Stephen Floyd is a polyglot who grew up in Arizona, learning Spanish and French concurrently as a child. After getting a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Humanities, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and became an interrogator, learning Russian at the Defense Language Institute. Truthfully, if he had known his friendship with Erin was going to blossom into romance, he probably would not have joined. When it became clear that peacekeepers would be needed to enforce the Dayton Accords in Bosnia, he was ordered to learn Serbo-Croatian and went to Bosnia for an entire year.

Upon returning from that crucial experience he and his wife Erin decided that he should get out of the Army and stay in Alaska, where they have now lived since arriving in 1994.