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My book, The Iron Snake, about a railroad in Africa is due out in October. For a summary and details including a railway scrapbook and how to buy it visit my website at: www.theironsnake.com. I taught biology at Makerere University in Kampala during the early reign of the eccentric and brutal dictator, Idi Amin, a man responsible for 100-400,000 deaths. I left Uganda when my contract was up and traveled to Kenya to continue my research on papyrus swamps. In my spare time I began writing about the railroad built by the British from the coast at Mombasa to Lake Victoria. This was my first attempt at fiction, I thought it would make a great subject for a novel because of the way the railroad affected a host of ethnic tribes and other historical characters. Also it crossed environments ranging from desert, grass savannah and forest to high mountains. As a tropical ecologist I thought that would be interesting, but after the first draft I realized I had left out an awful lot, especially about people. It took me several years to correct that. I had to find particular types in order to develop the characters. Some came from historical real life, such as the African tribal leaders who knew and understood the implications of the railroad; others were modeled after resourceful white adventurers who came there looking to make a fortune, including second and third sons of British aristocrats with no inheritance and thus no future back home. The amazing thing was that even in those days Kenya was overrun by unusual and interesting people, black, white, male and female, missionaries and vagabonds. Thus, once I began writing, it was easy to see how the main characters could get so involved in a series of adventures, all in the face of resistance from the original owners of the land, the local African tribes. Some of this action, by the way, foreshadows what happened fourteen years later with the outbreak of WWI and the bitter fighting between British and German colonial troops in East Africa. .....