Today my Gentle Readers, I want to introduce you to Paul Francois. In the style of my previous interviews, I will put my comments/questions in BLUE and Paul will be GREEN.

Seems like all writers are also voracious readers. What got you started in the literary world?
Actually, I am a hypocrite. I never enjoyed reading in school, not sure if that was due to the horrible English teachers I endured in high school or not. Unfortunately that followed me beyond my academic years. I even find it difficult to read my own work, of course what writer enjoys having to edit his own work.

I don’t think any nominally sane writer likes to edit their own work. When you do pick up that rare book however, what do you go for?
When I do read, my favorites are SciFi, Fantasy, and Suspense/Thiller.

So if English was so horrible in school and you weren’t a reader, what turned you onto writing?
I hated to write in school, once again a side effect of my hatred of English classes. One day in 2011 I started thinking of a story idea. No matter how hard I tried I could not stop the thoughts…or voices I guess. So I started writing them down. That first novella was the most difficult to write. Most likely due to my lack of desire to read and write at a young age. I have found writing to be my greatest challenge, and I love a good challenge. I am not sure where my ideas come from, but most of them come from when I shower. My wife thinks it’s the hot water that inspires me. Maybe the heat makes my brain work better.

Some people sing in the shower, you plot stories. Maybe it is the heat. So what genre is your specialty?
I still have not restricted myself to a single genre yet. I have written a YA Adventure novella, a Epic Fantasy novel, and am working on a SciFi novel next. I also plan on writing Thriller and Mystery as well.
So when you finally decided to write, what was your journey like?
As I mentioned before, I started in 2011 writing. Mostly to just stop the voices in my head. I felt as if the ideas were pouring out faster than I could write them. I lost count of how many edits that novella went through. I am surprised there were any pages left when I was done. Once I finished that I received my next idea for a novel from the online game I used to play, Shadowbane. I loved the lore behind the game, but it left too many unanswered questions. So I used that for my novel. Before I knew it, I wrote enough to fill a full length novel…my first one too. Before I could even finish that novel I started getting more and more ideas for novels. I finally started writing down the basic ideas on text files and storing them away for later. I think at last count I was up to at least a dozen more ideas. Now I just need the time to finish them.

No doubt you will have more ideas before you finish those novels. When you are not writing, what fills your time?
I work in the IT field. I am currently work at a college. I have a wife, who still tolerates me after 25 years, and a son who is finishing his 3rd year in college right now. All of my other hobbies, football, video games, and electronics, have taken a backseat to my new hobby…writing. I am obsessed with it. There have even been some nights I woke up in the middle of the night to write, my wife loved that!

I bet she did. I want to thank you for stopping by and chatting with me for a bit, Paul. I look forward to getting my hands on that epic fantasy and the Sci-Fi novel once I get my ‘to be read’ pile down a bit.

If you want to check out Paul’s work and keep up with what he dreams up in the shower next, just click on the link below to go to his website.

Paul’s Website – Crusader’s Crypt