Bodo Pfündl asked Matt Fulton:

I can't remember reading a novel with such detailed description on a variety of totally different topics. Therefore my question. How did you approach the research and what things were the most difficult to get right?

Matt Fulton Great question. To be honest, researching Part I was pretty scattershot. I mostly researched as I wrote, taking time to handle different problems as I confronted them in the plot. All the discussion of nuclear physics was probably the most difficult (and it's just going to get worse in Part II). I really value those mundane, day-to-day details of life inside the Intelligence Community, the State Department, etc (how their offices look, how schedules are set up, how things actually work from one minute to the next) and I found those little things are most difficult to come upon. You can read a huge book about a given issue or organization and often the author will leave those details out because, to most readers, they're irrelevant--but of course, to people like me, the opposite is true.

Another big issue was (and continues to be) portraying the Special Operations community. Obviously, not having any service experience myself, I went into this project about as blind as one could be, and that was pretty intimidating. Looking in, I find the community to be extremely guarded and almost suspicious of "outsiders," for lack of a better term. It was important to me to do them justice, not to portray them a flawless superheroes who go and kill the terrorists who simply hate our freedom, or something. That's not a story I'm interested in telling and so I think it was important to keep that in mind from the very outset. Of course, I hope I did them justice. It's not really up to me anymore, but I'll certainly keep trying.

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