Did September last eleventy-millionth days for you as well this year? I swear, it just gets longer and longer. Hopefully that just means you got a ton of great reading time in, though you shouldn't have needed too long for this gem. Also, Altimexis shared an image they had on another site for Cliff's Pendant, so I wanted to add that here for you along with the Author interview. Enjoy and don't forget to share your comments below! 

 Are you a person who makes their bed in the morning, or do you not see much point?

Growing up, my room was messy, but there were two things my mom wouldn’t tolerate. Firstly, clothes were never to be left out — if they were dirty, they needed to be dropped in the hamper and if they were clean, they needed to be hung up in the closet. Secondly, I was never to leave my room without my bed being made. It wasn’t that she was strict, but she was firm about keeping my room clean, if not neat.

To this day, the first thing I do when I get up is to make the bed.

If you were an animal, what would you be?

Technically, we are animals. That said, my avatar at AwesomeDude is a crow I photographed while hiking in Bryce Canyon. My avatar for Zoom is a pair of doves I photographed on our terrace in New York. Whether it’s a conscious choice or not, apparently I’d be a bird.

What’s one location you’d love to go to research for a story?

If there are no limits, I’d say Mars, with the Moon being a close second. If I’m limited only to places on Earth, it would probably be Cape Town.

I’ve traveled extensively and been all over North America, including 49 of the 50 states. I’ve been to Cuba, Argentina, Japan, Taiwan, China and Australia. I’ve been all over Europe, both east and west, before and after the fall of communism. I’ve been to Russia and to Turkey.

I’ve yet to get to Portugal or Spain, which are high on my list. Likewise for New Zealand. I’ve yet to get to Southeast Asia, a place I’d very much like to visit. I had planned a trip to Antartica, but was hospitalized the week before we were to go and never made it back. The most glaring omission, however, is the entire African continent. I’ve heard the Cape Town is exceptionally beautiful and of the places I haven’t been, it’s probably the best setting for a story.

What’s something personal about you people might be surprised to know?

Although I consider myself a rather private person, I’ve not been shy about my background. My early history is covered in the Introduction to Naptown Tales, and other aspects of my personal history, my religious and political philosophy and my professional life have made it into my stories in one way or another.

Perhaps the most surprising things for a prolific writer of gay-fiction is that I’ve never been in a gay relationship. Growing up as a teen in the Midwest, I thought that homosexuality was a mental illness. I did my best to ignore my feelings. Once when I was twelve, I convinced my best friend to get naked with me, but that was as far as it went.

Finally, at the age of 29 while doing a residency at Stanford in the San Francisco Bay Area, I acknowledged I was much more attracted to guys, but I went to see a psychologist who told me it wasn’t a good time to be gay! That was in the Bay Area, of all places. In his defense, we still didn’t know the cause of AIDS yet. However, he also said something of much more significance – that I shouldn’t worry about my sexuality. The main thing was to meet people. Less than a week later, I met a woman who blew me away. Forty years later, she’s still my wife.

Do you have any writing rituals?

The only rule is that I never post a story until the first draft is complete. Nothing frustrates me more than a story that’s left unfinished, or one with obvious inconsistencies. My stories are character-based and I like to develop my characters over time, which is why I favor story series. Some of my series have lasted years, during which my characters may grow from early adolescence to young adulthood.

When I write a new story, I start with a premise and a character or set of characters. I usually have an idea of how I want the story to end and what sort of things will happen along the way, but I don’t work from an outline. I give my characters defined personalities and the stories pretty much write themselves. That said, I love to leave clues of what is to come, and nothing is more fun than using deception or distraction to keep the reader off base.

Because I get frequent migraines that can last for weeks, I don’t like to write on a deadline. Indeed, the migraines forced me to retire early, leaving more time for writing. I write when the urge strikes me, which may be at home or when out and about – even while riding the bus. I’ve written entire stories on my iPhone.

How many stories have you written? Do you have a favorite and why/why not?

