The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Last Keeper by J.V. Hilliard

Episode Date: April 12, 2022

The Last Keeper by J.V. Hilliard A young boy’s prophetic visions. Blind at birth, Daemus Alaric is blessed with the gift of prophetic Sight. Now, as a Keeper of the Forbidden, he must use his... powers of the Sight to foil the plans of a fallen Keeper, Graytorris the Mad. An elven Princess with a horrifying secret. Princess Addilyn Elspeth travels from Eldwal, the magically hidden home of the Vermilion elves, to begin her life as a diplomat to the human capital of Castleshire. During her journey, she stumbles upon a mystical creature foretelling ill tidings. A terrifying force of evil. Daemus’ recurring nightmare vision threatens to catapult him into a terrifying struggle that will leave the fate of the Keepers—and the realm—hanging in the balance. Daemus and Princess Addilyn must set out to face the menace that threatens their very existence. Will the entire realm fall to its knees? The Last Keeper is the first book in The Warminster Series. With gripping, epic action and heart-pounding adventure, you’ll love this new adventure series.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.
Starting point is 00:00:40 Hey, we're coming to you on another great podcast. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you. The Chris Voss Show family. The family that loves you but doesn't judge you in the way that other families do. That makes us the best kind of family. So we welcome you with open arms today. As always, we're for the show to your family, friends, and relatives.
Starting point is 00:00:55 Go to YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Don't look at iTunes and subscribe. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Also go to, let's see, all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places the kids play. You know the drill. The big LinkedIn newsletter. Holy crap. I just popped in there and picked up 50 new subscribers in one day. That thing is like growing by the thousands. It's amazing. Also our big LinkedIn group, 132,000. Go follow that over there as well to see what
Starting point is 00:01:22 we're doing. LinkedIn is like, it's really hot right now as as well to see what we're doing. LinkedIn gets really hot right now, as they tend to say in Zoolander. Anyway, guys, we have another author on the show with us today. He's the author of the newest paperback, The Last Keeper, December 8th, 2021. This just came out. J.V. Hilliard is going to be on the show with us, and this is going to be a book of a series. So there's going to be a whole mess mess he's coming about that he will be talking to us about about himself his bio he was born of steel fire and black wind jv hilliard was raised as a highlander in the foothills of once great mountain chain on the confluence of the three mighty rivers that forged his realms's wealth and power for generations. We'll have to find out where that's at. His father, a peasant twerg, toiled away in industries of honest labor
Starting point is 00:02:12 and instilled in him a work ethic that would shape his destiny. I feel like I should be reading this as someone from WWE. His mother, a local hero, cared for his elders, and his warrior uncle, who helped raise him during his formative years. His genius brother, whose wizardly prowess allowed him to master the art of the abacus and his own quill, trained him for battles on fields of green and sheets of ice. Welcome to the show, JV. How are you? I'm doing well, sir. How about you? Sorry about that bio.
Starting point is 00:02:44 Yeah, that's a fun bio and it kind of matches with your brand. So where is the realm of the Three Mighty Rivers? Well, if anybody knows me and can figure it out by some of the hints that I dropped into the bio, I'm from Pittsburgh. So of course, the Three Rivers of Pittsburgh and the mighty confluence of the rivers. And of course, my father was a peasant twerg, which meant he worked in a steel mill. My mother was a healer, so she was a nurse. So I decided to write my bio in a way that was just as fantastical as the epic fantasy stories that I'm writing and have written. And I look at myself as someone who lives in the realm of Warminster. And as a chronicler of the events there,
Starting point is 00:03:31 I figured it would be pretty fun to throw myself into the role of one, instead of just having a standard author bio and boring people to death. There you go. There you go. So give us your.com where people can look up on your website, find out more about you, join your mailing list, all that good stuff.
