One of my best friends, Dr. Larry Stanton, wrote three beautiful books—The Glory Days of Baja, Arriba Baja, The Best Stories of Baja—about our early experiences in Baja California. After reading his books, I began to wonder if I could do something similar. I toyed around with the idea for quite some time before trying it. I considered various topics, including personal hunting experiences and travels and even—one of my favorite subjects—the American Civil War. I also considered—and am still considering—writing my "magnum opus", a devolutionary theory on the origin of cancer. Of course, there are literally thousands of works on the American Civil War so I questioned my ability to add anything new. After all, no matter how well or poorly I wrote, I couldn't reverse the fortunes of the South. On the other hand, no one has ever read about my hunting ibex in the Gobi Desert, either, but I reckoned the potential readership was limited.
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I still intend to document my theories on cancer causation, but this is a theoretical labor—conceptual and numerical—and I wanted to start with something less technical. I remembered Precott's brilliant The Conquest of Mexico and The Conquest of Peru.
I also remembered Jennings' entertaining Aztec novels and Schellabarger's wonderful novel,
Captain from Castile [later made into a movie starring Tyrone Power] which told the story of the Conquest from the Spanish point of view.

I did a little more research and discovered that few, if any, English-language novels, highlighting the Conquest of Mexico from the Spanish point of view, have been written since Schellabarger's tale published way back in 1944. This seemed to me an incredible omission. Why would one of the most dramatic events in world history have received so little attention from English-language novelists? I have a theory. The English-language media—news, cinema, television—has a deep bias in favor of things American and English, which colors our view of the world.

People are basically interested in themselves and people most like themselves. Logical. I'll give an example. I was watching an opinion-based news channel when the commentator stated that, during WWII, the Germans had most of the top aces, including the world's top ace—Erich Hartmann—who was credited with shooting down 352 enemy aircraft. Immediately a caller phoned the commentator and heatedly told the he that he was "dead wrong." "Why do you think so?" asked the commentator. "Because the Americans had all the top aces and shot down the Germans left and right."

Here is an example of English-language bias coloring the caller's view of the world. All he'd ever seen were newsreels, movies and television documentaries showing Americans shooting down German aircraft "left and right." It's barely conceivable that the enemy could have produced a few airmen of merit. As it turns out the Germans had over one hundred pilots who shot down more than one hundred planes. The top scoring English and American aces shot down forty-one and thirty-eight aircraft, respectively. A South African pilot flying for England shot down 51. The top fifty American and English aces shot down a total of 1,469 aircraft whereas the top fifty German aces shot down an incredible 10,484 planes.

Therefore, I reasoned, there hasn't been more fiction written on the conquest precisely because it's not a conquest by English speakers. It's the conquest of Latin America by Spaniards. At this point my contrariness cut in. Would it be possible to write an English-language novel on the Conquest of Mexico that will actually attract a significant number of American readers? Maybe, I thought, just maybe.

I therefore threw myself into study and writing that lasted five years. No, my nose wasn't on the grindstone all that time, but that's how long it took me. I aimed to get the history as right as I could, and where my tale diverged from the strict history, I planned for my diversion to be plausible and, in some causes, even probable. After all, no history ever written is perfectly accurate—there are always imperfections based on faulty or incomplete reporting and the bias of the historian. In the case of my novels, Skull Rack and Hummingbird God, the basic history is documentable. Also, when departing from history, I have relied heavily on personal experiences and the experiences of acquaintances.

Some of these experiences were unfortunate. Early in Skull Rack, a trapped leopard mauls Rodrigo. This actually happened to a friend of mine a friend who asked me to go with him to check a trap for a goat-killing leopard. I had no confidence in there being a leopard in the trap and thought it was a waste of my time. The next day after my departure he checked the trap and was killed. Therefore, I hope my novels have the feel, taste and smell of the truth.