Jason Schmidt’s first triumph as a writer was at Garfield High School, when another kid offered him five bucks for a scenario he made up in debate class. He wrote sci-fi and other genre fiction in college, first at Western Washington University and later at the University of Washington. Rosina Lippi, a creative writing professor at Western, encouraged him and became his mentor. When he finished the manuscript of his first novel, about Seattle in the 1980s, Lippi introduced him to her agent. Publishers reacted positively to the manuscript, but several of them were more interested in the one-page bio attached to it.
Schmidt, born in 1972, was raised by a single father he describes as an impoverished hippie redneck, who was busted for dealing coke when Schmidt was 3…
