I had the great pleasure of chatting with G.D. Baum about his new book Point and Shoot.

Over the course of many interviews, I have found that authors tend to use real people as their characters. Obviously there is a piece of you in Lock, although I am sure that you do not hang out in his kind of places. Are any of the other characters based on real people?

The scene that comes to mind is the one in which Grandfather holds out his two hands and tells Lock (at the time, a small child) to place his small hand between the two without touching them. Lock feels an electrical current running along his palm, which is the “Chi” or life force.

I have actually done that, both on the receiving end and later, as the one projecting the Chi onto someone else’s palm. It is absolutely extraordinary to feel something that is usually so intangible. I must say that actually experiencing that invisible energy as a tactile force convinced me that there was something more to the martial arts than just punching and kicking. It helped me make the transition in my own training from the hard style of Shaolin Kempo Karate, in which I have a 2nd degree black belt, to the more esoteric internal style of Tai Chi, just as Lock does in the novel.

I know a number of people in the martial arts and I tried to borrow aspects of many of them to take the reader into that world. Indeed, I know a very high level martial artist who looks exactly like Grandfather, but he disdains the internal martial arts styles that Grandfather has adopted. I think he once told me that “Tai Chi is bullshit.” On the other hand, I know martial artists who are completely immersed in the internal styles, such as Tai Chi, and possess that gentle mirth in their approach to life that Grandfather has. I amalgamated the two to create Grandfather.

The martial arts fight scenes are as authentic as I can make them. In particular, I tried to take the reader into the mind of a martial artist using the hard Karate style in an encounter with maximum speed and power. At the highest level, the movements literally become a tornado of strikes, a blur of energy.

As to whether there’s a reflection of reality in Lock’s relationship with a woman dying of cancer, I think I’ll skip that part of the answer.

Entering into the literary world is often a difficult task: first time authors are often disillusioned at the end of the process, the endless editing, rewriting, etc. Did you find the process frustrating?

I hired a professional editor and was disappointed with the result. I probably went through at least a dozen redrafts myself after the editor finished. I think that editing really involves a line by line review that is taxing even to the author himself. However, the good news is that I enjoyed re-reading my own novel; it holds up. I think that is because it concerns important themes, such as the relationship between fathers and sons; the imperative that a man live his life in an honorable way, regardless of the lack of appreciation he experiences; the discovery that there are unseen forces in the world that can shape us.