Most fiction series follow the story of a main character—perhaps through major life changes and/or some type of inner growth. The changes may happen even while the character is solving crimes or experiencing world changing events.

Mark Pacer, main character of the series I’ve chosen to write, changes through relationships and solving problems thrust at him. The countries where his job takes him also exert influence.

Mark is a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Another name for that profession is diplomat, but Mark doesn’t like to be called that. It doesn’t sound like who he is, an Appalachian boy, the first of his poor but proud Southern family to attend college.

They clash sometime, his profession and his upbringing. He is forever a non-belonger.

Nevertheless, he learns from experiences in each place his career takes him: Washington, D.C. for his training, then the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Egypt (so far).

Through the various cultures and the challenges in each, he explores himself and his country, his family and his inner yearnings.

The world, he begins to understand, is a huge mixture of peoples and cultures. His own upbringing may stand the test of the challenges, but he will be changed, no doubt about it.

Indeed, none of us today lives in a single culture. To understand the times is to understand how the computer/internet age has forever made impossible an understanding based only on one’s country of citizenship.