What inspired you to begin your writing journey?
I wrote my first “novel” when I was eight years old, and I’ve been writing fiction ever since. Call it a drive or an itch or whatever you like. Writing has been part of me since childhood. I write because I love reading, and a really good book always leaves me wanting more. Since I can’t write “more” of another storyteller’s stories,I write my own =)

Please share about your latest book, *Her Unwelcome Inheritance*.*Her Unwelcome Inheritance* is part one of a two-part story about Faerie, supernatural stalkers, family tensions, going off to school, and what to do when people you respect suddenly reveal that they believe in something absurd and impossible.
More details, including links to excerpts, can be found at my blog, www.smithyofthewrittenword.com.

Most writers are readers. What books do you have currently on your nightstand and/or on your “to read” list?
At the moment I’m in the middle of a poetry collection by Cheryl Dumesnil called *In Praise of Falling*, as well as a fantasy/horror novel by Alan Dean Foster. In the next few weeks I’ll probably read some Ursula K. Le Guin, Robin McKinley, and Emily Dickinson, as well as some classics that I haven’t gotten around to yet, like *Fahrenheit 451* and G. K. Chesterton essay collections. Maybe the next *Song of Ice and Fire* book too, we’ll see.

How did you decide to publish this book?
For the moment it’s available exclusively as an ebook for Nook and Kindle . I plan to seek traditional publication as well, once the sequel is written.
I chose to begin with the ebook route because it’s a strong emerging market that offers lots of agility to authors and gives readers a significantly less expensive way to “try out” new authors to see if they like them.
Meanwhile, it gives traditional publishers a chance to see how well a new book does with its “initial offering”, so to speak. If an ebook does well it should give traditional publishers much greater confidence in investing in printing and marketing that book. So it’s really win-win-win.

What is your best advice to beginning writers?
Don’t binge-write. Participating in writing sprints like NaNoWriMo serve a good purpose, if you’re such a compulsive self-editor that you can’t get enough story down on paper to move ahead, but in the long run success is going to come from establishing a reasonable writing schedule and sticking to it. Pace yourself. Write 1 chapter or 1 scene or 3 pages or 1,000 words (whatever works for you) every weekday morning or every night after everyone has gone to bed or every Sunday afternoon.

Don’t be afraid of a slow pace; be afraid of not being consistent. Even writing full-time I rarely wrote more than 3 chapters (about 5,000 words) per week. At that pace I wrote 3/4 of *Her Unwelcome Inheritance *in only 4 months.

What do you have on your calendar for the rest of 2012 in regards to your writing?
Outlining and writing *A First or Final Mischief*, the sequel to *Her Unwelcome Inheritance.* I hope to have it done by early summer, 2013.

How can others find out more about you and your book?
I blog, infrequently, at www.smithyofthewrittenword.com. I use it as sort of an online scrapbook, posting everything from short fiction and poetry to essays and articles.
You can find out more about the book on Amazon –

I’m also active on Facebook (facebook.com/mrwootton), Goodreads (
goodreads.com/mrwootton), and DeviantArt (mrwootton.deviantart.com).

Question for fun sake—what was your favorite childhood meal and why?
Oh, gosh. I’ve never been a picky eater and my mom is an excellent cook, so there’s a lot to choose from. Probably the meal I requested most for birthday dinners was chicken stoltzfus, a Pennsylvania-Dutch dish consisting of roast chicken in a parsley cream sauce served over hearty oven-baked crackers, usually with broccoli on the side. I was a weird kid, I know.