www.samanthablair.comMs. Blair lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with her loving husband and two cats. Her writing slows every fall with the start of the Steelers season before making an amazing rebound shortly after the Super Bowl. She has a full time career as a marketing director and website designer, but in her spare time she can frequently be found writing for the sheer joy of it.She and her husband enjoy traveling, camping, down-hill snow skiing, and reading post-apocalyptic fiction together. Taking hikes and wilderness survival classes are among their typical bonding activities.An avid reader, Samantha devours about 250 books a year from all genres and time periods. Her favorite authors include Stephen King, Fannie Flagg, Stephenie Meyer, and Henry David Thoreau.Q. Was there ever a book that changed your life?A. Absolutely, but it's actually a series of seven books. The Dark Tower by Stephen King started me down a long road that traveled through all of his writing. There's a lot of it, and I learned a lot from reading his works. What an imagination! I'll take a good storyteller over a Pulitzer Prize winner any day.Q. Where do your stories begin?A. It's usually a mental short film of an unusual situation. With Protectors it was a young woman running through a cornfield in the dead of night. The story that I'm working on now was originally about a very poor woman leaving a very wealthy man. It has since turned into a story about a young woman who auctions off her virginity to an oil tycoon. I try to figure out why the people in my head are in those awkward situations, and then I write them a way out of it.Q. What is your guiltiest pleasure?A. I'm a sucker for m/m fiction or chocolate mousse cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. It's a tie. If someone writes a steamy guy on guy scene involving chocolate cake, I'm doomed.Q. What is your greatest fear?A. Failure. I can be kind of hard on myself.Q. Why did you start writing?A. I'm a professional graphic designer in my "real life" and I needed an outlet for my creativity that wasn't tied to my job.Q. What do you find is the hardest thing about writing?A. Keeping to a steady schedule. I always want to write fifty different stories all at one time, and I have trouble finishing one idea before moving on to the next.