Starting point is 00:03:43 Yeah, sure. So jvhillier.com is the website. And then the social media stuff is at JV Hilliard Books. And if you go to that on TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram, you'll find me at Facebook, you'll find me at JV Hilliard. There you go. So what motivates you want to write this book? And I guess tell us that it's going to be a series and how that works. Yeah, sure. So in my genre of books, which is epic fantasy or sword and sorcery, oftentimes it's very difficult for an author to write a singular book. And in part, it's because as you go through the process of
Starting point is 00:04:17 writing it, you're creating the world and readers of that genre expect multiple books because they don't want to just be left behind with you know one story right and so if i you and i were writing a spy novel i can say that chris got into a car and drove down the street here i might have to describe what the street looks like is it made out of cobblestone is it made out of uh you know something magical or you know is it being pulled by horses or is it being pulled by a hippogriff? Or whatever. And so there's a lot of world building that goes into that. And as a result, you oftentimes will see series of books in my genre. So fans of things like Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit or Game of Thrones or Dungeons and Dragons are folks that would enjoy my novels.
Starting point is 00:05:03 There you go. What did you say? You said a word there of something that I didn't recognize. It went by me. So you're making this into a series. Is this your very first book? It is. It's my first novel.
Starting point is 00:05:15 And I didn't really have a whole heck of a lot of time to do it. Over the last 20 years, I've spent a lot of time in D.C. as a lobbyist. My professional career, I do mostly defense and technology work. But when COVID hit, DC shut down and I had a lot of time to sit at my house and my wife pointed at my den and said, you're not doing nothing, go in there and do something. And so I decided to write the book that's been rattling around in my head since I was a teenager. And then I shared it with an associate professor friend of mine and an editor friend of mine, and they both thought it was publishable. And they made a mutual introduction
Starting point is 00:05:49 for me to the publishing company, Dragon Moon Press, who, if you can tell by the name, sounds like it's just very genre specific, which it is. And they picked up the story. But in my discussions with the publisher, she said, look, I'm not just going to do one, you got to do at least three. And so we're up to four right now. I've got the seconds in editing and the third is about halfway done. Oh, wow. That's awesome, man. You're prolific. The COVID was really good for authors. Even I got my first book done. I was trying to get it done for 10 years. I finally had it done, COVID. Yeah, no, it's a silver lining of it all, right? I mean, this horrible menace that
Starting point is 00:06:28 creeps across the world, you know, and the only thing we're missing is blood, rain, and frogs. I won't curse you, that's all right. But, you know, I'm sitting in my house, I'm like... Don't give anyone ideas. Yeah, like, what am I going to do here, you know? And so, you know, I had been, you know, working on
Starting point is 00:06:44 something like this for a while it's it started when i was a young kid and if you can't tell i'm kind of nerdy and a lot of my friends are the kind of geeks that play dungeons and dragons and love the star wars and star treks and lord of the rings and so for us you know i i got some of the ideas from campaigns that we had led through tabletop role-playing games or through us just having, you know, just creative writing sessions. And then over the years, I just held onto the stuff. I didn't do anything with it. And all of a sudden that opportunity presented itself. And like you and others, I used that time productively to, to, to start the series. Yeah. I mean, it was,
Starting point is 00:07:20 it was a good time. You're like, Oh, I'm not doing anything else. You know, you can't catch COVID doing this. All the lifted weights I do. You can tell, oh, I'm not doing anything else. You can't catch COVID doing this. All the lifted weights I do, you can tell, right? That's what I was doing in my basement. That's what I started to do. Two days, right? Yeah. It was kind of funny.
Starting point is 00:07:41 I joined a gym, I think in August, and it was right before that Omicron rounded up. And I go to the gym and I have it all to myself and you know I usually go in the evenings too and but I just be like I have a whole gym to myself everyone's scared to come here except for me and I just have like the whole gym to myself and I loved it until like about a month or two ago I was like
Starting point is 00:07:58 why the hell are all these people at my gym like where do they come from? I'm like, I used to have this whole place to myself. And then I realized, I'm like, that COVID thing seems to be kind of over. Yeah, and I had culture shock. I was in D.C.
