1. What inspired you to write your first book?
My first book, Miss Alcott’s Email, was published in 2006. It was a response to two things: 1) the events of September 11, 2001; and 2) a fear I had that my business consulting life had squeezed all the writing ability that I may ever have had into PowerPoint bullets and project management status reports. I was afraid I’d completely lost the ability to write an interesting and complete English sentence.
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2. Writing can be a difficult job, what inspires you to keep going?
It’s fun.
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3. What are you working on now? What’s next?
I am working on two projects, with a third in the wings. One is a play script, co-written with Elizabeth Heffron, titled THE WEATHERMAN PROJECT. It’s about my days as a political radical in the late 1960s/early 1970s. The second project is a nonfiction book about the 1970 Seattle 7 Federal conspiracy trial. The third is a novel about a woman orchestra conductor (one of the jobs out there where women are still a significant minority).
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4. What’s your writing process, schedule, or routine?
I’m a morning person, so I do my most concentrated work with morning, and then work on revisions or research in the afternoons.
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5. What advice would give to aspiring writers? 
Just do it. But always, always think about your readers. Be kind to your readers. Don’t waste their time. Remember, readers are people too—they have lives to live, and issues they are grappling with. Entertain them, distract them, educate them, but don’t use them as an excuse for your own therapy. Also, read a lot and stretch yourself toward the best.
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6. Who would you most like to have a cup of coffee with? (Dead or alive)
Explain…
Way too many people—it would be a convention of people who took risks in the face of little to no encouragement. Examples: Susan B. Anthony, Emma Goldman, Vincent van Gogh, Mary Wollstonecraft.
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7. Sunrises or Sunsets?
This is an interesting question. In the late 1960s, I did a lot of cross country hitchhiking, so saw a lot of both sunrises and sunsets over mountains, water and the great plains. I decided that if you had a photograph of a sunset and a sunrise side by side, you wouldn’t be able to tell which was which. It’s all in the context. So I love them both.
Kit Bakke
www.kitbakke.com
www.facebook.com/kitbakkeauthor
kit@kitbakke.com
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