SUITE: Tell me a little about your books and what genre they are
PAUL: My debut novel is Prodigal Logic: A Ray Gabriel Floating Home Mystery. The protagonist is an amateur sleuth – a computer entrepreneur. He is working on a breakthrough creation, an intelligent program called Sherlock-in-a-Box that mimics human decision-making. He doesn’t quite have all the bugs worked out when he’s thrust into investigating the death of a priest who falls from a cathedral roof. The tone is light and slightly humorous, but it does touch on important topics like religion, psychology and metaphysics. And computers, of course. But the emphasis is really on the characters, which I think are quirky and engaging, and the plot, which is intricate, a real puzzle mystery.
SUITE: When did you first start writing? First start publishing?(short stories, books, etc)
PAUL: I had been interested in writing fiction as a profession since college, since I love to read and really appreciate a well-written novel. I had never acted on the urge, other than writing some technical articles for computer journals. Then about ten years ago the idea for this novel popped into my head and I sat down and wrote out a chapter, my first real piece of fiction writing ever. I bypassed short stories and articles, and jumped straight to writing a novel, which is probably an unusual route to take. I really wrote the book in earnest during the past five years, after attending the Mystery Writing program at the University of Washington.
SUITE: Why do you write?
PAUL: I don’t paint, sing, or dance, so it’s really my form of artistic expression. My mantra is to express interesting ideas in an engaging way.
SUITE: Do you have a day job?
PAUL: I’m currently on a sabbatical to market the book, but when that’s over I’ll go back into Information Technology. I work as a business process analyst. I’ve spent some time in the field of Artificial Intelligence, which actually gave me the original idea for the Prodigal Logic plot. I was working with expert systems, which are programs that attempt to imitate the decision-making rules and heuristics of an expert. I was reading Sherlock Holmes and wondered if I could put his expertise into a computer. Then the thought came: what if a person tried using Sherlock’s knowledge in a real investigation; then what if he had to grow it quickly and it kept making mistakes; then what if it started giving the right answer but the protagonist didn’t want to hear the right answer. So the idea for the book actually grew out of my day job.