Starting point is 00:08:13 with a client last week, and they finally started to allow people to come and visit on the hill. And the way that you used to do it is you would go to the front door of the building you needed to go in, and they would take you through a scanner, and then you were off on your own and you could walk between buildings and there was freedom this time you had to call ahead and have someone come down and escort you from the front to get your credentialed and then take you up to the office and they had to bring
Starting point is 00:08:36 you back down even if you had another meeting in the same building you had to go back outside call them and then come back in and it was you know i don't know how sustainable that is, but in the end, it was, I know what they're trying to do. They're trying to protect everybody. But, you know, it's the same kind of experience except inverted that you had at your gym. Yeah, that's crazy. I saw that they opened, I think, to tours, limited tours, finally,
Starting point is 00:09:00 after two years where the public can go in there. But it's, like, limited. Yeah, D.C. is such a big tourist town. I mean, that kind of stuff has got to be crippling it. Yeah. I heard they won't let you take Speaker Pelosi's lectern anymore. Evidently, that's it. Yeah, I think that's off limits.
Starting point is 00:09:14 I think some people learn that lesson the hard way. Certainly do. A good measure. So let's talk about this book. What's – give us a tease. I know the one challenge we have with novels is you can't tell us too much. It can't, my novelist can never tell me the ending.
Starting point is 00:09:30 My historian authors can, but, but never my novelist because you know, you got to read by the book and read it. Give us some tease out on some of the things that are in the book. Maybe some of the characters. Yeah, sure.
Starting point is 00:09:41 So one of the main characters is a, is a young man named Damus. Damus is a noble that's born with the power of prophetic visions. And so his ancient, which is my term for God. So think like Roman or Greek gods, they still visit the realm of Orminster from time to time. And they empower folks that are these prophets and seers. And in the book, they're called the keepers. And Damus is away at the Cathedral of the Watchful Eye, which is the home of the keepers, being trained to be a keeper. And he keeps having a recurring nightmare. And it just so happens that his sort of power of the sight comes when he sleeps, kind of like Edgar Cayce did in the
Starting point is 00:10:19 early 1900s. He would have these dreams and some of them would come to pass, supposedly. Damus has that same dream, except his is a recurring nightmare. And he has it of a fallen keeper, a keeper that was once a very powerful man within his sect who did something to upset his ancient. And
Starting point is 00:10:38 they took away his sight, both his physical sight and his metaphysical sight. And no one's been able to see this keeper. They thought for a while perhaps he was dead. And now Damus is seeing his site and his metaphysical site. And no one's been able to see this keeper. They thought for a while, perhaps he was dead. And now Damus is seeing his return in his dreams. And so the book starts out in a pretty dark place with Damus having some recurring nightmares.
Starting point is 00:10:54 And, you know, I actually got the idea from that when I was having, I had a set of recurring nightmares when I was the same age as Damus, I was perhaps like an 11th and 12th grade in my first couple of years of college. And so I took the recurring nightmares and I twisted it up into this sort of fantasy nightmare that involves, you know,
Starting point is 00:11:11 magic and myths and things like that. We were talking and joking before the show. I was looking at the two covers that are on your website. People can go see. And the two covers for the two forthcoming book, I guess the second, third in the series. And the fourth is probably in the the works but i joked i said i think i'm gonna nightmares from the cover of your books they they look quite scary and of course intriguing for people that love this genre yeah you know it's a little bit of a mix i had someone write a review about it
Starting point is 00:11:41 saying that it was darker than typical fantasy novels are and it is you know i i have a i have a penchant to write things that i think are are dark and i like the gothic i've always been intrigued by vampires and stuff like that and there's really none of that in my my novels save for the fact that you know i think to kind of grip an audience and if you're a reader or in this day and age, an audio listener to books, having someone tell you a story that scares you is something that gets you coming back. And for me, I'm a big lover of horror films
Starting point is 00:12:12 and things like that. So I tried to make the bad guys, the big bad evil guys in the book, scare people as opposed to it just being a sword fight. And so I hope people enjoy that. It's a little different spin on the genre. Yeah, I also kind of sprinkle in some sci-fi too. I'm a big sci-fi guy.
Starting point is 00:12:32 Yeah, so like one of the things, and I don't know if you're a fan of my genre or not, but if you've ever watched the Game of Thrones or if you've ever watched Lord of the Rings, these societies have been around for a thousand years and yet they're still using swords and shields, right. And so in my realm, I've created this scholar city that kind of advances science in a way that's safe for fantasy adventure people.
