Authenticity is important to me as a writer for the sake of my readers.

Although Rumors of War is a work of fiction, it could be considered historical fiction because of the enormous amount of research that went into it long before I began writing the story. My goal was to create a fictional story, completely surrounded by the true facts of history.

Not only was it necessary for the book to follow the events and timeline of Desert Shield and Desert Storm but also the operations of the 477th Army Reserve unit during the war. The 477th is an actual medical reserve unit out of Duluth, Minnesota, (the setting) which was activated during the Gulf War causing similar types of family hardships as described in the book. Even though Philip Singleton is a fictional character, everything his unit endured is based on fact.

Lucky for me the local newspaper tracked the operations of and communications with the 477th during the war, giving me access to hundreds of pages of documentation on microfilm. I wanted to be sure no reader would come upon a passage in my book and say, "No way. That never happened." An added bonus to digging up the newspaper articles during that time period, is I also got local news and weather information for the same time frame, which I sprinkled into the story.

What I found most incredible while writing the story was how well the hard facts of history were woven into the plot itself. It was almost eerie at times.

The most difficult aspect of my research involved the BCCI international banking scandal which occurred during the same time frame as the Gulf War, and because of that, barely made it onto the radar screens of the major news outlets. Stories about the bank fraud began to surface gradually after the war, through periodicals like Vanity Fair, The Nation, US News & World Reports.

Very little information was available, almost as if some kind of news blackout had occurred. I figured I would be forced to make up a lot of the bank scandal stuff.

Well into the writing of the manuscript, two brand new books fell into my lap--Dirty Money, BCCI: The Inside Story of the World's Sleaziest Bank [National Press Books] by Mark Potts, Nicholas Kocahn and Robert Whittington and False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire [Houghton Mifflin] by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin.

I don't recall how I heard about them, only that I had to order them in advance of publication and received each one hot off the printing press within weeks of the other. It was like manna from heaven. I stopped writing, immersed myself in those books and came out on the other side with a much greater understanding of the scope of the scandal and the implications of the timing of that breaking story and the Gulf War.

After reading False Profits and Dirty Money, I had so much more information I realized a sequel could easily come from this, if not a whole series. Real life has this way of adding layers and textures to fiction. It's how readers identify with the story.

I never use everything I find in my research, yet it always yields back to me even more ideas for more stories. That's the beauty of research, really.