I didn't know much about Texas when I moved there for graduate school. In my first or second semester, I took a class in life and literature of the Southwest, and that's where I first heard about these events along the border in 1915-1918, what Anglos called the Bandit Wars.
I was a bit of a delinquent growing up, a very poor student - I nearly failed several grades before dropping out of high school and getting a G.E.D. But I still read a lot. Thrillers and war novels, mostly, along with the occasional literary novel from my parents' bookshelf.
Life throws up enough road blocks to keep you from writing; you can't be adding to them yourself by saying you can only write in one specific place. I'm in New York half the time and Texas half the time, and I work wherever - in my computer bag I have some foam ear plugs that I can put in.
Texas was mostly short-grass and tall-grass prairie when modern Europeans arrived here. It really was a land of milk and honey. But when they brought all these cattle onto these relatively small bits of land, and the cattle were allowed to graze freely, they essentially destroyed the prairie.
When you hold things back, when you don't commit completely to your ideas and trust completely in your own instincts, you are guaranteeing your own failure - even if you end up having commercial success.
Fundamentally, all art is about human beings. You're always showing larger moral questions through the smaller moral, philosophical, or political choices through one character in the book.
I like mechanical things; my first book was a mechanics guide - that was what my parents couldn't pry away from me; that was the blanket.
