My seven year old daughter, Iris, was the first published author in our family. When she was five years old her children's book, I’m A Bunch Of Dinosaurs was published. She’s the one who inspired me to put pen to paper and author my first novel.
Tal M. Klein
I’m terrible at writing sex scenes. There’s one such scene in The Punch Escrow. My wife read it as told me, “this is terrible,” and I vehemently agreed. After I unsuccessfully tried rewriting it several times, she took matters into her own hands. That’s right, you heard it here. Scandal! Tal’s wife ghostwrote the sex scene in his book.
The Punch Escrow is set in New York and Costa Rica because, as the adage goes, “you write what you know.” While I spent my early formative years in New York, I only honeymooned in Costa Rica. Still, even though I spent a comparatively miniscule amount of time there, Costa Rica left a lasting impression on me, its verdant landscape will forever be etched in my mind.
Way before I become an author I was (and continue to be) a musician. I’ve produced seven albums over the last 21 years and have travelled around the world as DJ (I stopped touring once the kids came).
My two daughters are spaced three years apart by design; an evil scientific experiment, if you will. My sister and I were four years apart, and my wife’s sister is two years younger than her, so we decided to split the difference among our two girls!
Joel Byram, the protagonist in The Punch Escrow, has a strange affinity for 1980’s new wave music — a very obscure genre in 2147! If you’re wondering where he gets it from, look no further than the author. Don’t judge me!
It was very important for me to ensure The Punch Escrow passed the Bechdel test (having a scene in which two women are talking about a subject other than a man). It was hard to pull off in a narrative about a man, told by a man, but I pulled it off. It’s a scene I’m very proud of, but I can’t reveal it here because my publisher insisted I don’t reveal any spoilers (and this one’s a doozy)!
My favorite color is baby blue.
One of the most pleasant outcomes of seeing The Punch Escrow reviews come in has been the amount of positive response from female readers. I worked hard on trying to represent the female characters in three dimensions. I (once again) am grateful to my amazing wife for helping me shape those characters, especially Sylvia, Joel’s wife, who not only is his intellectual superior in every way, but also has a great sense of humor.
I almost failed biology and physics in high school. I had no business writing a hard science fiction book. And yet … here we are!
