerlifting since I was 19. One of my life goals is to bench my husband. Blue rims = husband in the air.
If you were to attend the ‘school’ yourself, who’d you befriend with? Would you try to keep a low profile and strive to pass of your aptitudes or enjoy your time being ‘locked up’ and find ways to break the rules?
I really badly want to say I would break the rules. But, honestly, unless I found something worth breaking them for, I would keep my head down and do my best to enjoy my time ‘locked up.’ I probably wouldn’t reach out to others. I think not interacting is the only true way not to offend anyone. Which is terrible, I know. I’m so lame. It’s why I write about women like Aphrodite!! I want to have her strength.
About writing
Are you a plotter or a pantser and what are your writing habits?
Pantser. I write personalities, put them in a world with rules, and see what happens. I only write when I feel like it. Interestingly I get big creative spirts a few days before I menstruate and write until I fall asleep, then wake up and keep writing until the ideas are on paper. Obviously, I write in-between as well, but if I’m stuck, I just reread, knowing hormones will help me out soon enough.
I strongly believe in peer review and crave (especially negative) feedback from beta readers to help me streamline my ideas into something more universally understood.

Do you do a lot of research when writing? What’s the most interesting thing you’ve earth while writing a book?
Yes. Wow, the amount of research is unreal. My search history is terrifying. When writing Aphrodite’s story, FaceBook started customizing my ads for online counseling and victims’ abuse hotlines.
I don’t know if I have a most interesting thing, outside of some sexual positions I didn’t realize the human body was capable of and am still questioning if they are hot or not. I spent a lot of time going down rabbit holes of information which usually end in videos of cats.
What are you currently working on?
There is a planned follow-up for Aphrodite, going further into her past, Tanwyn’s magic, and some unexpected family connections between the guys. I’m very excited to see what type of trouble Beryl gets into in the outside world and how his relationship, especially with our resident MA officer, Ashe copes. I also plan on writing a series of short stories about her years at the Institute between Class Studies and the new trilogy.
I didn’t start writing any of that because I honestly wasn’t sure if anyone would read my books! I have massive imposter syndrome as I’m not a trained writer, so I struggle with confidence.
While I wallow in indecision about Aphrodite, I’m tinkering with an urban fantasy duet tentatively titled: “Dragons Taste Like Chocolate.” It has a more streamlined plot and is ‘light-hearted’ (ha, as much as I can write that). Book one is with a few beta readers right now, and assuming they like it. I’ll write book two and start going through the massive rounds of edits needed.
Just another question:
You are creating your own harem. Who do you pick to join and why?
Ah, you are trying to get me in trouble with my husband on this one. Although I gave Aphrodite a larger harem, 3-4 is my sweet spot.
Jason Momoa – because every girl needs a muscle-bound teddy bear.
Henry Cavill – he’s king of the nerds, and we need someone to run our Dungeons & Dragons game.
Ryan Reynolds – because I’m way too serious of a person, someone’s got to make me laugh.
Chris Hemsworth can be our trainer and occasionally join us for board games, but he needs to prove he’s all in before he can join our group.




Contact author
About the author
Tell us your story? What made you start writing?*
I’d always been an obsessive reader, cereal boxes and warning labels, comic books (bought or stolen), then short stories and novels, but I didn’t write much (except, countless repetitions of “I will not talk in class.”) After high school (and a brief stint in the shipping department of the Peter Pan Swimwear Company in Newark, New Jersey), I joined the Navy. In the service, I enjoyed penning letters to family, buddies, and girlfriends. I liked riffing off my environment, the setting and people around me, using some detail I hoped would surprise or amuse my correspondents, perhaps make them laugh. I liked making stuff up. Honorably discharged from the military, I decided to advance my education, took the SATs and did okay, which I attribute to my obsessive reading. I enrolled in a local college, where it was suggested I major in history. Sure. In one of the required English courses, I wrote a character sketch the instructor liked so much he suggested I submit it to the college literary magazine. I did, and it was promptly rejected, but with faint praise—enough to raise some hope. A year later, I moved to California and attended UCLA, where I would get a BA in history, but by then my interests had turned to less academic writing. So, while I was reading Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, I peddled satire to alternative weeklies. I also took a few creative writing classes and worked at legitimate short fiction. After many, many rejections, a little/literary magazine accepted a story. Hooked.
Aside from necessities, what one thing could you not go a day without?
Coffee.
If you could go back in time, what year would you travel to?
It’s a toss-up between the flush toilet and the nearly extinct writing program XyWrite. That Webb Telescope is pretty cool.
About End Man

