I was born and raised in the Rocky Mountain region of the western United States, in a town of 12,000 people. I've tried living in more crowded places, such as Denver, or Atlanta, but after a year or two I always end up back in the high plains, where the antelope greatly outnumber the people. I've worked the usual jobs that writers end up with--cook, cowboy, roughneck, ambulance driver-- but mainly I've been a land surveyor, specializing in remote areas of the west and also Alaska, where I've helped to build airstrips, pipelines, gold mines and power plants. I like land surveying in the bush because it's outdoor work and there are few people and very little noise.
For the last decade I've spent half of every year in Latin America. My first novel is about drug smugglers in Texas and Mexico. For research on that book I crossed the border alone, at night. You can read my blog post about that experience on my website, edmundpickett.com/Swimming The Rio Grande. My second novel is about Islamic terrorists and the FBI agent who is chasing them. The third novel that I've published, Following Joshua Carpenter, was actually the first I wrote, many years ago. No publisher was interested then, but now we have the internet, and the book is finding it's audience.
