Q: Why did you choose this name? And why an antihero?
A: When I bought a used car in my early twenties, it came with a keychain that was a memento from someone who had visited Alcatraz Island. (I haven’t been there myself.) I carried the keychain around for years, and found that I liked the word itself. I started thinking that I wanted to name a character Alcatraz, but I thought I couldn’t use it since it was the name of a prison. If I was going to use the name, I would need a good reason why he was named after a prison. So I worked on that for years in my head until the idea came to me of having a lot of characters in the same book all named after prisons because in their world those were actually heroic names. So that’s where the name came from.
Alcatraz Smedry is an antihero basically only in the sense that he doesn’t consider himself to be a hero at all. He’s very disappointed with himself and some of the things he’s done in life, so he is reacting against people calling him a hero.