Starting point is 00:12:56 So there's no starships or ray guns, but instead there are kind of like Q from James Bond where you get an invention that helps the good guys at the exact right moment they needed that and so some of those inventions come out of this this scholar city of abacus so i try to sprinkle in some of that sci-fi for my sci-fi readers as well now is is it largely about you know inventions here in elven princess is is everyone elves in the book or is that just some of the characters there's just some of the characters you know and i would say that the if you were to you know pick
Starting point is 00:13:31 up the book and start reading it today through chapter one you're going to see the human element through chapter two you're going to see the elven element but in the books you know i've tried to take inspiration from previous fantasy authors and elves are kind of a race that's ubiquitous, but I put a spin on, on my own, right? So I have Vermilion elves, these elves that are tall and with alabaster skin and red eyes and red hair, thus the Vermilion name or Raven elves that are given their name because they have black eyes and black hair, you know, so they have this Raven-ish look to them. And then you read my father was a peasant twerg and stumbled over that name. And that's my spin on some of the dwarves or some of the gnomes that you'll find running around in a Dungeons and Dragons module or a movie that you see where Gimli is there.
Starting point is 00:14:16 It's a way of making something my own, but also, you know, fantasy novels and or movies. Yeah, I grew up, one of my favorite earliest books was J.R.R. Tolkien. I'm trying to think of who else, the Sword of Shannara. Who wrote the Sword of Shannara? Terry Brooks. Terry Brooks. And we talked to Terry about getting him on for his latest book. And I guess we missed his, I got into him too late.
Starting point is 00:14:42 I missed his book tour. But he's hopefully going to be showing up for the next one. But yeah, he wrote a ton of sort of generic series books that I read. So I was really into that genre. I mean, I still, I think I still have my original Tolkien books. They're horribly beat up. They're paperback. I think I have a beautiful gold version of it.
Starting point is 00:15:00 It's in a box of The Hobbit. But yeah, I still hold on to those to this day. It's a treasure from my childhood, but I love i still hold on those to stay to treasure for my childhood but i love that genre yeah i'm the same way i got when i was in fourth grade i got introduced to the genre by a an english teacher of mine my my english teacher went on a medical sabbatical and we for the last month of the year we had a substitute and our curriculum became reading the hobbit so he literally read it out loud to us and i loved it it was fantastic from that day i was i was a fan
Starting point is 00:15:31 of the genre and terry brooks was writing the sword of shannara series like sword elstone wish song back when i was in high school so again that was a follow-on because tolkien was gone at that time and so once you got through his stuff, you had to find others like that. And Terry was one of my inspirations. He and a number of the authors that have adapted many of the Dungeons & Dragons modules, like Dragonlance or Ravenloft or something like the Dark Elf trilogy by R.A. Salvatore. Those are folks that I've tried to follow in their footsteps doing same thing. And then Sky-Fi, I was
Starting point is 00:16:07 really into Alan Dean Foster books. I would buy them all. Buy them all and consume them. I loved, I guess you call them science fiction. But you know, I mean, the character building, it was pretty amazing. So, you know, you've gone from
Starting point is 00:16:23 lobbyist to author and you've been prolific. You've gotten three books in the can, I guess, right? Yeah, we've got one out that came in the last Keeper. The second one is due out late summer and the third will be due out right before the holidays of this year. And I hope to be able to complete the series by the end of Q1 of 2023. And then we'll see where that takes us. I mean, right now, you know, there's plenty to do in terms of building my audience and, you know, loyal readers. And I try to, you know, do shows
Starting point is 00:16:51 like this to help to promote it. But also, you know, I've got some ideas for other books and series within the same realm, or I can write stuff outside of Warminster. And for right now, I think that, you you know my focus is knocking out these four books and doing the best job that i can doing it yeah that's awesome you know we've got people on the show that come back about every six to nine months so they're just amazing how they punch out books and they're on like version 25 version 30 of like you know different novels they write for you know action or right you know like they're kind of like the ryan well they're they're not like the ryan what you would call it like tom
Starting point is 00:17:30 clancy or jack yeah the jack reacher sort of things but you know some of them are like sherlock holmes type characters you know they solve mysteries and stuff yeah it's just it's just amazing like they just they just keep pumping out. There's like 20 or 30 versions of that character. And then sometimes they have multiple book series that split off. And they've got 30 of Jane Doe and 30 of Bob Smith. And it's just amazing. And it's great that there's an awesome market out there where people love these books. They consume them.
