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THE MAGNIFICENT 7 INTERVIEW EVENT
FEATURING AUTHORS: Jeremy Robinson, Ryne Douglas Pearson, Larry Enright, Russell Blake, John Betcher, Rick Chesler, and Douglas Dorow

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PART TWO
2/8/12 - 2/15/12

Read all of the below and then take the quiz for a chance to win free eBooks from the authors and to pose a question to the author of your choosing.
 EVERYONE WHO SUBMITS WILL GET AN EBOOK COPY OF EITHER THE SOLOMON KEY OR PROGENY!
Click here for all the details and to see which books the winner gets to choose from. 
You have until PART THREE goes up to get me the answers to PART TWO.
If you missed Part One, you can catch up here

And the winner of Part One was: Harlow Coban! Congratulations! And here is her question to Douglas Dorow:

Harlow: Doug, how long did it take you to write The Ninth District? And do you have a title for the sequel?

Doug: For the first question, I have a long answer.  How long The Ninth District took to write is a tough question because it started probably 12 years ago out of a writing class and morphed many times as I planned and wrote scenes and learned the craft by writing the story. The story idea kind of got nailed down after reading this article in a local paper - Notes From Underground http://www.citypages.com/content/printVersion/12739/ 

So, I started late 2001, in no real hurry. But when things changed in the ebook pubbing market the summer of 2009 I knuckled down aiming for a Christmas publication. I hired somebody to create the cover and edit the book, but then my mom got sick and publishing was delayed about 6 months and I published THE NINTH DISTRICT on Amazon, June 2010.

Book 2 - the sequel will be much faster. I feel I know what I'm doing now. I know how to tell the story. I've figured out I need a high-level outline to keep me on track. The story is outlined and I'm working on it with a goal of publishing this fall.  The working title is Maple Beach, but I don't know if that will be the published title or not.


And now, picking up where we left of last week... PART TWO


Jeremy Robinson

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How much time do you spend researching your novels before jumping in?

Depends on the novel. THE LAST HUNTER books don’t take a lot of research before I jump right in. There are little things I have to research along the way, but so much of it comes from my imagination that it’s not too intense. But then there are books like THRESHOLD and SECONDWORLD which include multiple scientific theories, lots of history and gobs of mythology so that the research is intense beforehand and then continues throughout. I do take liberties with the facts at times, but hey, its fiction.

Okay, you know I LOVE the Antarktos Saga and that my novel PROGENY centers on similar themes. I know where I got my research material from, was there any specific material you tapped for the information you used outside of your imagination?

Well, for the Antarktos Saga, my research was the previously written ANTARKTOS RISING, which began the whole Nephilim theme. For ANTARKTOS RISING I used a lot of web resources, which is perfect for conspiracy theories. But many of the theories posed in the novel were things I came up with on my own. I recently listened to some sermons by Chuck Missler, a really radical and scientific thinking pastor, on the subject of the Nephilim. I was pretty pleased to find that my theories on the Nephilim and the genetic connection to the Biblical flood match his own. 

You've said that THE LAST HUNTER series has been your favorite work thus far, and yet I haven't seen it gain the traction that some of your other novels have (INSTINCT, PULSE, etc) if even in that my Barnes & Noble doesn't carry them. Any thoughts on that?

Ahh, looks are deceptive! True, the books are not readily available in Barnes&Noble. This is because I’m putting them out via my own imprint Breakneck Media, using print-on-demand technology that bookstores shy away from. BUT, the majority of The Last Hunter’s sales come from e-books, where sales are chasing the Chess Team titles pretty closely. In terms of dollars paid to me, the two series are about neck and neck. If they weren’t I probably would have cut the series short rather than write five. It’s also the series I’m most often e-mailed about. Nearly every day for the past few weeks I’ve received e-mails asking when book four is coming. The answer is June, by the way.

                               To Be Continued Next Week


Ryne Douglas Pearson

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Where did the idea for Donzerly Light come from? That was an unusually unique story unlike any I've ever read before. In reading it, I got the sense that it could have been a risky piece for someone less brave than yourself to go out and publish just because of how different it is. You pulled it off for sure, which is why I gave it 5 out of 5 stars. Tell us about Donzerly.

Donzerly has a different origin from my other books, in that I got the idea after seeing a guy sitting on the street corner holding signs with odd sayings on them. And so I thought, what if these random phrases somehow connected with a person passing by? And, what if this connection was somehow destined to be.

I also liked the idea of a person, be they human or beyond that, who, with ultimate power, didn't choose to rule the world. Instead, they just chose to mess with a small slice of it in the darkest way.

Is it the type of story that you think might have caused a problem with your old publisher?

I wouldn't say 'problem'. It's simply that publishers want you to write what you've written. I can understand that. I could have understood it a lot better back then if they'd lifted more than a pinkie in promoting my previous books. But all that is irrelevant now. I get to bring books directly to readers, and they get to decide.

Well, I'm glad we get to read this side of your work! Take us behind the scenes of Confessions, which was an exceptionally well-written novel. What was it like writing that one?

Thank you! Confessions is special to me. A very different approach to a story. I decided to make it very focused on the main character by writing it in first-person-present, which, essentially, puts the reader in his head as the story unfolds. I'm actually comfortable with that approach, since screenplays are very similar - you write what is happening, not what happened, and it is very Point Of View specific.

Speaking of screenplays, how many have you done besides Knowing?

A bunch. Unlike books, you don't necessarily get your name on a film even if you worked on the screenplay. The Writer's Guild determines the credits. For example, I worked on the remakes of The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Eye, but received credit on neither. In addition I've worked on maybe a dozen more scripts that are either dead as dead can be, or in some stage of glacial development.

                            To Be Continued Next Week



Russell Blake

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So I'm reading King of Swords and I'm kind of blown away by the environment your story takes place in. I knew the drug war was bad, but I didn't know it affected so many innocents. Can you share a little of the world King of Swords opens the windows to?

Modern Mexico is a series of contradictions. On the one hand, it's rapidly modernizing, and is very "first world" in a lot of ways, particularly in the proliferation of American brands. It's impossible to go to any city and not be inundated by Starbucks, Costco, Home Depot, McDonalds, Burger King, etc. etc. Many places truly remind me of towns in the central valley of California, replete with their strip malls with an Applebees and cell phone store and Nike athletic wear store. And there's a burgeoning middle class now, which there really wasn't 25 years ago. On the other hand, there are still huge sections that are "old" Mexico, colonial, and in many ways the impoverished, rustic stereotype we see in the movies. In the midst of all this is a de facto civil war, much like that in Colombia, where the hugely rich and powerful drug cartels are battling the government, and each other. It's estimated that between 8K and 10K people die every year in Mexico from cartel violence, including soldiers, cops, judges, cartel members, and innocents either caught in the crossfire, or family members of cartel members slaughtered for retribution or as a warning/deterrent. And yet outwardly, in all but the border towns, where there's a very real and palpable sense of impending violence, the country seems peaceful.
I try to capture that paradoxical sense in the book. In Culiacan, one of the bigger "drug cartel" towns and home to the Sinaloa cartel, which is the largest in the world, it's to outward appearances a modern, burgeoning city of over a million people. But it's also among the most dangerous places in Mexico, due to the near constant drug-related killings and the associated violent crime of the smaller time hoods robbing to augment their criminal lifestyles. The numbers don't lie, and it's shocking how close to the brink many areas of Mexico are - directly due to the government clamping down on the cartels, at the request of the US government, which seems unable to control its own population's rampant consumption of illegal drugs (virtually all the drugs going through Mexico go to the states), but wants to turn the corridors of supply into war zones. To me, living in Mexico, the hypocrisy of a nation exporting its problem (illegal drugs being as popular as hamburgers) south, to be dealt with in another country at tremendous human cost (and with no apparent effect - drugs are still plentiful in the US, as they have been for the 40 years of the 'War on Drugs') while that nation is unable to curtail the demand side of the equation is ludicrous. Add to that the only reason that all the violence is happening is due to the massive margins that are the direct result of illegality in the states, and you begin to see more of the true outline of the beast. As with Prohibition, when alcohol was made illegal and margins went through the roof, the illegal substance (booze) was still widely available, but the margin went from 5% to 100% or more. So suddenly the violence went through the roof, and the power of the Mafia was consolidated. And it was the illegality that drove the margins, which in turn made it worth killing over. Same exact situation in Mexico. And now the nation is a killing field in some areas, specifically due to those obscene profits.

This war has destabilized the entire country and created enormously rich narco-trafficking cartels. Rich as in tens of billions per year of profit, in a country where the entire military's budget is a under a billion. You can quickly do some basic math and see what the result is likely to be.

