I am a fantasy writer who loves mysteries, or a mystery writer who loves fantasy. Someday, I might pick one over the other. I love writing about characters who feel like outsiders and need to take a stand for what they believe.
Q: Yeah, but who are you?
I was born in California, but my parents cruelly moved me to Iowa as a baby. I graduated from Iowa State University, where I met my best friends, so all is forgiven. A practicing engineer involved in the design of water and wastewater treatment systems, I love to figure out how things work. I live in Ames, Iowa.
Q: Did you always want to become a writer?
No. When I was in high school, I wanted to be either a musician, lawyer, or engineer. I decided that I wanted a family, house, and all the trappings of the American Dream. The life of a musician doesn’t go well with that. Lawyer might, but the type of ethics and hours they put in were not something I wanted to do. So, I picked engineer.
Q: How does someone go from something like engineering to writing novels?
Contrary to popular belief, engineering can be quite creative. Look around you, almost everything you see had an engineer touch it in some way.
Q: How did you come up with setting for your novels?
When I was in high school, I discovered a wonderful hobby called Roleplaying Games. I loved fantasy as a genre, so playing D&D was great. The problem was that no one wanted to run the games. So, if I wanted to play, I usually ended up being the game master. I started by running published worlds like DragonLance (which I still think is awesome). The problem was the players would read a lot of the books that I didn’t have time to read, so they knew way more about the world than I did.
I’ve always been pretty creative, so instead of investing the time into immersing myself into someone else’s world, I decided to immerse myself in my own. So, I started with a single city, Fantasmia, in the Tarthan Empire. Everything just went from there. As I needed something, I created it. Over the years, that became the world we always played on.
Q: How did you come up with the idea of Blake Heira?
It began when we were playing a game with two of my friends playing Sarak and Gmal. We were playing a campaign in Anaquestria, the City of Thieves. They were cleaning up the town, working to break the hold of the various guilds. One of the things that I noticed was how much magic changed the dynamics of what they were doing, particularly the Divination spells.
So, I started thinking, in a world where people can know who is evil by looking at them, who can read people’s minds with 100% accuracy, who know if you are lying no matter what, why is there any crime? Couldn’t the king or whoever just start a school for investigators who use magic to find the culprits?
Blake is that guy.
Q: Does writing come easily to you? Do you revise much?
I’d say writing comes easily, good writing is hard. I end up doing four or five drafts, but usually they aren’t huge rewrites. I use a couple methods to plot out my book before I start writing. The first is the Snowflake Method, by Randy Ingermanson. I’m also using some of the techniques from Deborah Chester, who taught Jim Butcher and others.
I have a critique group who keep me honest. A writing club called the Saturday Writers help me a lot. Beta readers, editors, and my sister in law all contribute.
Q: Where do you like to write?
Weirdly, I do almost all my writing at home in the living room, but I do some at writer’s conferences, restaurants, wherever I have a place to sit the laptop and have an internet connection.
Q: Are there any books about writing you would recommend? Did you take writing classes?
I did not take any classes, but I read a lot. There are tons of resources for writers. Here are the books that helped me the most.
On Writing by Stephen King
Fiction Writing for Dummies by
How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson
Anything by James Scott Bell
Anything by JoAnna Penn. Her website and YouTube channel are amazing.
The Fantasy Fiction Formula by Deborah Chester
The best advice would be to read books you like, then read them again and try to figure out why you like it. Analyze the plot, the characters, how the author ends a chapter, and how they begin and end the book. Reading the books above will help you with that, but reading is the most important part of writing.
Q: What are some of your favorite books?
Temperance Brennan Series by Kathy Reichs
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
The Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
The Mage Chronicles by RJ Eliason
Lincoln Rhyme and Kathryn Dance Series by Jeffery Deaver
Dubric Byerly Mysteries by Tamara Jones
The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson
The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson