Goodreads asked Howard M. Tillison:

How do you get inspired to write?

Howard M. Tillison I was an avid reader from the first day of school until I was about 32 years old. In those days, conventional wisdom said that children should not be taught to read before starting school, but I have no doubt that policy simply held me back at least 2 years, because I WANTED to read as long as I can remember.

In school, I was always singled out as one of the best creative writers. My problem at that point was that I had nothing to write about, because I had not lived enough to know anything except what I had read. There is a huge difference between coming up with enough of an idea to write a short story, compared to the bulk and complexity of a full-length novel (which I consider to be a minimum of 100,000 words, or about 320 pages).

Over the next 10 to 12 years I had a number of real-life adventures and learned, I suppose, too much about relationships between men and women. So, when I was about 32 years old, I finished Tom Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October," and could not find anything else I wanted to read. I'd had ideas for books for a while, and so I set out writing "Wolfgang's Revenge" to fill what I saw as an empty niche in the market.

The characters I created in Wolfgang's Revenge are composites of people I had already known in real life. The book is really all about the quest for stimulation that many people fulfill with their jobs and romantic lives, and how the achievement of success in those areas is often not fulfilling because, suddenly, there is no more struggle to achieve that which is missing. The comfort which results in boredom often leads to a quest for something more, and every time you upset the equilibrium of comfort, there's a chance the next stop will be disaster. That's really what the book is about; people who cause their own problems and have no idea how it happened.

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