Who influenced you? John D. MacDonald is my favorite writer. He inspired me to try to tell a good story while commenting on the world in which the characters travel. His books were never one dimensional, and I hope mine aren't either...never predictable but familiar because they parallel our common dreams.

What is your style of writing? Inspired by memories of my three or four lives in one, I go back and dig up bones and embrace all the pain, grief, love, joy, gain and loss there to be authentic. I become just the chronicler and narrator of it all, paint pictures with words on a canvass rich with descriptors, and try to set it all free to find its audience.

Describe your experiences outside of writing that inspired you. The paradigms that I lived within were shattered by those experiences and others later in my life. The search for that elusive simplicity on the far side of complexity nurtured a need to write it down and make sense of it all, to examine my triumphs and failures in my writing. http://merletemple.com