Starting point is 00:18:04 And that's why we love this show. I mean, books are awesome. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, the marketplace for books has changed so dramatically in the last 10 years. You've had a number of folks begin to, and there's my husky in the background trying to look out for his mother. But the marketplace has changed. You have a lot of folks that are doing independent publishing or using publishing service companies to help them edit and get published. In other cases, you have something called rapid release, which are folks that are writing smaller books like novellas or 100 or 200 page novels. And that begets loyalty. People are looking for
Starting point is 00:18:42 the next and the next and the next. So it doesn't surprise me that you've had a number of successful authors on who are on their 25th or 30th book because you've got those sales, right? You've got people that are loyal to you. They want to read about those characters and or they want to read about the spinoffs of those characters too. My first book was out
Starting point is 00:19:00 and within the first week I had someone tell me that two of the minor characters in the book were their favorites. One wrote and said that they wanted to week, I had someone tell me that two of the minor characters in the book were their favorites. One wrote and said that they wanted to see, I have this like barbarian hobbit looking guy. He's not a hobbit. It's called a spring heel. But imagine sort of like this barbarian berserker hobbit named Blue Connie. And, you know, he's a drinker and he rides a war dog.
Starting point is 00:19:21 And everyone said, I want you to write the adventures of blue connie next and then everyone else tell me that the villain the the absolute villain in the book this guy named incanus drew waithe was their favorite character and reminded him of boba fett and in both cases i'm thinking to myself what about the main characters you know yeah meanwhile i'm like i know where i'm going next. You know, so it's just, it's strange how that happens sometimes, but you build, I think, not only loyalty with readers, but then there's a demand for that. And it's hard to walk away from it when you know that you can sell something and people want it.
Starting point is 00:19:54 And I know, you know, I think guys like Terry Brooks, he turned his into a TV show and there are others out there like The Witcher has become a Netflix show. So there are other options to come to to come with that too in terms of being a you know an entrepreneur in a very specific marketplace that's changed very dramatically in the last decade yeah if you can get your if you can get you know those what are the hollywood options and stuff like that that's a really good game we had we had jay jance on the show a couple times she's prolific I think she's written like 66 books or something now. We've had her on twice.
Starting point is 00:20:28 And she talks about sometimes, yeah, her audience comes up to her at book things. You really need to, like, I think one of the things is she's like, do you realize one of your characters is an alcoholic? And it never occurred to her. And might have an alcohol problem. She like wow okay so yeah it's interesting you get that feedback like you're talking about from the audience and you're just like well maybe maybe we should kind of helps it's kind of like a nice to help uh you know maybe map out the future of the books and stuff yeah not only that i mean i the question i get asked a lot is if your books
Starting point is 00:21:04 were to ever be turned into movies, what actor or actress would play? And that's a fun one. That's a fun one to play because you tell them who you think it is, and then you tell them who you think it is, and, you know, who knows, right? It was a fun question to answer. Did you have, yeah, do you have any in mind that you were thinking about when you were writing? Yeah, you know, some of them are my ideas. Others are from people that have told me. And I have to discount some of this
Starting point is 00:21:28 because my wife has her favorite actors. And it's not because they would be good in their roles because she wants to see them, right? So I give her a little bit of a wide berth on that. And I figure, okay, I know she's just casting for her own preference of man. But in my case, there's a couple of, like, I think Clancy Brown. I don't know if you're a fan of the Highlander movie back in the 80s,
Starting point is 00:21:50 or he played the main prison guard in Shawshank Redemption. Clancy Brown would be an excellent villain for me. Yeah, there's a character named Dragich von Lormark, and Dragich is sort of the guy in the book book that no one likes and he's in and like I said I'm not gonna give away too many spoilers but he's someone that ends up on the wrong side of of your your naughty and nice list if you're saying and I think he would make an excellent von Lormark without a doubt I also think that you know Gemma Anderson would make a great Fox Dalton I've got this sort of like red-haired, you know, rogue,
