I came to writing backwards, by which I mean directly. Most writers have a long list of strange jobs they held before they settled into writing. I’ve known I wanted to be a novelist since I was thirteen. I figured that instead of doing something practical that made money until I was old enough to have the leisure to try, I’d just try. To support myself, I worked as a bartender and then as an English teacher. When we married, my wife and I decided I would write full-time. Unless your spouse thinks being poor is romantic and is tremendously patient, unbelievably supportive, and basically unconcerned about owning toys, this is a recipe for disaster. For us, it worked.

Do you mainly read fantasy fiction or are there other genres that you enjoy?

Fantasy is my first love, but like most writers my reading habits are fairly promiscuous. I love reading history because it breaks you free of some of your own culture’s preconceptions while staying within the bounds of human psychology. If you read something totally outlandish in a fantasy novel, you think, meh, whatever. If you read something totally outlandish in history, you think, how did that happen? How did people accept that? It’s also fun because you find places where other novelists have “borrowed.” I was reading about the Borgias in sixteenth-century Italy and it slapped me in the face—Pope Alexander VII was the Godfather, complete with dysfunctional kids. I checked into it, and Mario Puzo readily admits it. I also dabble with mysteries and whatever’s on the best-seller rack, and I’m a recovering literature major.

The Night Angel Trilogy has a very dark and gritty concept. How did you derive the idea for it?

There are a lot of answers to this question.

First, few writers admit this, but coming up with ideas is the hard part of writing. I pay a guy in Bulgaria to do it for me. Then I do the easy part and make a novel out of it. No, actually, ideas come from a secret email discussion list in New York City. You can’t get on the list until you’re published, but you can’t get published until you’re on the list.