Reading Away Life: Author Interview

What’s your favorite place in the entire world? I think we can find beauty everywhere in the world, no matter how inhospitable a place can be. If you can see the world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, the entire world is a favorite place.

How has your upbringing influenced your writing? I had a dad and an older brother fan of science fiction. I’ve read it since I learned how to read. Then I read many other genre, and the classics, too. My father is an avid reader, or should I say was because he became blind. It is what he regrets more and no, he didn’t learn Braille. Maybe he should.

Do you recall how your interest in writing originated? I started to write almost at the same time I started to read. Micro stories, I had visions of other worlds, other times, and wanted to save them beyond my memory capabilities. No one ever read those stories though but me, from time to time, to remember them.

When and why did you begin writing? I was only a child, barely able to read and write. I always had a vivid imagination and I didn’t want to forget the scenes and the worlds I imagined. I did that for quite a few years then stopped around the time I went to University and started to work. It has been a long hiatus that has finally ended.

How long have you been writing? Since I learned to hold a pen in my hand. Stories and situations, worlds and characters always filled up my imagination. A story simmers, starts to boil, and then it needs to escape and asks me to become its storyteller. But I never published anything but academic work. Never fiction, those were my private world, until now.

When did you first know you could be a writer? Honestly I never thought of it. I always considered being a writer meant living off your words. I guess I was wrong. One is a writer if writing is like a wound that never heals, and something oozes out of it. In this sense, I’ve always been a writer, wrote for myself for years. Now something inside made me willing to share with others.

What inspires you to write and why? Everything, a sound, an image, a situation, an eavesdropped dialogue in the street. I take note of everything and anything can became a scene, a situation, the origin of a conflict. Writing is like evading, I become unaware of the world around me and I live through my characters. What happens in those worlds make me appreciate more ours.

What genre are you most comfortable writing? I’ve always written fantasy and science fiction but mostly about worlds where science removes the barriers to my imagination. If I can think of it, it must be one day possible, right?

What inspired you to write your first book? Daimones spurred by finding on the net an amazingly long series of inexplicable death of animals, where nothing can be pointed at as cause for the events and still most of those events share common aspects. Intriguing…what if… It developed into a post-apocalyptic novel with an ongoing mystery and suspense till the end, where all “dots connect”, especially with the main character’s past.

Who or what influenced your writing once you began? Well, my readers. When I started I joined a peer-critique group online and I received lots of encouragement and help too. Their initial reaction, that what I was writing was good and captivating, had been the fuel that allowed the fire to keep going. Their criticism too and the encouragement that I could become a better writer, that I had a voice.