Starting point is 00:22:26 young rogue who's kind of like the Han Solo of the group. And, you know, I've seen her now in a number of things, including a vampire movie called Byzantine. And I thought she did a great job. And she looks exactly like how I wrote the character. And so you get a couple of those that kind of pop into your head
Starting point is 00:22:41 from now and again. And then, you know, you get random people telling you that, oh, yeah, I get Peter dinklage to play blue connie and i'm like yeah i don't think anything i'm doing is going to be able to afford peter dinklage but thank you very much for giving me the suggestion yeah that gentleman i just googled him he's he's got uh flowing white hair almost gandalfish like now at least in some of the photos I saw. I don't know how recent that is, but he definitely can play someone like an elder sort of whatever dude. He has that kind of regal sort of look for a character. So, yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:16 Yeah, and he just matches the character. I mean, he's monstrous. And in the Highlander movie, he carried a two-handed sword in his character. And I'm already casting him, as you can tell, as long as he's already playing it. But the character he would play would be a guy that wields two swords at the same time, sort of this Florentine-style fighting. And, you know, I think he would be perfect for it. Like you said, he's a little older than he was when he was playing these action roles in the 80s. But I think from the way that I've written the character, he could be both.
Starting point is 00:23:45 He just comes across as somebody that could fit the Dragon Spawn and Lord Mark role to a T. There you go. There you go. So, who's your favorite character in the book? So, that's a little bit of a cheat. So, I wrote that
Starting point is 00:24:01 my favorite character is a character named Sir Ritter of Vulcaneer. And Sir Ritter was a Dungeons and Dragons character that I played for many years. And so I adopted sort of his character arc as something that fits into the novel. And, you know, Sir Ritter is a Trollborn, which is, you know, someone of mixed blood. His father is human and his mother is raven elf. And so those of troll-born blood are often looked down upon in their societies. And so Ritter suffers from that complex.
Starting point is 00:24:35 He's someone who's been given a very difficult job in guarding the borderlands for the king, and they don't appreciate him for it. And then, of course, his love interest is that elven princess that you mentioned before. And it's sort of a forbidden love, right, where he's not allowed to be in love with her but can't help himself. She starts to fall for him, but it's kind of foreboding. And I think that's what I try to do in all of my novels. I think that there's a number of themes like forbidden love or just a general struggle
Starting point is 00:25:03 or things like duty. Like Sir Ritter, his job is to do things he doesn't want to do and he he does them just like any other soldier would without without complaint and so i think those those kind of themes that you find oftentimes i think people that are reading it can identify with and as is as he identified with it they want to read more they want to they want to be like sir ritter they want to find out what happens to him does he does he change that perception around? And I think everyone likes to cheer for a guy like Sir Ritter.
Starting point is 00:25:29 And, you know, it's kind of a trope. You know what I mean? I know J.K. Rowling has the Muggles, you know, and they're mixed blood too. Or you see this in other novels. But I think in mine, there's a specific purpose for it. And so that's my favorite character. But I say that because, you know, I had to literally play him. I don't know if you've ever done my nerdy version of Dungeons & Dragons,
Starting point is 00:25:51 but if you have, you understand that sometimes these things take their own, you know, a life of their own in your head, and you don't forget them. They're almost party. Yeah. Well, the genre is huge. I mean, there's people I know that are my age that are still playing D&D. And I remember when I was growing up in high school, which was a long time ago, I consider I'm 54. You know, there were people in D&D.
Starting point is 00:26:14 I think it was kind of the latest thing back then. I think it had been around for a while, but it was getting really hot. Of course, all the people in the religious town were screaming about hellfire and damnation and Satanism. They did that about video games, too, when video games first came out and pinball. They were like, Pac-Man is of the devil, which, of course, everyone knows it is. Well, clearly Pac-Man is of the devil. Especially Mrs. Pac-Man. I didn't know if you knew that.
