Goodreads asked Neil Low:

What’s the best thing about being a writer?

Neil Low For me the best thing about being a writer is the actual writing itself. I started writing while I was the commander of Internal Investigations for the Seattle Police Department. I wrote formal findings all day, sometimes the equivalent of three term papers a day, along with a handful of closing letters. This would be called right-brained logic writing. At night, I found stress release in writing fiction, which would be left-brained creativity. It also allowed me to work in some names (which I later had to change) of the people who might have been giving me grief in my work world. I look back now and am totally surprised how quickly that first novel jumped off the keyboard for me. It was a totally fantastic release for me.

Later, after my novel was published, and I was being interviewed by a reporter, she asked: "When you wrote about the murder of Alan Stewart's father, was that your way of dealing with the loss of your own father when you were young?" The reporter had caught me completely off guard, but she was absolutely right. That is really what I was doing, dealing with inner angst, feeling that he was taken to early from me. So I was projecting myself into one of the characters, one I no doubt wished I had been more like in my youth.

Another favorite thing about being a writer is receiving fan mail, making Facebook friends and Twitter friends of people who feel they know me through my writing. One of my favorite new friends got so much into my characters that he suggest a prequel to my first story. He'd like to know what Alan's father and associates had been up to in the years before the murder. He even suggested a plot line that's quite good. The biggest thrill here is that he enjoyed the characters I created so much that they seemed real to him, and he wants to see more of them. It could happen... Meanwhile, I'm writing my seventh novel in the series...

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