What writer’s books would you suggest?

Book on writing abound and what’s useful varies wildly from writer to writer. These are the books I go back to again and again:
Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury
Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, Lawrence Block
Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande
Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle
The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell
The Elements of Style, Strunk and White
Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path, Nancy Pickard and Lynn Lott
Writing the Novel, Lawrence Block
On Writing, Stephen King
Plot, Ansen Dibell

What writing rules do you follow?

I’m not much of a rules person, but here are the things I’ve done since I made up my mind that I wanted to earn a living writing novels:
Write every day
Read everything
Write the stories I want to read
Keep going

Where do I get ideas/would I like to write your idea/do I ever worry about running out of ideas?

If I never had another idea, I still have enough writing to keep me busy for the rest of my life. So no, I don’t worry about running out of ideas and I will never need anybody else’s.

Where do these ideas come from? Who knows? They just come and I write them down. Sometimes the idea that seemed so fascinating before I wrote it down dies on the page and sometimes it grabs me by the throat. The ones that die on the page obviously didn’t involve me enough to want to stay with them for the number of hours, days, months, etc. it would take to write the story. The ones that grab me by the throat I surrender to and get to work on.

Why do you write these kinds of stories?

I am a product of my environment and my interests. I grew up living for Creature Feature, horror comics, science fiction, fantasy. I read romance later, after monsters and space travel were firmly ingrained in my psyche and found that true love and hot sex interest me as much as all that other Weird Stuff does. I write about what interests me.

It’s like this: if God wanted me to be Herman Melville, I would have been born a man, in a different time period, with a monomania for whales. I’m not a man, whales don’t interest me that much, and so I will never write a Moby Dick kind of book.

I could do one heck of a parody, but it’s probably better for everybody if I don’t go there.

How do you find time to write?

I started using this technique and shared it with my writer’s group. Many of them found it very helpful, too. It goes like this: if you have fifteen minutes, sit down at your computer or with your paper and pen and set a timer. Start writing. Do not stop until the timer goes off. You will be amazed at the number of words you can produce with time you didn’t think you had. The trick to being a productive writer is to use the time you have.