Are there any books or authors that inspired you to become a writer?
I was nine when I read, The Black Stallion, my first novel. As I read, I was in the story, riding along with Alec as he clung to the mane of the Black Stallion. Growing up, I read constantly. There was a small-town library, and I checked out books every week. Some were teen romances and others were best sellers. When I was twelve, I decided to read books that were more grownup. I read two novels by Charles Dickens: Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. Because I was so young, much of what Dickens wrote escaped my understanding and appreciation. Still, I identified with Pip, his loyalties and his romantic yearning. Although the guillotine scenes made me squeamish, I was impressed by the way Dickens laced dark humor into the Reign of Terror and his observation that Old Bailey’s hangings were entertainment for the locals. Dickens created characters—portraits of people I imagined I knew. Like Dickens, I often use dark humor and social commentary in my work.
Have you ever tried to write a novel for a genre you rarely or never read?
When I became an English teacher, I had little free time. There was a script I had co-written about mall rats battling demons on Christmas Eve. I decided to expand it into a YA novel. Big mistake. I had no idea how to keep things simple and write from the point of view of a teen or young adult. I kept writing, but the genre changed. The Demon Rift is a horror novel spanning over a century. I became a novelist, but not as a YA writer.
How do you develop your plot and characters?
It helps to be curious. What makes a character interesting? When I began to write The Demon Rift, I had one event, a true story of a prison fire, and to explain it, I created one character, an old man who summons hellfire and the prison burns. Why did he do it? I started by exploring the history and culture of prisons and occult rituals. Research makes for more believable characters. For example, when I studied the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and read accounts of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, what I learned added to the story of a major character.
My second novel, Babylon Dreams, began with a “what if” question. When I read an article about mind-uploading into a virtual reality program, I was curious. What would it be like, existing in VR? What could you do in VR that you can’t in the real world? What would happen if you mind-upload to a virtual reality world and then in the real world you die? What if your upload files begin to fragment? What if a quirk of personality (like the way you cover your mouth when you laugh) disappears from your upload folder; what memory (something painful or pleasant perhaps) could you lose and still be you?
What do you do to get inside your character’s heads?
I studied theater in college, so I start with an actor’s question: What do I want? When I have an answer, I place myself in the character’s head and look around. Assuming I’ve researched the setting, what do I see and hear? Are there other characters? Do I know them? Are they a threat? There are countless questions and as the storyteller, you must decide which answers are important in terms of structure and pacing, and what readers may want to know.
Name an underappreciated novel that you love.
VERSION Control: A Novel by Dexter Palmer. I read this novel several years ago. In it, a man invents a time machine which goes back in time only a few seconds. After their young son dies in a traffic accident, his wife enters the time machine, changing not only who dies in the accident, but history, technological advances and society norms. When the narrative switched and suddenly, the little boy was alive, I was disoriented until I realized what was happening. Two more versions play out, involving the same characters, altering their fates and relationships to each other. At the end, you’re unsure how many times this process has played out. What stayed with me was how these few seconds changed fates. Each character, their successes, their cruelty and generosity toward each other was different.
What book (or books) are you currently reading?
The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle. This is the third novel I’ve read by this author. I love his straightforward elegant prose and the way he engages the reader from the very start. It concerns a psychiatric hospital in New York. The Devil lives on the fourth floor.
If you’re planning a sequel, can you share a tiny bit about your plans for it?
I’m working on The Dark Side of Dreams, the sequel to my novel Babylon Dreams. Several years ago, in Psychology Today, physicist Ray Kurzweil wrote an article on mind-uploading into a virtual reality environment. He said we could copy our minds, upload them to a computer and meet friends for lunch in VR. Even better, we could customize our appearance, for example “raspberry eyes.” I was working on a film at the time, and I mentioned the article to the writer/director, along with a story idea: a love triangle that continues in virtual reality after all three are dead and mind-uploaded into the same VR program. He liked it and suggested I write it. Being someone who loves films, I thought of a Citizen Kane-like character who tells his story long after his death. Gunter Holden is a murderer and an impossible narcissist who finds redemption in Babylon Dreams.
The first book is set primarily in virtual reality. The sequel alternates between a VR setting and the real world. The questions I raise and answer in these two novels include: are we the sum of our choices and memories or is there a core, something innate that defines us? Which memories can we lose and still be us? And would VR after-death worlds change our legal system? Do people existing in VR have the same rights they had before their physical deaths? What about property rights? I answer the last two questions by creating a Virtual Bill of Rights.
This new novel is not only Gunter’s story. The Dark Side of Dreams connects us to the “bio” world as it is in the 23rd century. When she finds a hidden mind-upload copy of her grandfather, Gunter Holden, Mira Patel risks everything to take back Gunter’s company and restore his legacy.
What do you think makes a good story?
That’s a hard one. Stephen King creates characters we all seem to know, and through them, we see the battle of good and evil play out. Elena Ferrante’s books, starting with, My Brilliant Friend, are stories about life in a Naples slum and the power of friendship between two women. John Grisham writes novels where characters are caught in the legal system. The common ground is our humanity, even when we are not human. In Murderbot, a science fiction series by Martha Wells, Murderbot is a robot programmed to kill, but it would rather catch up on its favorite soap operas.
There are non-fiction stories, like The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. Larson gives a detailed account of the building of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and how a serial killer named Henry H. Holmes used the excitement and confusion to hunt and kill his victims. What fascinates is not Holmes’ humanity but what was missing in him.
What makes a good story? I don’t know for sure. We know it when we see it. Whether it has a fish-out-of-water plot like Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a quest like Frodo’s, a coming-of-age tale like Charles Dicken’s Pip or an awakening such as Dorothy’s discovery that “there’s no place like home.” Each good story has its own secret sauce.
As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?
When I was eleven, our class read an article on the discovery of a Stone age grave. I learned what was included, the dried flowers, ancient ornaments and other gifts that meant to say goodbye, by custom and with love, thousands of years ago. What else could I learn about them? I decided I would become an archeologist. It was fleeting ambition, with no set plan. I think what I felt was curiosity and a desire to connect with people who once lived and loved in the distant past. As time went on, my interest in our common humanity resulted in the coursework I did at UCLA as a theater major.
Decades later, I worked as a casting director for film productions and then as an English teacher, until I became a writer. My second book, Babylon Dreams, peers into the future where the dead continue to exist by mind uploading to a virtual reality program. What common ground would we find with people who live in a place where there is no physical ground? The place they inhabit is not an after-life, they exist in an after-death computer program. No gifts to the dead are necessary.
I’ m writing about a different culture in a different time, only it’s in the future, not the distant past. I wonder what the eleven-year-old me would think.
If you could be mentored by a famous author, who would it be?
William Gibson. He’s been writing speculative fiction set in cyberspace (a word he created) since the 1980’s. Although Babylon Dreams differs in tone, structure, etc., the technology involved owes a debt to William Gibson. When it comes to virtual reality fiction, Mr. Gibson is a pioneer.
Readers can follow me on X, Bluesky, Facebook, Amazon page and my website.