First of all, would you like to tell us a little about yourself. I grew up in Texas and attended UT at Austin studying literature and history.  What I wanted to be was a writer, but my dad, who was a very practical man, convinced me that being a starving artist was not all it was cracked up to be.  Instead, he argued, I should study business, get a “real” job and write in my spare time.  Which is what I eventually did.  After college I lived and worked in New York for twenty years:  10 years working for the former Chairman of the Commodity Exchange, and then for another 10 years as a civilian contractor to the U.S. Department of Defense in Russia facilitating defense conversion work, converting military plants into civilian use.  I wrote a lot during those 10 years, but almost all of it was factual progress reporting to my coordinating CO in Washington. I did very little creative writing as my job was all consuming, leaving not much time, or energy, to commit to writing a …