For me, it started with reading. A dangerous habit! Books teach you to question and think, and writing can be five times as bad.

My father read The Hobbit to my brother and me when we were kids, probably eight and ten years old. Big mistake. Putting words together is addictive. By the time I was twelve I was reading James Michener and Jean M. Auel on my own, The Source, The Clan of the Cave Bear, all of those giant, wild, absorbing epics. Then I got into Heinlein and Haldeman and the short stories of John Varley... and those writers seemed to cover even more ground in books that were only a quarter as long as Michener's doorstoppers. I was ready for it. My pace was increasing. And eventually I decided I wanted to play, too.

I got serious about my writing in college and made my first pro sale about ten years later. Maybe it wouldn't have taken forever except that I heard the siren call of Hollywood and took a major detour. I spent several years chasing around Los Angeles before I got smart and returned to my real love, prose fiction. Don't get me wrong. A good movie is an incomparable experience, and I still walk out of theaters like a wide-eyed kid. Ask my wife. You don't want to go on a sushi-and-a-movie date with me unless you're prepared for a grueling rehash of the story afterwards. As I write this, we recently saw the third Pirates of the Caribbean. Hilarious. It's just that any given time there are 30,000 other hustlers in L.A., and I didn't want to hustle, I wanted to write. I do have a few hot film concepts up my sleeve. We'll see.

As for where I write, these days I work in a home office plastered with maps, notes, schematics, and newspaper clippings. Diana says it looks like something straight out of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS after Dreyfus has lost his marbles, but I like to surround myself with the places, gear, and terminology of whatever I'm working on. Of course, that's usually at least three projects at any given time, so, again, it resembles the psycho ward unless you're in there studying it every day and you know how all the pieces fit.

I have to mention Varley again. Famous for good reason. I've read every story in his collections The Barbie Murders and The Persistence of Vision at least ten times. Wow. Short stories are an excellent place to hone your craft. It's a real trick to wrap up a plot and a character arc in the space of twenty pages, much less introduce a sub-plot and a smart bad guy. (I love smart bad guys.)

Short stories are also a good place to experiment. If it fizzles, you've only lost a week or three. If it works, you make a nice sale. Either way, you learn something.

The setting was easy—being trapped at 10,000 feet elevation because of the nanotech plague and looking at the tallest mountains around the world not only as remote peaks but as islands. I'm a lifelong backpacker and snow skier, which is where the idea first came from. My brother and I had had one of those life's best powder days among the cliffs and trees of our local ski resort, but we had to leave because we both needed to get to work the next morning and I thought "What if we couldn't go home again?" We'd been snowed in before, but I thought "What if we could never go home?"

As for how the survivors react, well, that's just straight out of the headlines. In a crisis, some people will fail. But there are always others who rise to the occasion. Any occasion.

Human beings are the smartest, toughest creatures on the planet—but it's given us a blind spot, too. It works against us. We're the cause of all of our own problems, and yet at the same time, we solve every bind. To me, that's fascinating.

With Plague Year, I was able to explore all of the classic elements of story: Man against nature, man against man, and man against himself.

The environment is lethal.

The people are killers.

And everyone has to find a way to live with what they've done.

I'm very pleased with the incredible tension of the story. The heroes are dealing with problems in every direction, both external and internal, from the large-scale conflict across the Rockies to the very personal struggle for survival among the smallest islands of safe ground in California.

To succeed, an end-of-the-world thriller like this needs all kinds of cool features and I like to think Plague Year has it all—new world maps, world war, the space station, mad scientists, commandos, and weird things like evolutionary stresses and niche species break-out.

I'm fortunate that I have a lot of experts at hand. My step-brother is a major in the Army Special Forces and has been deployed in Afghanistan and Columbia. My father is an engineer and former division head at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where they do space defense lasers and other stuff right out of Men in Black. Both of these guys were topnotch sounding boards.

As for the nanotech, there's a lot of eye-popping material being published right now, and I also made a point of attending talks on the subject and then mercilessly pestering the speakers afterward. Thank God for email.

Plague Year is not a text book by any means. Most of these ideas come at you like race cars and are gone—Zing! Slash!—but it's all real. That's the scary part.

Platypus.

We have kids. We don't relax. Seriously. Being a family is outrageously cool because the boys are so curious and energetic, and being a father has made me a better person (and a better writer), but if Diana and I get out by ourselves once a month it's a miracle. No relaxation in the Carlson house.

I'm all over the place, I'm afraid. In sci fi, Joe Haldeman continues to produce superior work, and I'm also a big fan of Richard K. Morgan. I especially thought Broken Angels was moving, dark, and wonderful. Robert Charles Wilson's SPIN deservedly won the Hugo last year.

At the same time, I'm a great admirer of writers like John Irving and Amy Tan, and if I glance at my book shelf, some of the All-Time Greats As Jeff Has Picked Them include The Monkey Wrench Gang, Little Big Man, King Rat, The River Why, Catch-22, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and On the Beach. That's alphabetical by author if you want to look them up. ;)

I also like detective series and suspense by writers like Robert Crais, Janet Evanovich, and Nelson DeMille. Unfortunately, I don't read as much as I used to. We have kids. Did I mention that? My free time isn't zero, but it's definitely not more than .0015%.

Be involved. Work at it. Think like William Goldman, which means you have to realize the competition is relentless. Every day there are other writers improving their skills and vying for ink, so if you don't make time for it every day, you're falling behind just by standing still. That's not very encouraging, I guess.

How about this: Read a lot, too. Study what you like. And persist.

More thrillers and action-adventure. I was very glad that for my next title, my editors wanted the book that I most wanted to write—the sequel to Plague Year. It's a changed world. I was eager to see what happened next.

War Day will be out in 2008 and it's told through the eyes of the same characters—the ones who are still alive, that is. I don't want to give too much away, except to say that the changed world will change again. Our heroes have their hands full with old enemies, new challenges, and some huge surprises.

Readers can find a free excerpt of Plague Year and one of my favorite short stories at my site, www.jverse.com, along with tour dates and other information including a brain-busting sci fi trivia contest. Ten winners will be given the chance to name a character after themselves or a friend either in War Day or in Colony High, my collaboration with the amazing David Brin. See you there!