The influence of True Crime has touched my work. The ideas can be loosely based as in Escape from Dolphin Street or more overtly as in Lane Bowden 1973. A story takes on a sense of fear, a deeper horror that resonates, when put in the context of fiction that is based on a real life event. The genesis of Dolphin Street was a...

Doubt is the mind killer just like its cousin, fear. In the past, I hated the idea of someone judging my writing. The flaws stuck out and tormented me. There was no way it could be as good as others’ work, or so I thought. I always saw images in my head like a film playing out behind my eyeballs. I used to want to make movi...

Real life events impact my writing. I have used random meetings of unique individuals, places I have seen, and research of history and true crime to put my fiction in real spaces. One of the most personal aspects came to pass in Lane Bowden 1973. In the unreleased novel, Lane’s mother, Ellen, is dying of cancer. I based her...

Research can involve more than archives, internet searches, books, and interviews. If possible, going to a location is important to get a feel for it. In Lane Bowden 1973, I wanted to know what it was like in the Heights neighborhood that summer. Houston is notorious for not preserving history, but there were pieces of the...

The genesis of Lane Bowden 1973 began in the aftermath of my mother’s death from cancer. Time is a funny thing in regards to memory, to this day, that time is surreal and blurry to me. I had published my first novella, Where the Road Roams, and had written some underground films, when I was approached to do a project about...