New Virtual Pulper Paul Hair interviewed me about “conservatives,” the culture war, and my books. Here’s part of it:

 HiT: Why’d you write The Retreads series and what’s it about without giving away too much of the plot(s)?

Brown: I didn’t anticipate making it a series, initially.

Between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, I had considered going back into uniform, but my knees and back were pretty well FUBARed from before, and my tolerance for Dumb S**t had shrunken considerably.

My subconscious mind must have been invested in the idea, though, because I often dreamed about being back in the Airborne.

One dream (not quite a nightmare) featured a fairly vivid firefight. I built a story around that scene and eventually titled the resulting novel “Hell and Gone.”

It’s about a team of Gulf War One veterans on a mission to recapture a tactical nuke. I didn’t know how common that “stolen nuke” plot was, or would become. I chose it, and many other elements of the story, based on unclassified intelligence reports I was privy to at the time.

For years, no agent or editor would read it. In 2010, I decided to take advantage of the digital revolution and outflank the New York Publishing Cartel altogether.

You can read the entire interview (it’s very brief) over at Hollywood in Toto. They’ve got some other good stuff there, too.