That depends on how you count my stories. My series may include stand-alone short stories, multi-part novellas and full novels. I’ve been writing for about twenty years and have written dozens of short stories. I’ve written four full-length novels: Love in a Chair, which was my first story and an embarrassment, Legacy, which is a Naptown Tales sequel, Conversations With Myself, which is a sci-fi thriller, and Brilliant Boy Billionaire, which is nearly a half-million words in length.

My favorite story is Conversations With Myself, even though it didn’t seem to get much traction with readers. The premise was of a government scientist who develops the technology to communicate with himself in the past, but through his dreams. However, meddling with time is serious business and to avoid it falling into the wrong hands, he does much of his work in secret. Then he makes a critical error. As a test, he contacts his past self on the night before September 11, 2001. It was only supposed to be a proof of concept, but his past self acted on the information, preventing the 9/11 terrorist attack. Things spiral out of control as he goes farther back into the past to try to fix the problems he creates.

It was the most challenging story I’ve written because there were seven periods in the main character’s life that were involved and each time he made contact with a past self, it affected events in all timelines after that. Presidents changed. History changed. It was lot to keep track of. I ended up creating a graphic to keep track of the seven timelines as they progressed simultaneously. Of course there are aspects I would do differently if writing it today, but I’m particularly proud of how well-it turnout in the end, in spite of a two-year hiatus in writing it.

When writing Cliff’s Pendant, did the idea for the character or the plot element of the pendant come to you first?

Because the theme of the anthology was the gift, it was the pendant that came to me first. A lot of the characters in my New York Stories series are Jewish and so I imagined a Star of David, inscribed with the Hebrew word for ‘life’, with a rainbow background of iridescent glass. My next door neighbor’s kid, who’s currently a student at the University of Michigan, attended Brooklyn Tech High School at the time, so I conceived of a kid of similar age and wrote the story about Zach. To make the gift unique, I came up with the story of Cliff.

Is there a particular line or scene in the story that you love the most?

That’s easy – the scene in front of the Stonewall National Monument. Zach’s father hadn’t given him the gift yet, but the way his parents let him know how they felt still brings me to teas.

Coming out stories can be very popular on GA. This is a very personal event that can go very different ways. Do you want to share your choices on the plot development for Cliff’s Pendant for that?

I think the main reason Zach was still in the closet was because his parents, both emergency medicine physicians working staggered shifts, just weren’t around. I think the real coming out story was that of the father’s best friend, Cliff. After all, it’s Cliff’s name in the title. Cliff grew up in a much more restrictive environment, in Indianapolis in the 80s, and he led a double life. Zach’s dad didn’t even know his best friend was gay until he developed AIDS. However, out of the tragic story of Cliff came the pendant – a beautiful symbol of love between friends – which became a symbol of love and acceptance between a father and his gay son. Then when Zach made a duplicate, it became a symbol of shared love with his boyfriend.

Can you share anything about your current or upcoming works with readers?

My current story, A Summer in Iowa, is in progress right now. It’s a prequel to one of my New York Stories, and it’s partially autobiographical, based on when I was sixteen and spent the summer at the University of Iowa.

The characters from Cliff’s Pendant have appeared in two subsequent New York Stories, most recently in October Fire, which is about the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023. I’ve been planning a sequel ever since, but then the world went off the rails. For a while, I wasn’t sure where to begin.

My next story doesn’t have a final title yet. The working title is Fallout. I’ve written two chapters so far and there will probably be a dozen or so. Rather than focus only on the aftermath of 10/7, I’m going to try to tie up most of the loose thread in the New York Story series. Whereas October Fire involved multiple primary characters and was written in third person. Fallout is told in first person by Zach’s kid brother, Jake, who’s now sixteen years old, and he’s straight.

Jake is a budding journalist who’s given the chance to take a summer trip in the American West with a group of his friends, most of them older, established characters from the NY Stories series. A number the kids are victims of 10/7 and two of them are in wheelchairs. Jake will go, hoping to write a story about the survivors of 10/7, but he’ll come away with much, much more. He’ll experience personal loss and the triumph of the human spirit.