Authors' Notes

We authors of The Prodigal Knight have been close friends since we met and trained martial arts together around 2005. We studied Modern Kenpo, a realistic adaptation of traditional martial arts movements and modern scientific principles to the streets. The art's base is attitude, fitness, basics, and logic and we learn on a web of knowledge from everything: grabs, punches, kicks, hugs, holds, locks, chokes, weapons, multiple opponents, and ground fighting. You might think of it as MMA, but it's less about preparing for tournaments and more of just a way of life. In case any of you are wondering, we are able to write so much action in our story, primarily because of our martial arts background.

The first order of business is the disclaimer that we have always stuck by no matter what. We own none of this. What ideas (original or not) we may have generated for this story are all under the influence of previous copyrighted works and considering that this is Star Wars, we owe it primarily to George Lucas.

Here's a list of the sources we took influence from. It is probably incomplete, but we've done our best to keep track of them.

Books

Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy – Timothy Zahn

The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling

The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis

Band of Brothers – Stephen E. Ambrose

The Forgotten Soldier – Guy Sajer

Memorial Day – Vince Flynn

Watchmen – Alan Moore

Brain Droppings – George Carlin

Just and Unjust Wars – Michael Walzer

Showdown at Gucci Gulch – Jeffrey Burnbaum & Alan Murray

Fan Fiction Stories

Knights of the Old Republic III: The Exile's Redemption – Dream Forger

The Weight of Glory – Elwin Ransom

Movies

Star Wars

The Lord of the Rings

Star Trek

The Departed

Iron Man

300

The Matrix

Batman Begins

The Dark Knight

Prince Caspian

James Bond

Bourne

Rambo

Die Hard

Enter the Dragon

Ong Bak

The Protector

Apocalypse Now

Pirates of the Caribbean

Indiana Jones

Alien

Terminator

Braveheart

Full Metal Jacket

Mission Impossible

Fight Club

Law Abiding Citizen

Pulp Fiction

Inglourious Basterds

TV Shows

24

Chuck

The Wire

Heroes

Firefly

The A-Team

Avatar: The Last Airbender

J.A.G.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

Games

Knights of the Old Republic

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

Star Wars: Obi-Wan

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Bioshock

Halo

Gears of War

Mass Effect

Starcraft

Warcraft III

Diablo II

Magic The Gathering

Music

Aerosmith

Talking Heads

Bob Dylan

The Beatles

Boston

Lynyrd Skynyrd

Deep Purple

Scorpions

AC/DC

Black Sabbath

Metallica

Iron Maiden

Queen

The Eagles

Fleetwood Mac

Johnny Cash

Neil Young

Eric Clapton

Grateful Dead

Jethro Tull

The Who

This story was written in… (Gipper does a lot of traveling)

Massachusetts

Ohio

Washington D.C.

New Jersey

Italy

Greece

Turkey

The Mediterranean Sea

New Zealand

To be a bit more specific in certain fields, we would like to first and foremost tell you what our main sources of canon are. It's not just enough to say "Star Wars" because there are so many aspects of it, and it can be a little disorienting. As what must always be the case, the films are the ultimate canon. Just as well as that, so too must the KOTOR games be canon as well – the light side male Revan and the light side female Exile. Of course, there is some room for flexibility considering all the side-quests and different plot-lines to explore (and we take advantage of this), but the one thing we do not take as canon is the Bioware MMO – "The Old Republic". Of course, it is not to say that these two cannot possibly coexist. The thing is, that game takes place 300 years later and not only can a lot happen, but history can also be rewritten. We take influence from the old "Star Wars Clone Wars" miniseries, which was one of the best animated action shows ever created. The final principle canon source was the Star Wars Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn. The books are absolute masterpieces and it was in them that Gipper learned how to reverse-trigger an accelerator compensator (the trick Jace pulled to escape Sith captivity in Chapter 27). We also gained a breadth of information of the Star Wars by the occasional several-hour long surfs through Wookieepedia.