So after living there for all these years, can you give us an insider's view of the whole border thing? I mean, we know what we see on the news, all the kidnappings, the drugs, the illegals, etc. Is it really as bad as we're told? Worse? And do you think a "wall" would stop the infusion of drugs and solve the immigration problem? I know I'm kind of going off the path here, but I've been having a discussion on the "war on drugs" lately, and I'm dying to know what you, being an insider, thinks of it.

My view won't be popular with most Americans. I view the drug problem as a criminalization problem, not a drug problem. As an example, you can buy any drugs you want anywhere in the US with very little difficulty. So it's not like 40 years of the "War On Drugs" has accomplished anything, except to make trafficking in them wildly profitable, as well as fighting the war. So everyone's making lots of money by them being illegal. But the demand is still very strong, as it will continue to be as long as people like altering their state, which they have since recorded history began. You look at countries where drugs are legal or decriminalized, and the violent crime drops to near nothing. But our politicians, who are more interested in arguing esoteric moral arguments, feel that it's a good idea to criminalize a widespread social behavior. The US has the largest percentage of its population in jail of any nation in the world. It is also the largest market for illegal drugs. And the profits have never been higher. If I was cynical, I'd say that an entire system makes hundreds of billions by that criminalization - for the population's own protection, of course, because citizens can be expected to be responsible for their own behavior, after all - they require government to act as parent for them, and  tell them what they can and cannot do. And when all the arguments collapse, as they inevitably do, the machine falls back on the hackneyed bromides: "Do it for the children!"

Last time I checked the children have no problem getting drugs. Anywhere. In school. At the playground. Wherever. So the children are no more being protected by this criminalization than anyone else is. What's being protected are 1000% profits. Just exactly as we saw in Prohibition. Same exact lesson, but we as a society don't like to learn from history.

In Mexico, drugs are largely decriminalized. So the problems are from the trafficking of drugs to the US. The border towns are killing zones for cartels fighting it out for territory. And because the nation's resources are being spent battling the cartels, they aren't battling the gangs of robbers or kidnappers - there are only so many resources to go around. Again, the budget for the army is less than a billion a year. The wholesale earnings of the Mexican cartels is estimated to be between $50 billion and $100 billion. That's at 90% profit. So do the math. In a country where the min wage is $5 per day, what will be the result of a trade where a cartel member, low level, can make $5K or more as a street enforcer? What was the result in Chicago during Prohibition? The economics mean lots of killing. Then, as now. If drugs were legal in the US, the trafficking would drop to a 5% business. And you don't see a lot of killing over the same margin as cigarettes and alcohol - two legal drugs that are "OK" because the government says they are.

Mexico is very dangerous in areas where the cartels traffic. Juarez. Tijuana. Sinaloa. Any city along the drug transportation corridor. It's the trafficking that is the mother of the violence, not any domestic consumption. But of course that falls on deaf ears in the US, because then it's the US' problem. And nobody there wants to hear that. So build more prisons, and watch more 16 year olds shooting each other north of the border over trafficking rights in their neighborhoods, and condemn those bad dirty Mexicans for their role.

A wall? To keep Americans who are tired of an increasingly fascist, repressive and criminally operated country in, or immigrants out? I believe net inflows to the US are now down due to the economy, so that's another manufactured scare. Ironically, if you trace hysteria over "them" taking over "our" country, it has a centuries-old history. So it's nothing new. A wall wouldn't change anything. It hasn't in TJ. And plenty of drugs still make their way north. The solutions of barricading the nation to keep its own citizens from taking substances they want to take is absurd, but completely in keeping with puritanical measures that fail to work every time. Hey, maybe another 40 years of centi-billion dollar unwinnable wars on drugs will do the trick. Maybe then Johnny won't want to smoke a joint, or his dad won't, or mom won't want a line of coke. Maybe a century of that will yield a better result than almost half a century?

Like most government policies, that one is really stupid, and ensures that lots of money will be made by everyone except the taxpayers paying for the flawed policy. What else is new? Governments don't make rational decisions. They make what they hope are popular decisions, so they can get re-elected. As long as there are angry voters who believe the answer to everything is more laws against things, then we can bet this will continue.

