Author Interviews

My book began with an idea of two riders, a man and a woman, entering a tiny village in the rain and fog. Though I believed I could never write fantasy due to my having Aphantasia, I couldn’t get the story out of my head and the story kept growing around that idea. I soon knew that the man was someone who was called ‘the Traveler.’ I soon knew that twins related to the woman had been abducted and the story would begin with the man and woman setting out to free the twins. So the title, The Traveler: Quest for the Twins, was actually quite easy to come up with.

Erin is the author of Kapuna: How Love Transformed a Culture, which received the North American Book Award 2015 for Best Travel Non-Fiction and the 2015 Idaho Author Awards First Place in Biographies, Autobiographies, and Memoirs. She studied Art, Photography, and Journalism at Hillsdale College in Michigan, USA. Her passions include teaching inductive Bible studies, urban gardening, good coffee, wombats, family-based care, and, of course, books.

Writer and photographer Ethan Hirsh served four years as an air traffic control officer in the United States Air Force, then worked as a wordsmith and communications strategist in Houston and Kansas City for more than thirty years. His corporate specialties included annual shareholder reports and branding. He has degrees in English and business. Now starting a third decade of “retirement,” he spends much of his time with his wife, JoEl, tending their nature preserve in the Missouri Ozarks. An amateur naturalist, Ethan publishes a photo blog several times a year.

Katherine Williams was born on the Wirral Peninsula in England. She now lives in rural Connecticut, USA, where she likes to write, work in her vegetable garden, and hike in the surrounding countryside with her new puppy Maus.

Honey Lea Gaydos is a writer, visual artist, and professional nurse specializing in mental health. Combining all these interests, she developed an innovative research approach using visual art to explore self-defining memories earning a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies. In her career as a professor of nursing, she promoted the use of the arts in healthcare environments and advocated a holistic approach to care. Her emotionally evocative artwork has been sold for many years through galleries and exhibitions. Her writing includes scholarly publications, essays and poetry, and a spiritual memoir, Patterns: The Mystical Journey of an Ordinary Life.

A lifelong devoté of Jane Austen and all her works, James Wollak is a retired financial data analyst and lives in San Francisco, California, a third-generation San Franciscan. He is an avid reader, numismatist, and music lover, enjoying all kinds of music such as classical and opera, Motown and soul, ABBA, Celtic, blues, bluegrass, and zydeco. He also loves silent and classic Hollywood films, and the “Poldark,” “Downton Abbey,” and “Sanditon” series. He is a confirmed Anglophile, and Pride and Prejudice is his favorite novel of all time.

Sofia Pires Baquedano is a Brazilian-Spanish writer and filmmaker. She currently is a film student in university in Brazil, and holds a certificate from the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles. She is passionate about the importance of imagery and beauty in a scene, both on-screen and on-paper. She grew up between Brazil and Spain. this is my worst nightmare please be nice to me is her first novel.

Ever since childhood, I have written stories. My mother read stories to me every evening at bedtime, and when I didn’t like the ending of the story, I changed it. When my children were little, I made up stories at bedtime. Throughout my teaching career, I published short stories in literary magazines and wrote several plays. I have won eleven prizes from my writing. Writing and storytelling are in my DNA.

Mark Katlic, M.D., is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Washington & Jefferson College and an Alpha Omega Alpha graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He completed residencies in Surgery and Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, then practiced Thoracic Surgery for forty years, first in Northeastern Pennsylvania and then in Baltimore. He was Chair of Surgery for Lifebridge Health System in Baltimore until his retirement in 2024.

I’m seventy-one years old, and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1982. At that point in my life, all I wanted to do was write. I started writing sonnets and haiku about Parkinson’s disease, and fiction that went in wildly different directions. Suddenly, I had enough material to make a book!

John W. Long is a retired Federal agent with more than thirty-six years of law enforcement experience. He has been a homicide detective, a military intelligence officer and was the Special Agent-In-Charge (SAC) for the Department of Transportation, Office of Inspector General’s Atlanta Region for many years. He attended the University of Georgia and Nova Southeastern University and has a BA in Criminal Justice, an MA in Criminal Justice and an MBA.

W. A. Polf is a retired Senior Vice President from New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, who now lives in North Carolina. His stories have appeared in various publications and have been finalists or semi-finalists in a number of contests. He won second prize in the North Carolina Writers Network’s Doris Betts Short Fiction competition. The story was published in the North Carolina Literary Review Online and was nominated for a Pushcart and for The Best Stories Online.

Erik Schneider was born in Austin, Texas, and frequently visits the state, but he has called Northwest Arkansas home since early childhood. It’s not the most bustling location in the country, but the dense forests and somewhat secluded feel to the area inspired the setting and character of this novel.

My brother and co-author James Schmitt is a videographer providing the video feed to local, college and professional sporting and civic events. As a paralegal, I worked mostly in real estate law, through which I eventually became the president of a multi-million-dollar non-profit corporation. We both spent our downtime at work imagining or writing stories.

Brett Shapiro is an American writer and the author of Late in the Day, a novel published by Atmosphere Press in 2022, and Those Around Him, a novel published in 2019. He is also the best-selling author of L’Intruso – a memoir published in Italy (Feltrinelli) that was later produced into an award-winning film and theatrical production. In addition, Brett is the author of two children’s books, one of which was the recipient of Austria’s National Book Award. Several of his short stories have been performed in theatres throughout Italy, where he lived for twenty-five years, and his essays and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers in Italy and the United States.

R.M. Tembreull is a devoted husband and proud father. He is a combat veteran with twenty-six years in the U.S. Air Force and an accomplished career professional in the disciplines of law enforcement, physical security, and antiterrorism. In his travels and endeavors, he has experienced the best and worst of humankind. He is also an avid scuba diver with a lifelong passion for experiencing the planet’s natural wonders, employing his skill as an artist and creator at every opportunity. His love of writing is only matched by his respect for nature.

Caroline Willcocks has worked in the theatre, as a freelance journalist, and in charities. She has written all her life, and finds history fiction is a wonderful way to portray human emotions in extraordinary settings. She lives in rural Herefordshire with her husband, two cats, and a dog.

A twenty-two-year-old father becomes a single parent to two sons, ages three and five, abandoning his aspirations of becoming a singer-songwriter-performer. Despite eight years of mental illness, Jerry recreates himself through adversity and more than one failed marriage to later fulfill his dreams of becoming a full-time musician.

Melissa DelMonego has been a corporate event planner for more than thirty years. She has an unwavering passion for organizing and leading projects to successful completion. Now, Melissa shares her expertise and productivity techniques to help others experience a greater sense of achievement in their daily lives. She helps others be their best: more focused, empowered, and accomplished through offering simple, yet highly effective strategies for planning, moving forward and achieving goals.

Natalie Musgrave Dossett grew up in San Antonio, spending a great deal of time on family ranches in deep South Texas, a place her great-grandmother referred to as ‘an acquired taste’. A seventh-generation Texan, Natalie was raised on tales (most of them tall) of the Wild Horse Desert. Her love of history and writing was nurtured by wonderful high school teachers and strengthened while earning a BA in History at Vanderbilt University. She lives in Dallas and enjoys a large, growing family with her husband.