I grew up in north Florida, worked as a seasonal employee in Montana's Glacier National Park, saw Hawaii and the Philippines while serving on an aircraft carrier, and taught at a small college. Each of these experiences had an impact on me. In a sense, it created a psychic bond, so to speak, between those places and me, and this allowed me to write about them in my novel with more power and realism.

When I had a protagonist who was drifting around the world search for something, I put him in places where I had been: that's called writing what you know. I used my own experience plus a lot of imagination to create the experiences my David Ward character has in the book.