Q: You´ve been writing stories since before you were a teenager. Why did you wait until you were in your fifties to write a novel?

A: This was the first time in decades I had an idea I thought would make an interesting story. In my twenties, thirties, and forties, I did a lot of writing, but it was always technical writing or writing copy for ads, training materials, or press releases—no fiction. As soon as I came up with the idea for this story, some words appeared in my mind, and I wrote them down. It was more like someone was speaking and I was taking dictation than it was me making up a story myself. In a few minutes, I had written a few sentences, and then, a few paragraphs, and before I knew it, I had filled up a couple of pages. I read what I had written, and thought, Hey, with a little work, this might make a good short story. A year and a half later, I had written thirty chapters and had a novel on my hands.

Q: Where did you come up with the idea for this novel?

A: I had not one, but two main sources of inspiration for Lazaurus Man: Resurrection.

The first was an email I received a few years ago that described life in the United States in 1907 and pointed out how much things have changed in the last century. (In 1907, the population of Las Vegas was 30, life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years, the average wage was 22 cents an hour, there were only 144 miles of paved roads in the entire nation, only 18% of households had a bathtub, and women washed their hair once a month using borax soap or egg yolks!) And that started me thinking: if the world transformed that much in the last 100 years, with things changing now at what seems an almost logarithmic pace, what will the U.S.—and the world—be like in another century?

The second thing that inspired me was the memory of a TV show I remember watching when I was in elementary school in the 1960´s. The series was called The Second Hundred Years and starred Monte Markham and Arthur O’Connell. It was about a man in his thirties who fell into a glacier and was subsequently frozen in the early 1900´s. Sixty years later, he is found, thawed, and revived, and hasn´t aged a day since he was frozen. When he is reunited with his family, he discovers that his son is now a senior citizen and his grandson is the same age he is. I was always intrigued by this storyline and fascinated by the realization that, from the protagonist’s point of view, this experience would be essentially the same as time traveling sixty years into the future.

Q: What type of readers do you think will enjoy this novel?

A: That´s a very good question, and I think it´s interesting that my answer to that query has changed over the past year. When I started writing the novel, since it has a science-fiction premise—scientific knowledge allowing a man to be preserved and wake up in an advanced, future society—I assumed that sci-fi fans, mostly men, would be my target audience. I had a handful of people “test read” the novel to give me their opinions on it, and there were some sci-fi geeks among them. But the group also included people who love to read, but don’t particularly care for science fiction—most of whom were women—and they seemed to like it as much as, if not more than, the sci-fi fans did. Some things both groups told me they liked about my story: it was consistently interesting, had believable characters and dialogue, was surprisingly funny in places, and, because it wasn´t full of technical jargon or scientific terms, was very accessible and reader-friendly. I suspect that anyone who likes to read and enjoys an interesting story should like my novel.