Interview at PodSyndicate.com
I’ve been interviewed in some depth over at PodSyndicate.com. Please head on over and comment! Here’s an excerpt:
The first book in the series, Predestination, deals with rigged poker games. Do you play? What did you learn from personal experiences that played a key role in creating scenarios in your book?
I’m actually pretty rusty, but at the time I wrote the first draft I played a lot, and had been playing for years. I got started when I was about ten, when an uncle of mine who was a low-level diplomat explained the nature of his job to me by saying “If you know how to play poker, and you know how to play chess, then you have the basic skills it takes to do diplomacy.” I was the kind of kid that viewed that sort of statement as a challenge, so within about two months I had a regular poker game going in my garage with my siblings and other neighborhood kids - we played for M&Ms or other types of kid-gold because we weren’t allowed to play for money. I kept on playing right through college on a daily-to-monthly basis, but since college it’s been hard to find people willing to play for stakes I can afford.