That's not a political rant, BTW. Every country has the same hypocritical problem with its government. It's just that everywhere else, the populations understand their governments are self-serving liars. In the US, they drink the Kool-Aid more. That's the only difference.
                                          
To be continued




Larry Enright

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Regarding the three published works you've penned (some would actually call them masterpieces), how much was based on your own childhood?

Other than the settings and some incidentals, nothing of my three published works is factual. Of course, my own experiences were a natural jumping off point for some interesting "what ifs," but none of those crazy things I wrote about ever happened, for all intents and purposes, as far as you know, to the best of my recollection, I take the fifth.

You did a great job of capturing the nostalgia of that particular day/lifestyle - at least as far as I can tell. I didn't experience it, myself. I got the sense though that you miss those days (you made me miss them, and I wasn't even alive!). In a general sense, was that what life was like growing up in the Enright family?

Life was very structured and dependable, which is huge for a kid. We could always count on our parents to be there for us, and let us know what the expectations and boundaries were, and we always knew where we stood, even if it was in the doghouse. They were very consistent and very clear in their beliefs - very religious, very pro-country, very family-oriented - and we were expected to grow up in the same mold. And yet our play time was our time, so there was a world of freedom that parents today are afraid to expose their children to. Who today would allow a bunch of grade school kids to go outside and play unsupervised for hours knowing they could stray miles from home? And expect them to come back in one piece? Parents today expect the worst. Back then they expected the best and held their children responsible for transgressions. I know this is a generalization, but I do believe it was a different world back then. I miss the simplicity of it.

What inspired the fantasy aspect of Buffalo Nickel Christmas?

Put together the imagination of a child, the magic of Christmas, and mix in a hint of reality, and voila! The take-off setting of Horne's Department Store's Christmas Village was perfect. I remember that place growing up and how special it was for us. I remember riding the escalators, playing with an entire floorful of toys. I wish I had met the Professor, but sadly, he only exists in Buffalo Nickel Christmas.

                                              To be continued...


John Betcher

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Tell us a little about the Becker series, what inspired that?


There are two unrelated sources that combined to launch the Becker series.

First of all, the plot. In my home town, we have a nuclear power plant that has been with us since 1976. When one is a new novelist hoping to write a suspense/thriller, and lives in close proximity to a source of potential nuclear disaster, it is virtually impossible to avoid writing one's first book about a terrorist attack on that plant.

So the first book -
The 19th Element - deals with a homegrown U.S. terror cell and its well-planned attempt to cause an explosive release of radiation at the nuclear power plant. Is their plan a realistic danger to nuclear power plants you wonder? In fact, nuclear insiders tell me that the plan is plausible, but unlikely. (I'm not comforted by that statement.)

Sadly realities of the tsunami at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Power Station in 2011 confirm that my terrorists' approach is, indeed, plausible. One reader living in Japan bought The 19th Element about a month after the meltdown began. He described reading the book while living the experience as "surreal."

The characters, I virtually stole from the late author Robert B. Parker. I had read a couple dozen of his Spenser Detective Mysteries shortly before staring to write my book. I loved the way they dealt with serious subject matter, but still managed to have intelligence and a sense of humor while they worked. Of course, my characters are playing out thrillers, while Parker's were solving mysteries. But if you watch closely as you read my Becker series you will see similarities between: Beck and Spenser; Beth and Susan; Gunner and the Boston Police Department; and Bull and Hawk.

Now don't be too literal, because my folks have different backgrounds and talents than Parker's characters. But his influence on my cast is clear.

After Book 1, the characters became part of my writing world. So they are here to stay.

If the Becker series was made into a movie and you had say in who played Becker, who would you try to get?

I've already thought about this one -- Mark Wahlberg. I think he could pull off Beck's sense of humor and respect for Beth, while still projecting a potent Delta Force-type persona.
 
I'll have to keep that in mind as I read Covert. By the way, after I started reading Covert, I realized that your novel is based in the same pool as Russell Blake's The King of Swords
. You may be interested in what he has to say about the drug war. Anyway, both books open with a cartel being taken out by a force parachuting down on them:)
                                           
More next week!


Rick Chesler

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So I started reading Wired Kingdom and I was instantly made even more jealous by the fact that you had thanks to give Steve Alten, another of my favorites! What has your interation with Steve been like? Had you been a fan of his long before Wired Kingdom?

