Where ideas come from.

Some of the greatest ideas in history come from boredom. Ping-pong, for example, and I would suspect most of the hairstyles from the 80s (actually, lunacy probably had something to do with those).
The Portal Project was my boredom invention. One day, I was sick of working on my current book, but I wanted to write something. I basically began with my own day--sitting on the front porch eating Raisin Bran--and began to run with the idea from there. The next thing I knew, there were aliens crashing into a building down the street, and the universe was suddenly composed of a huge chain of infinite worlds connected by portals. I found that writing for explorers is a lot of fun, since I can switch worlds if I get bored of the current settings. I have great hopes for this series.