His book is hiding a deeper and slightly terrifying concept and he’s managed to bring it to life with an amazing story and compelling characters. The whole idea behind a company harvesting our online presence and saving all of our information is not bizarre and there’s most certainly some of that going on in the real world, but the extent to which Norval Portals operates is completely horrifying.
Once your life is diluted to ones and zeroes on the End Man’s desk, it’s over. Or is it?
Afflicted with dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, 26-year-old Raphael Lennon must live out his life within the four thoroughfares that border his Los Angeles neighborhood. Luckily, he found a fulfilling job within his space as an End Man at Norval Portals where Raphael is the best possum hunter in the company. He hunts the dead who live, people hiding under the guise of death. He doesn’t want to bring these “possums” to justice but to keep them out of his firm’s necrology database so their presence doesn’t crash the whole system.
When the company founder assigns Raphael a fresh case, he sets aside all other work to investigate Jason Klaes, a maverick physicist with boundary-pushing theories that may have attracted unwanted and sinister attention. Raphael soon discovers messages sent by Klaes after his supposed death—threats to people who have subsequently died. As he digs deeper, he receives his own message from Klaes, a baffling command to pursue the truth.
As he unravels the mystery, he unearths the secrets of his own phobia-plagued life and the inner workings of Norval, whose corporate ambitions include a nightmarish spin-off of its product. Raphael must stop them or he’ll never be free and neither will anyone else.
Raphael is such a unique character. And the whole search he’s going through in the book to find truth brings out his personality in the best kind of way. How did you come up with the story for End Man?
The idea for End Man came from an online experience. I’d been trading pages with a fellow writer. We’d been in this relationship for months, and we thought the swapping beneficial. I emailed her some new chapters and asked her to send her material. She didn’t get back to me acknowledging my new chapters or sending hers. I sent several messages, which also got no response. In her story, her main character was battling an incurable disease. Had she fictionalized her own ailment? Could she be hospitalized—or worse? I checked her Facebook and Goodreads pages, but I found nothing to explain her silence. As I reviewed more of her online haunts, I realized if she had succumbed to an illness, everything she had posted online would remain intact. She would still get likes; people would continue to comment on her posts, friend her, spam her. As if her life went on. How many internet users was this already true of? Was the online world occupied by ghosts? This seemed to be the stuff of a speculative novel. As I developed the plot, I recalled Gogol’s novel Dead Souls in which the main character figures out how to profit off of dead serfs (Gogol gets a shout-out in End Man). Now I had to come up with a contemporary (2030s) business plan to match the Russian author’s slick scam. Over many drafts, I recognized I had to provide details sufficient to raise venture capital if I were pitching Norval Corporation in the real world. As to my missing writer, I discovered that—ironically—she was “ghosting” me, a term that came into play while I was writing the novel. To that point, yesterday, Linkedin invited me to congratulate a former colleague on his work anniversary. The man is five years dead.
In early drafts, I had two POV characters: Raphael Lennon and Clark Ramfree. Clark was a middle-aged former journalist who lived the good life abroad; Raphael was a 26-year-old IT worker with a lifelong phobia that made it impossible for him to leave his Los Angeles neighborhood. Clark was free, and Raphael unfree. I wanted to explore how Raphael’s phobic prison affected every aspect of his life to produce a shy, self-conscious person whose boundaries were always on his mind. With Clark, I wanted to see what would happen if his freedom proved illusory.
Unable to weave the two character threads, I extracted Clark from the novel, leaving Raphael alone to explore the notions of freedom and imprisonment. (I have known people with phobias, and what struck me was the thing feared is usually commonplace, but the intensity of the fear is unlimited. I knew a student who was afraid of cheese. If he even heard or saw the word, he would fall to his knees in tears. Raphael suffers from dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, but he has a rare form. It’s only four streets that he can’t cross, but the four intersect to form a rectangle of about one square mile. Each of the four streets holds its own terror. Because his phobia is so unrelatable to others, he has hidden it, making far-fetched excuses why he can’t go to the beach at Malibu or the class trip to Magic Mountain. In his own eyes, he is weird, and believes others view him similarly (crank up Radiohead). Saddling Raphael with this heavy load, I lightened it a bit by making him a talented skateboarder, which provides physical exhilaration.

