I began to conceive this story as an unsupervised freshman in the International Division of Sophia University in Tokyo, far from my parents at an Air Force base in the north of Japan and from the Nebraska town where I’d attended high school. Looking back, I now understand its theme—of a questing village youth who makes the eye-opening and mind-expanding transition from post-apocalyptic village to all-powerful Citadel—to mirror my own experience of going from a small town into the sophisticated expatriate community of the biggest city in the world. Unsurprisingly, plans to write a dystopian-tyranny love story got pushed beyond graduation in the States, then life happened. Not the settled post-college family variety but a challenge-and-risk-filled one of international travel in the service of government (as my state’s first commercial rep in Tokyo at 26) and industry and ultimately of crime, when I narrowly escaped death in Colombia to bring back the means to finance a business but did not escape arrest and imprisonment in the U.S.

With reputation and career destroyed, friends and loved ones variously hurt, sad, or angry, and having little left to lose, I escaped a Georgia prison and fled to Guayaquil, Ecuador where I was first sheltered by the family of a well-connected politician with whose son I’d been confined. Moving on to Lima, Peru, I again began to encounter but then mostly avoided such elites, whose perceptiveness and foreign connections made them dangerous for an anonymity-seeking fugitive to be around. Then came London, where I secretly met my parents (regretfully telling them that, no, I was not working for the CIA) and Paris, to where my American girlfriend had slipped periodic FBI surveillance to help decide if we could safely be together. (Conclusion: we could not.)

Fast forward through capture at home in Arizona after seven years as a multi-passported fugitive, through unexpected release in response to community support, through marriage and running a small business, through ultimate entrapment by someone from the South American past who asked me to find machine guns for Colombian farmers resisting the “tax collectors” of the FARC rebel army (leading me into federal agents’ trap to save himself and his family only after his own arrest had led to the death in Miami of his 5-year-old daughter, breaking his heart and resolve), and there you find me, your author—having declined to sacrifice anyone to save myself—sitting amid the swirling cacophony of six maximum-security federal prisons with plugs in ears, notebook on lap, bent mechanical pencil in hand, finally able to scribble out the 6,000 double-spaced pages comprising the semi-autographical Witch Doctors’ Bane (still unpublished) and the present Into the Citadel trilogy. I hope you’ll enjoy them, now colored as they are by unusual life experience and populated with grown-up heroes and villains like those I’ve known personally, as well as the idealistic, brave, and reckless youth I started with so long ago.

Yours Truly,