The Byzantium Stone

Biographie de David Chacko

A lot of what a writer does at the desk is the result of research being plugged into what happened every day of his life up to that point. Where he's born doesn't mean a lot except that's part of what he brings to the work. So let's say I was born in a small town in Western Pennsylvania where the coal mines closed thirty years before, then let's say that I found my way to New York and Ohio and New England and Florida and Istanbul with lot of stops along the way.
I don't remember much about most of those places except that I was there in all of them and I was thinking. One of the things I was thinking about, because I'm always thinking about it, is the way people and governments lie to themselves and others. Those two thing--the inside and the outside of the truth--might be the same thing, really. That place of seeming contradictions is where I live. And that's where every last bit of The Satan Machine comes from.
The lies piled up around the attempted assassination of the pope like few events in the history of man. Most of it had to do with geopolitics, especially those strange days when the world was divided into two competing blocs that were both sure they were right in trying to dominate. So an event that was put through the gigantic meat grinder was one that would be mangled nearly forever. That's what I've been thinking about--the hamburger, so to speak.
The results will be told in several blog entries from my website, so you might want to mosey over to www.davidchacko.com. I can guarantee you a good time.