Authors are often asked, "where did you get the idea for this book?" or "what inspired you to create this character?" Or, at least, I have heard authors get asked such questions. It has yet to happen to me.



So, with only prompting from my own ego I thought it would be fun to give an overly detailed account of how the central character of one of my books came to be.

It all started, really, around 2005 or so when I was on an urban legends message board and people were posting links to videos on some site called "YouTube". It wasn't long before I had abandoned that urban legend site and was spending most of my free time watching YouTube. People were uploading clips from shows I watched as a child and had not seen since. It wasn't long before I began to discover other videos that were even more intriguing. People were sitting in their dens, in their bedrooms, on their porches, wherever they could and talking to the camera. Everyday folks were just talking to cameras and posting it on this site. Even more amazing, people were watching this stuff.

Skip a couple of years to around 2007. I started doing this very thing, too. I would talk to the camera and post the videos to YouTube and -- wow. People watched. People commented. But, I was never content with just being one of those that would talk to the camera and nothing else. Videos became more of a low budget production for me, a third rate D-movie experience with props and characters, sound effects, animation, music and most anything I could get my hands on.

I started developing characters. The first two were forgettable - an animated news reporter named Chuck Offenboffer* and another character I called "The Confessions Guy".

Being overweight and middle aged and, at that time, a huge fan of the Harry Potter book series, I thought it might be funny to play Harry Potter in his middle years. Somehow, I kept that name but developed a character who was certainly older and heavyset, but other than that bore no resemblance to Harry Potter in the books. I began doing this extremely low budget "talk show" in which an elderly conservative gentleman from Minnesota who would sit in the basement of the local bait and tackle shop and talk about politics, religion, sports, fishing and various other things. People used to compare the character to Red Green, even though I have never seen that show. The character is actually influenced by a number of things, but probably more Hank Hill than anything else.

The point of the show was not really to make fun of conservatives, older people or Minnesotans. The point was to make fun of anyone who is more in love with their own opinion than learning about the world and listening to those around them.

I do regret calling the character Harry Potter. For a little while I had a running gag in which people would write to him, thinking he was the character from the fantasy series -- and he would be deeply confused by the letters as he seemed to be the only person in the world that had never heard of the Harry Potter books.

I don't do YouTube anymore. There are a lot of reasons, but the top two are: I no longer have decent editing software and YouTube took up a lot of my time. A ten minute video might take all day to put together. These days with my work schedules I just don't have the time to devote to it anymore.

But, I have a lot of fond memories of those days and am still in touch with a number of people I "met" through YouTube. I do miss it. Maybe some day I will go back to it.

In the meantime, however, I am working on a project in which I have taken the Harry Potter character and am working on a book featuring him. In one of the later videos he revealed his real name is Horatio, so he primarily goes by Horatio in the book. In it, since leaving YouTube, he has started writing an advice column** called "BE A MAN" in which men write in questions and Horatio advises them on how to be more masculine. It's a satirical look at sexism using a blatantly sexist and ignorant character. I seem to enjoy writing about loathsome characters.

*I would later physically play a disgusting bum of a morning show host called Chuck Offenboffer.

** It turns out Horatio's wife is also an advice columnist and has a book out now, called "The Misadvice of Miss Addy Vice".