I had read Alten's MEG and really liked that. (I've since read and liked the meg sequels, too!) Then when I went to his website, I discovered that he offered what he called a 'writing coach' program where he works with aspiring authors to sharpen their work. I'm not sure if he still does this program or not, but I remember I found it under his Writing Tips section. I submitted an early chapter 1 of Wired Kingdom and was pretty surprised when he got back to me. Anyway, Steve was kind enough to give me some great feedback on the manuscript. He didn't mince words or let me down easy when he wanted to let me know that something wasn't working, and I thank him for that.

So I'm loving Wired Kingdom. The setting is different, the story is unique, and the flow just keeps the kindle screen smeared with my fingerprints! Can you talk about your female POV? What made you chose a female character, and what was writing through a woman's eyes like?

Thanks, Shawn, I'm glad you're enjoying Wired Kingdom so far!

I chose a female protagonist because they are less common than male protags in the action-thriller genre, and thought it might help my books to stand out a little in this crowded category. Also factoring in to that decision was that it emphasizes how the FBI at the beginning of the story doesn't believe they are dealing with a real crime. They think it's some kind of media hoax that they can expose with a little desk work and pavement pounding. They don't contract some special forces team to go get this whale, they assign Special Agent Tara Shores to what they think is a simple hoax verification. Naturally, that's not what the case turns out to be, and before long Agent Shores is in water way over her head, literally and figuratively. So there's an element of vulnerability in having a female character caught up in a situation she was not intended to be exposed to, as well as the fact that females do have different personality traits and thought processes than men, which leads me to the second part of your question...

What was writing through a woman's eyes like?

It was challenging, to be sure. I didn't want a guy in a girlsuit, I wanted a genuine female character, albeit one who is a highly trained FBI veteran, who would behave and think like a real woman, not a cartoon character. The character of Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs was somewhat of an inspiration in this regard, but I also read a couple of non-fiction books by real life female FBI agents who recounted their time in the agency and reflected on what it was like to be a woman in such a male dominated, macho culture.

So as I wrote this action-thriller (as well as kiDNApped, the next book in the series), the protagonist's actions had to be constantly tempered with and informed by the answers to questions like, "Would a female have the physical strength to do something like that?" "How would a woman respond to a question like that?" "When dealing with other women, is she acting appropriately?" etc., etc. On the whole, I just try to make sure that the character is serving the story--moving the plot forward while being rendered with sufficient depth.

                                          See you next week:)


Douglas Dorow

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So how about we back up a little bit and allow you some more space! Give us a more detailed glimpse at Doug if you don't mind.

Hi, Douglas Dorow is my name. My friends call me Doug and my last name rhymes with Zorro. I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota with my family and our dog, Rupert, that we got from a rescue society. He's our fourth golden retriever we've rescued. Oh yeah, and I write thriller/suspense novels.

They say you should write what you know. I'm not an FBI agent, or a bank robber. I could write about driving my son to soccer and hockey practice or working at my day job, but that wouldn't be exciting. So, I write in the genre I like to read and the stories I think will be fun to research and write and hopefully others find them fun to read.

I've been writing a long time, reading even longer. Last June, I finally was at the point of finishing The Ninth District. I think Amazon's opening up opportunities to Indie authors was just the push I needed to get the book done.  One of my favorite classes in college was Creative Writing and I got some good feedback back then, but I went the practical path and majored in Civil Engineering, but I finally came back to writing.

It was kind of scary publishing THE NINTH DISTRICT last year. Publishing it meant really putting it out there for people to read. Before this, the only people who have read my stuff have been the people in my critique group. My wife hadn't even read my book, not her genre. Now, she's started reading it and sometimes will just stop, look at me and then say "Who are you?".  She doesn't imagine me writing some of the scenes I do. That's part of the fun of being a writer!

What else can I tell you? I'm originally from North Dakota, one of the few who can say that. I've done a few marathons, but my knees and ankles have talked me into stopping that. Writing doesn't hurt as much :)

We're the typical Minnesota family who spends a lot of the summer weekends at the lake (you know Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes).  Book two in the series takes place at Jack's in-laws Minnesota lake cabin. Again, write what you know! I'm hoping to release that book this summer and then I have a third book that is the first in a new Action/Adventure series that will be next.

Now that you're writing a sequel and your second novel, do you find writing easier or harder? Easier because you've already been through the whole process, you're only growing stronger as a writer, etc... Or is it harder because you have to market the other one on top of writing? Or some variation in between?

