I thought “geography is destiny” was a quote from an ancient and revered book, such as The Prince, The Art of War, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I was surprised to search for its source and discover an Ethopian-American writer named Abraham Verghese who is very much alive and writing.

Do the Tibetans read any fun books?

I bring this up because my editor and my wife have both said that my book lacks specificity. Meaning, why did I make everything up? Where are we really? What state is this?

There are several stories about Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for Treasure Island. Here’s the one I prefer. RLS was painting the walls of a bedroom with his stepson when he was caught by the shape of one of his paintbrush doodles. He expanded it and reshaped it and it looked to him like the map of an unknown land. Next thing you know, we’ve got the books and the movies and one-legged buccaneers with parrots and everyone declaiming “Arrr” and speaking like a Welshman.

Deborah and I have painted many rooms and we’ve done plenty of doodling, including the time we were painting a basement when we realized, wait a second, this is a basement, who cares, and we stopped taping things off and we started rolling into and out of corners and racing around and right over unlucky spiders.

But that’s not where my book began. My book began on my sixth birthday when my father and my Uncle Morry gave me an Lionel electric train set. That was the first step. The second might’ve been right here:

This is a map of the Hyborian Age, invented by Robert E. Howard. It was accompanied by an essay on the civilizations of that time and I found it in the front of a Conan book I read when I was 12.

I soon gave up on Conan, as the formula was too predictable and there were so many writers listed on these things that they felt like a committee or a football club. I’m fairly sure I read Conan the Freebooter and probably Conan the Bootscooter. Howard’s writing was serviceable, certainly on a par with Andre Norton, though I note that Ms. Norton wrote her own books and didn’t require the 14 relief pitchers listed in Conan’s Wikipedia entry. But I never gave up on that map (and that essay).

My point is that, no matter how old you grow, you will never outrun your childhood.

My book is set, not in Hyperborea, Earthsea, or Middle Earth, but in the mythical kingdom of Colorado.