I am often asked, being a writer, if I am lonely, the perception is that all that time alone writing I miss company of people. Quite the contrary. I have enough characters wanting a voice to be heard, that I sometimes I run into the company of friends to chat about ordinary things.

In my novel, Forcing the Hand of God, the main character, Rodger Brown, became a distinctive voice, a person so real to me that I felt I knew him as a family member.

It’s hard for me sometimes to transition from a story into my other life as wife, mother, friend. While writing Forcing the Hand of God in 1982 for my master’s thesis I would dream about the protagonist, Rodger Brown. I could see him clearly in a small village in China walking along the alley ways, alienated by the language barrier and misunderstandings of the customs and people. When I got the internet twenty years later, and could research hours at a time, I came across a picture of a Flying Tiger in Benyang, strolling the through the dirt street, self-contained yet his expression belied a wistfulness, perhaps a wish to belong where he was at that moment. There was so much about him that I just knew the short story grew into a novel.