Clan Hawkins

How did you come up with the various pets?

Bob's pets growing up (a cat named Trouble and a dog named Schnapps, as described to Julie in "The Strange Secret of Matthew Fuseli") are based on pets I grew up with.

Merlyn is based directly on a cat my late sister acquired during a band tour in 1981 whom I took in after her death in 1986.

Baskerville is an original creation for purposes of the TASK FORCE stories. He was named by Bob...

Is there anything special about the creation of Bob & Julie's children?

Nathan shares a birth date and time with my oldest daughter Rebekah. The final stages of his birth, as seen in the last scene of "United States v. Hawkins", are taken more-or-less directly from the events surrounding her birth in real life.

Laura shares a birth date and time with my daughter Raychel.

James and Jillian share a birth date and time with my son Luke

Did you have an inspiration for Shina Arikawa?

In Hero Games' old electronic magazine Digital Hero, issue #19 had an article by Michael Surbrook on Anime Martial Arts. One of the three characters he used as an example was a 19th-century female ronin by the name of Shina Arakawa. When I started redesigning Julie, I felt she needed the equivalent of an "Alfred" when she returned to the United States from Japan pre "You All Meet in a Lab". Something told me to go with Shina, so I gave her an immortality mutation, upgraded her gun to a Desert Eagle, expanded her origin out so that she was a family retainer for Clan Ishikawa at the time Julie was growing up in Japan, and inadvertantly mis-spelled her name in the process of doing all that.

What about Holo-D?

Doctor Destroyer's technical database as of "The Battle of Detroit" was always going to be delivered to Bob after his fake suicide and drive most of the next 10 years' worth of stories in-universe. In retrospect, I'm not sure what prompted me to make its interface an intelligent and snarky hologram -- it just sort of happened as I was writing the first scene to "The Legacy of Doctor Destroyer." After that, I shrugged my shoulders and ran with that concept for all it was worth.

Where did you get the idea for Jocelyn Sher?

Jocelyn didn't even exist as an idea until after writing "Extinction Event" and Raychel had talked me into letting her mother live (more on that below). She originally started as an idle What-if exercise on how Bob would handle having an illegitimate child of his own -- which helped kick the story "The Destroyer Wars" to its ignition point (see below). The timing between "Extinction Event" and "The Destroyer Wars" was perfect to have Bob and Jocelyn first meet as adults if I assumed that her mother Judith was pregnant when she originally broke up with Bob. Her creation also aided in splitting "The Manifestation" off from "Cliques" as its own separate story.