About

To The Last Drop imagines a present-day war over water rights between  Texas and New Mexico. The Texas State Guard invades and occupies New  Mexico and provokes an increasingly violent New Mexican insurgency. How  did that idea come about?

I live in a former  coal-mining town in New Mexico, and the diminished quantity and quality  of water confronts me every day. Quantity, because it's the high desert  near Santa Fe which has an enormous demand for a very limited supply.  Quality, because the water is contaminated with heavy metals, coal,  sulfur gas -- it reeks of rotten eggs and isn't fit for drinking. 

That  pointed me toward the importance of water. The war aspect was inspired  by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. In watching the footage of our  soldiers, I was struck by how similar Afghanistan's mountainous terrain  is to New Mexico's. It certainly looked like a place where the defender  has an enormous advantage, and I imagined that New Mexicans would fight  with the same tactics as the mujahideen. 

So I had the primacy of water in one hand and the imagery of a dirty guerilla war in the other. I simply made mud. 

What did your preparation for writing the book involve? 

I  prepared for the book by grinding out nine months of research before I  started the first draft. I continued to do research while I was writing,  as gaping holes in my knowledge opened up. 

My main areas of  research were water rights, hydrology, biology, military history and  theory, Southwest history, Afghani history and some computer science. My  knowledge had to quickly broaden; limits of my time are responsible for  the shallowness of my understanding. To protect me from my ignorance,  expert readers helped me out enormously, particularly in the legal and  military areas. 

The great majority of my research was done at  the Santa Fe Public Library, supplemented by the internet. My research  time included more immediately pleasurable activities such as inventing  characters and shooting guns. 

Shooting guns?

Shooting  guns, indeed. New Mexico, like most of the Western states, embraces the  Second Amendment. It's a well-armed populace with a fair distrust of  government. That would contribute to this territory being difficult to  occupy-just like Afghanistan. 

So as part of my research, I got the feel of the guns I had to write about. I'm not a gun-blazing man by nature. 

You are a published haiku poet. When and how did your interest in haiku develop?

J.  D. Salinger introduced me to haiku in his brilliant Seymour: An  Introduction when I was in high school. Investigating, I came across a  haiku that made me see and feel poetry so clearly and powerfully.  Nothing in literature had ever done that before. It was this poem, by  Basho: 

So cold are the waves 
the rocking gull can scarcely 
fold itself to sleep 

It  hit me with great force. Nothing extra, nothing missing, and absolutely  true and sincere. I've been writing haiku for many years now, trying to  abide. Here's one I wrote last year visiting my little brother in  Japan: 

Some unnamed scent, 
some unseen bird's song 
haunt this cool green bamboo forest