Q: How did a pair of dogs become your main characters in the Spot and Smudge series?

A: I figure every dog owner has experienced that moment when their pooch looked up at them, tipped his head, and appeared ready to blurt out ‘I really don’t like your Uncle Gus much...he smells funny and blames his gas on me’.

Well I’ve raised lots of rescued mutts, from bounding puppies to gray-faced old coots, and I swear every one of those expressive furry faces were just itching to let fly with a good joke or a zinger of an insult. I thought it would be interesting to give a pair of scrappy rescued littermates that opportunity.

And then I wondered if human-level smarts and understanding of their surroundings would alter what it means to be a dog. How would it affect things like their loyalty, or playfulness, or nobility, or protectiveness...or aggression...and most importantly, what would happen if they and the family they love were shoved into some very, very tough situations.

And...my crazy dogs have provided me with a constant supply of real-life stories that beat any fiction I could come up with, so I cheated and used them for some of the best, and funniest, parts of the books. Many of those anecdotes came from the real Spot and Smudge.

Q: Aside from the dogs, some of your most memorable characters are Scots. What inspired them, and how did you approach writing their accents and colloquialisms?

A: My in-laws are all Scottish…and by ALL Scottish I mean there’s no half measure with that group. They’re Scottish right down to their tartan slippers. We recently travelled from Boston to Inverclyde to meet the extended family and they’re no less crazy, and I mean that in the best, most loving way. My biggest challenge was to write them so the kindness, smarts, cheekiness, loyalty, and irrepressible love for life came through without being a caricature. I failed, mostly because they have such BIG presences in real life you have to write them big…even while trying to use ‘wee’, and ‘aye’ sparingly so the reader can bloody well understand ye’.

Q: Many of your characters are strong, smart women. What influenced them?

A: I'm surrounded by them. Our own Mimi had survived The Blitz, and raised three children by herself, and moved to the US from Scotland. Her daughter (my wife) and our two girls are equally sharp and cunning. And they're as beautiful as they are tough. They're the kind of people you'd want with you when the zombie apocalypse comes, and they just seemed to fit perfectly into these twisted stories, either directly or by inspiring a character.

Q: What made you decide to self-publish?

A: Fear, mostly. I wrote the first three Spot and Smudge books before releasing them as I wasn’t sure they were any good. It felt like a self-indulgent hobby but my first reviewers really liked them, and told me to get them out there (and some of them weren’t family, or people who owed me money). I started looking into the options and self-publishing seems to be the right way for me. I have the advantages of time and an amazingly supportive family so I can focus on getting better at the craft, and building an audience, hopefully.

Q: What inspired Spot and Smudge's unique 'enhancements'?

A: The stories are pretty gritty, both mentally and physically. It was important for the dogs to do more than just wag, bark, bite, and stare. They needed to interact with their environment and communicate in a way that allowed them to get their hands dirty (ha!). The idea for their special paws came from watching our dogs attack one of those huge braided rawhide bones. They each held an end as they chewed and tugged away bits, and although they were pretty deftly manipulating it I imagined what they could do if they had a thumb, of sorts. Hands themselves are a recurring theme in the books, and several astute readers have picked up that hands often play a role in the pivotal scenes.

Spot and Smudge's other abilities started out as two questions; 'If I were a dog, what genetic modifications would I want?', and  'If I were a nefarious corporation trying to build a modified soldier how would I do it?' The accelerator compound came from the answers of course, but so did the most important part which was 'we don't know'. The two dogs' capabilities, and their control of them, evolves differently over time as they grow physically and intellectually. And the unknowns of those abilities and the compound itself mirrors the increasing dangers around them as the stories unfold.