Joe Cooke

My love of fiction started with a musty box in my uncle's garage that held a treasure trove of old magazines and paperbacks, but it wasn't the artwork that held my attention, it was the short fiction and the novels by L'Amour and Vonnegut and Fleming and Hemingway. Those books made me want to tell stores.

I wrote my first full-length real novel in the basement of an old house in Vancouver, Washington, with water dripping from the pipes above me and a weird kind of millipede for company. I lost that story when the pages flew out of my motorcycle saddlebag on the I-5 freeway outside of Portland, Oregon, and it's probably a good thing.

I've been writing for thirty years now, and I still love a good story. I write fiction and non-fiction, but what they have in common is my desire to inspire and entertain. My non-fiction is based on a lifetime of studying the fundamentals of meaningful personal accomplishment and my fiction is just pure fun. I admire badass female warriors, so that's who I write. They fight injustice and wrongs and sometimes they fight werewolves or zombies. They are always flawed and human and I love them. I take my inspiration from current events and my brilliant, badass, social justice warrior wife (she wrote that bit).

I love to get out into the world and away from my desk by riding my Harley Road King across the southwest, hiking, eating at one of the great Santa Fe restaurants, or flying down the Colorado and New Mexico slopes on my skis.