I also gave him a love of music, which I view as transcendent. Guided by his mother, a museum curator who died young, Raphy also loves art and is a painter himself. He works on a canvas that stretches across his living room ceiling, and may be the key to his freedom. He resembles David Bowie, but his name is Raphael Winston Lennon, and there are parallels with both artists in his character. John Lennon’s mother, Julia, was killed by a car at age 44. Her death devastated Lennon, and he wrote several songs about her, reflecting his grief. In End Man, Raphael’s mother, at about the same age as Julia, dies of a horrible disease that turns her to stone; Her memory and suffering haunt Raphael. End Man is a dystopia in the making. Winston is the protagonist in Orwell’s 1984. It’s also John Lennon’s middle name. David Bowie’s favorite book? 1984. David Bowie created his last album around the theme of death.
If you’d have Raphael’s phobia. What four streets would you rather be trapped inside?
Raphael is trapped in a choice neighborhood. It was once called The Miracle Mile of Los Angeles by real estate developers. Within Raphael’s four streets are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (with its parklike grounds and Tar Pits), the Farmers Market and the Grove, an outdoor shopping and entertainment complex. There is also now The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in the former May Company Building, which I turned into the headquarters of the Norval Corporation in End Man. What it’s missing is water. If I could squeeze the Pacific Ocean in the center of those four streets, I’d take them. If my map skill weren’t so limited, I could probably pick an alternative four streets in Paris.
Do any of the characters resemble anyone from real life? Are any of them a bit like you?
Addy is modeled on a restaurant server and talented singer I know. She is also a passionate reader. Raphael combines aspects of two close relatives. I’ve used myself plenty in fiction, but not in End Man.
Do you have a favourite scene from the book? Something you enjoyed writing the most or think came together well?
At the top of the list would be the scene in which Geo Maglio, the CEO of the Norval Corporation, reveals the company’s new product to his employees. An outraged Raphael tries to elicit the truth, but Maglio responds with shameless, euphemistic answers. Any material from that chapter would be a spoiler.
About writing
What is one of the most interesting things you have researched while writing a book?
Japanese culture for Nakamura Reality. The nature of consciousness and the scientific/philosophic debate about the possibility of consciousness existing in a machine for End Man.
What were your expectations for writing and publishing the book?
I’ve self-published and traditionally published. I thought the themes and concepts of End Man, including a main character with an unusual and unsettling phobia like Raphael’s, would make it attractive to literary agents and publishers. Early on in the game, I had interest from some heavyweight agents, but they thought elements were missing (action, mostly). I revised several times, but the agents weren’t satisfied. I eventually got agent representation. She loved the story, and even brought CAA onboard to sell the TV/Film rights. Still no sell. I kept revising, getting feedback from beta readers and editors. I never gave up on End Man because I thought I had a compelling main character and a story that explored timely and provocative themes. After making changes I never thought I’d make, I sold it to Cursed Dragon Ship, a small independent. I still believe with a little luck, End Man will make a dent.
What are you currently working on?
The publisher has asked me to write a sequel. I’ve been mulling ideas for the plot. In End Man, I set up a new pantheon of minor gods, influencers, and I’m sure they’ve been up to mischief. I’m also finishing a rewrite on a realistic novel called Blood Marriage about a young woman who escapes an arranged marriage in Pakistan. The novel has been up on Radish and attracted plenty of readers, but its second half was a mess. The beat goes on.

Do you have any tips to share for starting writers?
“The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” is a short story by Alan Sillitoe, later made into a film. I view that title as an apt description of the novelist. Writing a novel can take years, and many writers give up during the process. Can you endure? You’ll piss off many people who can’t understand that your story is almost always in your head, grabbing your attention when they want it. You’ll piss off people who think your story is about them, and you were unkind. Every rejection delivers a wound that doesn’t heal. You end up a bloody mess. And the rewards are none too certain. But if you’re bound to do it, then read. Read everything. Know words. You may never use all of them, but you’ll have them at your disposal for that metaphor. Write your first story or novel in the first person and keep it close to your own experience. Swap stories with everyone you can. Learn to take criticism.
Surprise question
You are transported to a world without technology. What’s the first thing you’ll do?
See if I could pull off that trick of starting a fire with two sticks.