A portion of a 2013 interview with Daniel, reprinted from The Cult of Me
You’ve written for most of your life, what inspired you to start writing fiction?
As a photojournalist, I was frustrated by not being able to put words to the pictures I was taking. Then, as a journalist, I became frustrated not being able to write my own opinions and perspectives to what I was reporting. Fiction was simply the inevitable evolution of this process of discovering the world and wanting to make some sense of it. Creating my own stories is my attempt to understand human nature and my own place in the universe.
Did your experience in writing non-fiction help when you started your stories?
Of course. I not only use the editorial skills I developed and perfected over the years, I simply extended the reality of what I saw and observed by asking the question “what if” and letting it take me where it would. One of the more important lessons I learned from journalism is Read More
Still needing to use his talents for some greater good, Daniel threw himself into investigative reporting. That was at a time when magazines still had budgets to support the kind of probing and fact substantiation that could take months for a single story. Covering politics and politicians, secretive sects, white collar criminals, the global munitions industry and such, his research was so solid that some of his stories resulted in indictments.