Wow, that's a great question and one that made me sit back and think. And I'm kind of surprised at the answer myself. 


Working on the sequel (book 2) and the third book (first in a different series) is .... different then working on the first one. In some ways it's easier and in some ways it's harder. 

It's easier to write now because with the first book I was learning to be a writer. I took a writing class. I did some writing. I went down a lot of rabbit holes. I didn't know if I was an outliner or a pantster. I didn't know what process I needed to follow to tell the story. I threw away a lot of writing. Learned to revise and rewrite.

Now, I know that I need some sort of structure or outline in order to plan out the book and let me move forward with writing without thinking about the twists and turns of the story too much. I do it ahead of time, but give myself room to change as I go along.  I'm somewhere between an outliner and a panster. I don't know what to call it. Pantliner, ooo, doesn't sound good, neither does outster. Whatever it is, I've found what works for me. 

In that way, writing the sequel is easier. I don't need to find out what my writing process is.

Writing the next book(s) is harder in a few ways. With the first, it was my first. I had no deadlines, didn't know if it would ever be published. I was really writing for fun. Then this Amazon/Kindle thing happened and I decided to finish, hire a book cover designer, hire an editor and publish it myself and see what happened.

And people have read The Ninth District, liked it, and want to know when the next book is coming out. Now I kind of have a deadline, I have people waiting to read the second book, and they won't wait forever. And I'm learning the publishing business - and it keeps changing. And I'm trying to figure out the self-promotion thing... The great thing is I have stories to tell. And there are people who want to read them. The bad thing is, I have a day job (I don't write full-time), and a family. But I need to set a deadline and get the second book done.

I need to prioritize the time I have and focus on getting the second book done. To do that I need to follow some of my own advice. The best way to double your sales? It isn't to sell twice as many of the book you are selling. It is to sell the same number of two books. I need to get the second book done; for myself and my readers.

Yes, writing the next books is easier in some ways and harder in others, but I'm still having fun writing. 
                             
                                   And... To Be Continued




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QUIZ TIME!!!

Write out the answers to the questions in the contact form and send them to me. All answers can be found in either the interview or my website (either on front page or in the menu tab... they're easy). Remember, this is for a guaranteed copy of one of my eBooks and a chance to win 9 other ebooks, mostly of your choosing, and the oppurtunity to pose a question of your own to one of these great authors. Good luck!

The Quiz

1. John Betcher's The Covert Element shares similarities with which other novel mentioned in the interview?  

2. Which Larry Enright story takes place in Horne's Department Store?

3. Name my four novels.

4. Which Russell Blake book is set in Mexico and involves the War on Drugs?

5. What three movies did Ryne Douglas Pearson say he worked on as screenwriter?

6. Which of my novels is like Jeremy Robinson's Antarktos saga?

7. When is the next Last Hunter book coming out?

8. Who has a dog named Rupert?

9. Which famous character was inspirational in forming Rick Chesler's main character in Wired Kingdom?

10. Which two of these authors reviewed my novel PROGENY?
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    Your Answers...

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          WHAT"S AT STAKE?
1. A Kindle* gift copy of either PROGENY or THE SOLOMON KEY - winner's choice (you get for submitting)
2. A Kindle gift copy of a Ryne Douglas Pearson novel - winner's choice
3. A Kindle gift copy of Doug Dorow's, THE NINTH DISTRICT
4. A Kindle copy of one of John Betcher's books - winner's choice
5. A Smashwords coupon from Russell Blake for his DELPHI CHRONICLE Trilogy (all three novels)
6. A kindle copy of either Rick Chesler's KiDNApped or WIRED KINGDOM
7. And an epub or mobi copy of one of Jeremy Robinson's novels - the winner's choice**
8. And the winner will also get to ask the author of his/her choice any question (come on people, within reason) they want. The question and answer will then appear in the following Part.***

* If the winner does not have a Kindle, he/she will be encouraged to download the free Kindle app to their computer or phone or other reading device. If this cannot be accomplished, alternative prizes will be given, though at this time, there have yet to be any decisions made as to what those prizes will be.
** Excludes INSTINCT, PULSE, and THRESHOLD
*** Unless, for some reason, the author cannot answer the question within the specified time frame, which, in that case, the answer will appear in the following segment.

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