Patrick D'Orazio: I think I have always been a writer, even since I was little. I would write ten page hand scrawled sagas for assignments that asked for a one page essay back in grade school. I wrote my first fantasy adventure novel in high school, and I gave serious consideration to majoring in journalism in college, although I didn’t head down that path. It wasn’t until I hit my mid-thirties that I think I realized I needed to get serious about things and stop scribbling short stories that I stuffed in a filing cabinet and focused on writing my first serious novel.

PD: I think I have always had a tremendous respect for those who create compelling horror stories, whether on film or in print. I read quite a few horror comics as a kid and had a dad who loved the classics and let me watch them with him when they showed up on TV late at night. I also started reading horror novels at an early age (a healthy dose of Stephen King at age ten is a good thing) and when we got cable television back in the early eighties and I got to see Dawn of the Dead and some of the Fulci zombie movies for the first time, I think I was smitten with the genre.

I love science fiction, fantasy, and horror and consider myself an equal opportunity fan of all three genres. I think as I continue to learn and grow as a writer, my work will end up being a blend of all three of these genres, and I may even stick my nose out and take a shot at other areas as well.

PD: It is never easy to pin down one particular book or author for me when I am asked this by anyone because so many authors have influenced me and I don’t necessarily just mean in horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, but also in other genres and in general literature. I also love the men and women who are the fresh faces in horror who I have had the privilege of interacting with, like Ben Rogers, David Dunwoody, Rhiannon Frater, Eric Brown and countless others who blow me away with the quality of their work. Honestly, I am jealous as hell of most of them because they are so damn talented.

But as I look around on my book shelves, my eyes gravitate to one particular book, and so that has to be the one that is my favorite: The Stand by Stephen King. That book, along with the movie Dawn of the Dead, started me on my fascination for the apocalyptic.

PD: In life, there are a great many, but I think perhaps the most profound was the birth of my son. The reason is because he was born extremely premature. We were supposed to have twins, but his identical twin brother died in utero and the entire pregnancy was a struggle for my wife. He weighed one pound, twelve ounces at birth and was on a respirator for weeks, spending the first few months of his life in a neonatal intensive care unit. We almost lost him on several occasions and I can’t honestly say how me and my wife got through that time, especially since my job had me traveling a great deal, so I couldn’t be there at her side every day and night as she watched his little body struggle through that. Today, we have a wild, rambunctious nine year old boy that we still call our miracle baby, but in those early months, we honestly didn’t know what to expect on a daily basis.

That might not be an experience that is directly correlated to my writing, but I have to say it has profoundly affected me and in turn, everything I write.

PD: When I cracked open the box and got the copies of my first novel in the mail it was a pretty monumental occasion for me, but I think my absolute favorite thing has been building the many relationships I have with other authors and fans in the horror genre over the past year or so. Just getting the chance to talk with them and trying to figure out what makes them tick and what gives them their passion for writing has been one hell of an experience. They are so incredibly supportive and the biggest cheerleaders (outside my wife and kids) that I have as a writer. It is like having an extended family that keeps me motivated to keep forging ahead, even when I doubt my own talents and abilities as a writer.

PD: I think inspiration can spring from almost anything. My kids inspire me with their creativity, my wife inspires me with the stories she tells me after a long day at work, and just about anything else I have been exposed to has, to some extent, inspired me in some way to write. Stacks of ideas on furiously scribbled notes clog up several envelops on my desk and more come all the time. I guess it’s always been that way, but only since I got serious about writing have I tried to refine some of those ideas and determine what among them make sense and can become more than just a one sentence lark of an idea. I wish I could say that there is a process or a method to my madness, but I think inspiration just comes whenever it feels like and there isn’t much I can do about it.

PD I doubt you can ever do enough research. For my first novel and the two follow ups that I have written, I conducted interviews with National Guardsmen, tossing out random scenarios to them, asking them about equipment, how they would be deployed in certain situations, how the interact with other elements of the military, etc. I am familiar with the geography where my stories take place, but I drove around and took hundreds of pictures of different buildings and different landmarks to insure that I could describe things in good detail and understood how I would approach certain elements of my story. Of course, with the internet, a lot of things are at your fingertips, which is nice, but I do like actually speaking to people and getting the scoop on things that you just can’t get through a computer in a lot of instances. In addition to research, allowing the people who are experts, or the closest to it, to proofread what I have written always helps as well.

PD: My first novel, Comes the Dark, has just been released from The Library of the Living Dead Press. It is the first of a trilogy of books and I have actually finished the manuscripts for the two sequels, so they are scheduled to be released six months and a year from now, respectively. My short stories are also appearing in a variety of anthologies that will be released over the next year from a variety of publishers and I am planning on beginning my next novel, which has already been outlined, in the next month or so. I try to keep things updated as I go on my blog, at www.patrickdorazio.com.