Xander Zackery – Sixth Grade
There has been a little feedback asking about how and why I came up with the characters I did for Sugarbeet Falls. I can honestly say each of them have some sort of relationship with someone in my life.
Xander is the easiest. He’s based on my son Zack. Zack gave me the idea for the series after I watched him pretend to be different superheroes for an entire summer. He was never the traditional ones. He would run around at night as “The Nothing,” an ivisible hero who saved people without them even knowing it. He would always be some sort of fish man when we were swimming in the pool, or a hyper-jumping lizard creature at the grocery store as he bounced from colored square to colored square.
I always thought it would be so cool if any of these characters could come to life for him in print or on film so he could literally see what he had constantly going on in his mind. The idea was to write a book a year to loosely follow his life as he grew up. I started right on time, but by the time I got Volume 1 published, he is a 20 year old adult living in San Diego sneaking into San Diego State Football parties (that won’t make it into the next book).