Before I was an author, I spent more than 25 years as a Casino Surveillance Technician.
Most people hear that and picture cameras and cheaters. That’s part of it. But the real job is something else: watching. Really watching. Learning to read people – the small tells, the patterns, the things happening beneath the surface that nobody in the room notices. In surveillance, the truth is never what’s happening out in the open. It’s always underneath.
Working as a surveillance technician, I once spent hours tracking down an intermittent problem. When I finally found it, an operator said, ‘I’ve been telling people that for weeks.’ I’d been so focused on fixing the equipment that I hadn’t really listened to the person using it. That taught me something about people: they don’t always need you to have the answer right away. Sometimes they just need you to take them seriously.
That way of seeing never left me. When I started building the Quantum Step universe in earnest, I realized I’d been training for it for decades. Fiction runs on the same principle: the interesting stuff is always beneath the surface. Payton’s ordinary hometown. The nightmares that aren’t just nightmares. A legacy buried where no one thinks to look. I didn’t plan the parallel – it was just how I see the world by then.
There’s another thing surveillance teaches you: patience. You can watch a table for hours waiting for one moment that matters. Writing a novel is the same discipline. Decades of world-building, piece by piece, most of it invisible – until the moment it all pays off.
So if you ever wonder where the layers in this story come from – the hidden things, the double meanings, the sense that there’s always more going on – now you know. I spent a quarter century learning to see it.
— JD