Did you get any of my rather frail attempts at humor?

For example, when they were in the Visitor's Center at Slaughter Bridge, Arthur was looking at a poster depicting his last battle. When Merlyn walked up to him Arthur said,"I've got a bad feeling about this."

"I think someone already used that line," said Merlyn. "In the future, actually."

I hope a few readers smiled, recalling that Hans Solo used that phrase in the first Star Wars movie which was set in our far future.

How did I get approval to use the British Royal Family as characters?

I didn't. But I don't expect that to be a problem. Charles, Camilla, William and Harry are all in the story of Future King. However, I didn't present any of them in a bad light. On the contrary, they're real people, even heroic figures. I also put a disclaimer in the front of the book that indicates Future King is entirely a work of fiction and, "the author intends no harm of any kind to anyone living or dead."

That's basically the same approach I took in my first novel which featured Walt Disney. And I never heard a squeak from the Mouse.

Those other nine years

By the time Waking Walt was published in 2002, the doctors had diagnosed the problem I was having breathing. They called it COPD -- Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. I called it SAD -- Stupid And Dumb. Even though my father, a heavy smoker, died of lung cancer at age 52, I had the sharpness of mind, the grand intelligence, and the brilliance to smoke for 30 years.

There is no cure for COPD. It slowly, but surely destroys your lung capacity. At first it was just an annoyance. I couldn't walk up our slightly uphill driveway to get the mail. Then it put me in the hospital, with pneumonia. Then they put me on oxygen - just at night. Then 24/7. If I wanted to go anywhere, I had to take a portable oxygen tank.

Of course, I could still type. But without a lot of imagination. I wrote a couple of short stories that were included in collections with several other authors called "Secrets." And in 2005 I published "Lyrics of Life in four-part harmony" a collection of poetry I'd written over the years.

But what I did mostly was slowly go down hill. I remember getting out my research on the "King" book, every so often, and I read most of The Once and Future King again, but it was all too hard.

Then, in 2006, at the recommendation of Dr. Layish, my pulmonary doctor in Orlando, Harriet and I went to Shands Hospital at the University of Florida. Over the next two years, working with the Shands  lung transplant team under the direction of Dr, Maher Baz, I found myself on the transplant list. And on May 13, 2008 I had a double lung transplant.

It was a couple of years later, with some ups and down, that I began to seriously work on the project that ended up being titled Future King (as in the Once and...)

What's with all the dragons; on the book, the website, and blog?

As you may remember, Arthur's father was Uther Pendragon. The way we think of names today, that would naturally make him Arthur Pendragon. However, in Medieval times it wasn't a last name. As you can see in the excerpt from the Online Dictionary below, PENDRAGON is a noun. Pen-dragon -- it literally means the head dragon.

www.thefreedictionary.com/pendragon

(Historical Terms) a supreme war chief or leader of the ancient Britons. [Welsh, literally: head dragon].

By the way, according to legend, King Arthur's flag had a dragon on it.

Fifteen years in the making

Someone asked me how long it took to write Future King and I had to stop and think. The answer had me a bit shocked. I came up with the idea in 1996 after re-reading one of my favorites; that classic by T.H. White, The Once and Future King. It took me a couple of months to outline the story in my mind (I never do it formally on paper) and write a first chapter.

Back in those days, my wife and I owned an advertising agency. Our landlord was a man named Marty Cummins and we had grown to be friends. One morning I met Marty going into our building. We stopped and chatted a while about nothing much and I decided to ask him what he thought about the idea. About bringing King Arthur back from Avalon in today's world.

He liked it. But then he got a funny look on his face. Marty knew that my wife and I had both worked for the Disney Company for a number of years and he was an avid Disney fan. He looked off into the distance for moment, then smiled. The six words he said changed everything: Why don't you bring Walt back?

Six years later WakingWalt was published. It's still available on Amazon as the original hard bound or paperback and recently became available as a Kindle.

What got in the way of Future King those other nine years will have to wait for another post.