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My stories are all true in a sense.
What happens is that I pick a country.
I read, I learn the political history of that country.
I mean, I really learn it. I mean it takes a month.
It's like memorizing something like from Britannica articles.
Once I know the political history of the country,
I can see where the spy stories could be. It's quite obvious.
Once I have those, the characters are obvious.
What sort of people would be involved in this kind of thing?
Once I have the characters, I have vocations.
And once I have vocation, then I tend to have atmosphere.
In other words, are we talking about a poet? Are we talking about cafes?
Are we talking about libraries?
Are we talking about offices in the backs of bookstores?
Are we talking about the logical places where these kinds of things go on?
Movie theaters, what have you.
Now why the atmosphere is deemed to be good and it generally is in reviews,
I can't say.
Except that for some very strange reason, I'm able to teleport.
I don't actually. I'm not actually here when I'm writing.
I look like it. I'm physically here, but I don't know where this comes from.
I'm a very secular sort of person, I don't believe in channeling
or anything like that, but I'm getting it somewhere
and I got it from the very beginning.
The first day I sat down in Paris and started writing a book called Night Soldiers,
I was hammering away at
a scene set in Bulgarian in 1934 in this little town where I'd been, Vidin.
And I looked up after 3 pages and I said where is this coming from?
And then I went; "I don't care" and went back to writing.
But I didn't know where this was coming from and to date I don't know where it comes from.
Mystery.