Andy78 is the featured Signature Author this week, and as always, we have a great interview where he can share just a little bit more about himself with site members. I decided to change up the questions, so we have a few new ones this time to go with some of my favorites. Andy actually said, "Thank god you didn't ask the what are you wearing question." Maybe if I had, Andy would've been sharing A LOT about himself.

Single people often have more time to write. Are you single?
Nope. I’ve been with my partner for sixteen going on seventeen years (that makes me feel so old lol).

Have you ever gone out in public, realized your shirt is on backwards, and just don’t care?
Once – thankfully it was nowhere fancy, just the local pub. By the time one of my friends pointed it out to me, I was far too drunk to care.

Did you like to write in school?
I did. It was mostly essays though, I was never one for writing prose.

What brought you to the Gayauthors?
I was reading Ghostryder’s Kombat Kids over on Nifty and there was link over to GA.
What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
Reading for the most part – anything I can get my hands on really (I’ve even been known to read Jane Austen).

The other thing I really enjoy doing is baking – cakes and breads mainly. I also like to experiment a lot in the kitchen. My most recent act of bravery was with baking peanut butter bread – it was not nice.

What’s the first thing you do when you start to write a story?
I plan out the universe it takes place in. Who my characters are, what the country is like, the religion, their folklore, their laws, those kind of things. I tend not to worry about the timeline so much at the outset – I find the story dictates the timeline rather than the other way round.

If you could give advice to yourself when you first started writing, what would it be?
Don’t adopt plot bunnies lol

In all seriousness, never start posting anything until it’s finished. Life ‘n stuff happens. If you have a complete story written, you can postdate the chapters and not have to worry about the unexpected.

Did something inspire you to write a story with magic for The Back-up Plan anthology?
I had the TV on in the background just for some noise (I can never concentrate without background noise) and I had the SyFy channel on, when an old episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer came on. The episode revolved around a student who had brought his brother back from the dead and was building him a girlfriend in a Frankenstein-esque way. I’d never been a fan of the Frankenstein genre, but the idea of creating someone with magic suddenly came to me.

How long did it take you to write Magic in the Air?
It took just over nine weeks to write the story. Then it went through about two weeks’ worth of editing and beta reading (which added about 1400 words to the story).

What was your favorite part of the story?
The scene at the start with Angus performing the incantation. That was probably the scene that I spent the longest amount of time fussing over, and I also needed to research the various plants and weeds that flourish in the highlands.

Do you have any stories in the pipeline you haven’t posted yet?
There’s two that I’m seriously writing. One is an old story I wrote that never really came to anything so is going through a major rewrite (it’s up to about 50k, but is a long way from being ready). The other is a Star Trek-esque sci-fi that I think will end up as a collection of short stories rather than a novel.

There’s also a couple that I’m just toying with. One has some potential, and the other one just won’t leave me alone. They are annoying little plot bunnies that I adopted a couple of years ago but haven’t had the heart to fricassee.