Starting point is 00:26:41 Yeah. The bow in her hair tips you off. It's like the six-inch thing. Yeah. Donkey Kong clearly is an immaterial. Everyone knows that. If you play the game, it's hell to play. So it's a lot of quarters.
Starting point is 00:26:58 Let's put it that way. People, half the Gen Zers are going, what are quarters? Yeah, what are you doing with a quarter? I know. What, quarters in Donkey Kong? Yeah, what are you doing with quarters? I know. What, quarters in Donkey Kong? Yeah, well, you're right. I mean, D&D was popular for a long time, and then it had a comeback. And part of the comeback, I would attribute to
Starting point is 00:27:14 the new generation of gamers. You know, I think now people are playing Dungeons & Dragons live on TV, a critical role. And the folks like that, they have their own show, or there's folks that do L.A. by Night, and they play a vampire game, a critical role. And the folks like that, they have their own show, or there's folks that do LA by Night, and they play a vampire game, and those things. People will watch them
Starting point is 00:27:30 like they do nowadays. I mean, there are kids that watch G4 for... They watch gamers playing games. It's an entirely different thing, and you just have to get used to it. But I think COVID helped that out a bit. People were sitting at home, they couldn't do much. All of a sudden, they started to Skype and play D&D. And its
Starting point is 00:27:46 popularity is, again, on the rise and has been for the last couple of years, I think. You even see celebrity guests come on those shows to play characters. And most of them are actors or actresses, and they make their way in for publicity stunts. But also, I think, many of them, like Joe Mangganello one of the you know another fellow pittsburgh he's been playing for many years and you know he's found uh you know his his love for the game is his return with his research the i i think too like you know like me i still love everything old like i was looking at a box and playing some records the other day like seriously i have collector's items of rush from my childhood and and other albums
Starting point is 00:28:25 and and i was going through uh some of my boxes i still have eight track tapes there's kind of a you know a resurgence of that where a lot of us that are older we're we're kind of evaluating our childhood some of my friends that are my age i saw they were making like dungeons of dragon dice on their 3d printer like yeah i you know, we got money. We can pay for stuff now. Yeah. Just like doing crazy stuff with it. Like, let's make a Dungeons & Dragons thing.
Starting point is 00:28:53 And, you know, it's kind of fun that, you know, it takes us back to their childhood and brings us back to those wonderful memories. Anything more you want to touch on or tease on the book before we go out? You know, I would suggest that, you know, we've talked about Terry Brooks. We've talked about Tolkien.
Starting point is 00:29:08 We've talked about Dungeons and Dragons. And I would say that, again, if you're a fan of that genre or if you watched Witcher on Netflix or even if you like the sci-fi stuff like Star Trek or Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, any of that stuff, this book is for you. I think to that kind of audience, folks that have open minds and folks that like to throw themselves into fantasy, in my case, it's escapism for me. I deal in a very real world every day. And for me to find an escape hatch and writing allows me to do that.
Starting point is 00:29:44 And I like to share those stories with other folks. And I think if those folks can appreciate just some. I mean, there's many more. Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, you can go through the list of them. If you like that stuff, I hope you'll like mine. There you go. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful having you on the show.
Starting point is 00:30:00 Thank you for coming on. We certainly appreciate it. My pleasure, sir. And thanks again. And I'll reach out to you again in July when the next on. We certainly appreciate it. My pleasure, sir. Thanks again. I'll reach out to you again in July when the next one comes out. Do it. Do it, please. We have so many authors that keep coming back.
Starting point is 00:30:11 Some of them just reschedule after the show for the next one because the scheduler goes on nine months or so. It's funny. Give us your .com so people can find you on the interwebs and get to know more about you. Sure. Yeah, it's www.jvhilliard.com there you go order up the book guys you can find it wherever fine books are sold and the last keeper december 8th 2021 by jv hilliard and of course you want to subscribe to his list i think he's got a list on his website you can get
Starting point is 00:30:42 notifications for the upcoming books that will be coming out. You probably want to get this one in the can so you can read it and be ready for the next stuff that comes out. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss. Refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to all of our places across the interweb, goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, and all of our groups. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.

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