And on a similar note, the character of Jace Myrther is the sole creation of Sarge42 and he is modeled off of two things – Jace Beleren from Magic The Gathering (in terms of looks and mind-tricking powers), and the personality of Sarge42 himself. You can think of Jace to be Sarge's doppelganger of a sort. Sarge is wise beyond his years (and he doesn't have that many years behind him) and this entire project was his idea. Lena Verado in role and back story was created by Gipper 40 but given the name and personality by Sarge42. Amicus Trek is the sole creation of Gipper 40, but unfortunately is not modeled off his personality. The backstory and brutal vengeful nature of Trek was taken of great influence from the film Law Abiding Citizen with Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx but more importantly with the idea that it matters less about what kind of power you're using compared to what you're using it for.

Music influences often come from either lyrics, themes, or just the song titles. Take Chapter 16 for instance – Rats in the Cellar, which is an Aerosmith classic. Or Chapter 23 – Working For MCA an epic song by Lynyrd Skynyrd; and there's also Chapter 20 – Space Truckin' (Deep Purple). Then there's also Chapter 41 – Disposable Heroes (Metallica). Simple things like that are sometimes tough to think about, and that's where music or other media can help.

Obviously having a martial arts background isn't enough to write what we'd like to think are some of the most detailed gritty bone-crunching violent action sequences in our story. We've taken influence from other martial arts movies and fast paced thrillers. 24 is certainly a source, as is James Bond, The Matrix, Die Hard, Rambo, and the Bourne Trilogy. Heavy metal and hard rock music was also quite useful in helping us write them out.

Then there's also the matter of character dialogue. We cannot cite Firefly and 24 enough to properly show how much they've contributed to this. Granted of course there are others (like Goldeneye, Rambo, The Departed, and basically anything by Quentin Tarantino) but the kind of witty or serious manner by which they're expressed from my imagination is a trait that aspired from watching these two shows. To be even more specific, we even took a few scenes from Firefly and put them in the story. Chapter 25 has a part with Revan and Lena and HK-47 doing an op on a random backwater planet, a scene taken almost word for word from a scene in the Firefly episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds." Remember how many times Revan yelled "Damn it!"? Every time we (Gipper specifically) wrote that, it humored us to think of how many times Jack Bauer says it in 24…and how it just never stopped being awesome.

And as we're certain you've noticed there's a good amount of politics in this story. Star Wars is political by its very nature – episodes 4-6 depict a noble rebellion an evil (and imperialistic) tyranny. Episodes 1-3 are a parallel with the story of how Adolf Hitler came into power and how the Weimar Republic fell. The Galactic Republic is built off of Plato's model – something that requires an order of supernatural "guardians" to protect it and keep the peace. Mass Effect calls those people SPECTRES. Star Wars calls them Jedi. Gipper 40 is a political junkie to the nth degree and has spent a fair amount of time in Washington D.C. studying how the process works (and in the case of this story…learning about what a particularly entertaining Senate hearing looks like). The both of us see more or less eye to eye in terms of politics, but we have also done our best not to bestow any kind of bias upon the readers (aside from the necessary "Sith suck" kind of attitude…) because it really doesn't matter. I also mention this because that is what gave us the idea of a Kraxis Rebellion against the Sith empire happening in the first place, as it is a quintessential element of Star Wars.

Our final set of acknowledgments goes to all of you. Your courage and bravery in trudging through this colossus of a novel (that went to over 450 pages on Microsoft Word) and the energy you gave us with every review and alert/favorite subscription went into inspiring us to continue and keep doing our best in more ways than you might believe. As much as we valued all of your constructive criticism, we would like to especially thank Elwin Ransom. He has been a major supporter in our efforts and a great friend, particularly to Gipper 40. His advice and ideas (many of which came straight from his own stories that we highly recommend reading) went a long way to helping us and we probably could not have done this without him. We also thank Darth Azrael for his help in correctly crafting the character Lucien Draay, as well as the dialogue between him and Darth Sion in Chapter 20. Thank you all, best wishes, and God bless.

Gipper 40 & Sarge42