Vine Deloria, James Loewen, and Jack Forbes for history, Noam Chomsky for political analysis. For fiction, I grew up reading mostly science fiction, the old classic authors, Asimov, Clarke, Clifford Simak. I later enjoyed authors like Henry Miller and William Burroughs, partly because I saw their influence on punk rock, which was also a big influence on me.

Just being glad to be alive and enjoying my work, both writing and teaching.

I work as a college history professor. But when I have free time, I still go to punk and metal shows, not so different from when I was a teenager. When I'm not working, I travel, and have been to close to three dozen countries, as a tourist, working, or speaking.

On my own, many of them. Some of them from the professors who trained me as a historian.

There were some not very good sci fi stories I wrote as a teenager that I didn't keep, thankfully.

Just write, every day, whenever there is free time. If you get writer's block, write anyway, just switch subjects.

How far back are we talking? I remember Encyclopedia Brown mysteries in the 4th grade or so. The first stories that had a real impact on me would be Asimov's sci fi, his robot stories, when I read it at age 11 or so. About that same time I started reading Voltaire, and Orwell's 1984. All of them taught me to try to understand the larger world beyond the small Texas town I lived in.

The cover for Medicine Bags and Dog Tags, showing a Navajo Code Talker, was chosen by my university press, but I was pleased with it. For my recent book, whatever is the most visually striking color combination to catch the eye and get someone to read the title.

I read for knowledge and understanding, which gives me pleasure.

Overflowing with papers, student papers, research, you name it.

South Texas, small town, then later San Antonio. The isolation of a small town turned me into a big reader. San Antonio is where I first felt really at home. The southwest is the only part of America I feel like I'm really part of. It's like me, hybrid, mixed.

First as a teenager, but not seriously until grad school, and not really being driven to write all the time until I survived a cancer scare. Then I feared dying before getting all my writing done.

I was fed up with the inane way presidents are always ranked. It's usually a shallow "hooray for my side" exercise, people naming whoever fits this shallow ideology. I say rank the presidents for the good and evil they did, especially how many lived or died because of them.

It's especially galling that many admire Reagan, given his part in the deaths of over 300,000 people, mostly by genocide. It's almost as galling that some consider Nixon such a skilled president, when he was incredibly incompetent. When people die in huge numbers because of your failure, as happened in Vietnam, or downright evil, as he carried out in Cambodia...you can't be a bigger failure than that.

The big publishers are dying. No author should try to publish with them. They can't match the royalty rates you get from self publishing. And the big companies do very little for you for publicity or anything else.

An alternate history work, Confederate Tyranny. I also plan a sequel to Presidents' Body Counts, but one focused on the greatest and worst world leaders.