Lunch with The Robot Driver: Adventures in Hero Construction, by Angela Knight:

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Lately people have been e-mailing me with two questions:

1. "Do you have a list of your 'Mageverse' series in order?"  For the record, I do, here on my website.

2. "Will there be more 'Mageverse' books?"  Well, of course.  I've just written a novella called "The Vampire's Ball," for an October release, Hot for the Holidays.  And now I'm hard at work on the sixth book in the series, Master of Fire.

Frankly, I had to take a break from the Mageverse.  If you read Master of Dragons, you know why.  The ending of that book was like something out of Lord of the Rings, with fairies and dragons, vampires and werewolves, all fighting an invading horde of demons. When it was over, I'd killed off all my bad guys.  That's a problem, when you write the kind of adventures I do.  So I wrote the first two books in the :Time Hunters: trilogy to give my brain time to reboot.

I soon realized the answer to my problem was right under my nose.  Or actually, having lunch with me on a regular basis.  My husband is a cop, which means lunch with him tends to involve lots of other cops.  His best friend is a truly amazing guy, a forensic chemist named Ashley Harris.  He's also an arson investigator and a member of the Spartanburg Sheriff's Office bomb squad. 

And his tongue is made of solid titanium. 

Seriously.  We go to this particular Thai restaurant that offers the hottest food in the county.  These dishes are laced with evil little Thai peppers that can sear your tongue right out of your mouth.  They rank how hot the food is based on stars.  Being a wimp, the hottest I can eat is one star. My husband loves spicy dishes, and he usually orders two stars.  If you're really brave, the waiter will recommend four stars, which makes the most macho cops sweat and turn red in the face.

Ashley habitually orders thirty stars.  Thirty.  The waiters view him with awe.

My husband, Mike, is a hostage negotiator, which means he often talks to crazy people who like to insist they have a right to bear arms. (They apparently don't realize that this right also extends to members of the SWAT team.) Ashley sometimes goes along to drive the bomb squad robot, which is used to approach these nutballs and give them cell phones so my hubby can talk to them.  Now, the ‘bot is radio controlled, so you drive it kind of like one of those little toy cars.  Except it weighs four hundred pounds, cost $100,000, and has two shotguns mounted on the front.  It looks like something out of the Terminator. 

Recently, one of Mike's fruitcakes threatened to shoot the robot when it rumbled up to him on its caterpillar treads.  Ashley said through the ‘bot's speakers, "Don't shoot me!  I'm just the robot driver."

Cops being cops, this is now his nickname.  (The fruitcake, by the way, let the robot flee back to its master, and Mike soon talked him into coming out of his hole.  He was then sent off to the Home for Heavily Armed Psychotics.)

Anyway, after hearing this story, it dawned on me I'd found the hero of my next book.  I'd base the guy on Ashley. 

Now, Ashley is a real sweetheart, along with being one egg roll short of a combination plate.  So he agreed to let me follow him around for a week, watching him test drugs and blow stuff up.  I was in writer research heaven. 

I got to test a crack rock to make sure it wasn't actually a macadamia nut (which is what crack kind of looks like.)  I got to stick my nose in a bag of cocaine and smell it.  (Note, I said "smell," not "snort.")  It smelled kind of like chalk with a hint of gasoline.  Blech. 

I put on the helmet of the armored bomb suit.  The helmet alone weighs 30 pounds, while the suit weighs about 60.  It's made of Kevlar, and includes lots of armor plating.  There are all these cool controls on the sleeve for air supply and radio contact.  It's like something out of one of my "Time Hunter" books.  Yet it has no boots or gloves, since gloves would keep you from being able to handle the bomb.

I asked, "What if the bomb goes off?"

Ashley said, "They call you stumpy."

Oh, man.  How could I not make him a hero?

More about Ashley and Master of Fire in my next blog.                                                                                  

 

Angela Knight, Guardian, paranormal romance, The Time Hunters, Penguin Books