Just posted: An October 25, 2007 interview with Ridley and Dave Barry discussing Peter and the Secret of Rundoon.

Q&A with Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry, authors of Peter and the Starcatchers

What inspired you to write the prequel to Peter Pan?

RIDLEY: I was reading Peter Pan to my (then five-year-old) daughter before bed one night, and she stopped me from reading by asking: "How did Peter meet Captain Hook in the first place?" That opened up a world: How did a boy become Peter Pan? How was it that he could fly, and never grew old? Where did Tinker Bell come from?

A week later I was staying with Dave in Miami and told him I was considering a prequel to Peter Pan, and hoped that he might consider co-writing it with me.

DAVE: I immediately said yes, because at that point, despite being the author of more than 20 books, I had yet to write anything that I'd want one of my children to read.

Have you ever written books together before?

RIDLEY: Neither of us had every collaborated on a book. We felt the combination might work, as I tended to write darkly plotted thrillers and Dave's fiction was more character driven and humorous. A good counterbalance.

DAVE: It was good for me, because Ridley has a highly sophisticated grasp of the novel-writing process. For example, he showed me that it's a good idea to know the plot BEFORE you write the book. This had never occurred to me, but it turns out to be amazingly helpful.

Do you live near to each other and how did you go about writing the book together?

RIDLEY: At the time I lived in Idaho, and Dave in Miami, Florida, -- two places that are worlds apart. Dave visited Idaho and we sat around a kitchen table plotting the book for several days. After that, we divided up the first-draft writing by assigning each of us a set of characters. If that person's characters dominated a chapter, then that writer was responsible for the first draft. We then emailed the chapters back and forth with FULL license to change or mutilate the other guy's work without explanation. Some chapters were edited as many as eleven times.

DAVE: And yet, we're still friends! Although I have hired a bodyguard.

Did your own children help you to write the book/come up with any of the ideas?

RIDLEY: Dave claims that we locked my daughter Paige in a room until she came up with another idea for a book, but it isn't true.

DAVE: Right. The police intervened.

Who is your favorite character in the book and why?

RIDLEY: I like Molly very much — she's intelligent, spunky, and willing to speak her mind. Black Stache — the pirate who becomes Hook — jumps out at me as well. He has a smarmy, evil way about him that I find appealing.

DAVE: I also love Ammm, the porpoise who saves humanity.

Will you write any more prequels and what books do you think would be good ones to choose?

RIDLEY: We've just finished the second in the Peter trilogy. The first book showed how an orphan became a boy who can fly and never grows old; the second will start to address the question of how he comes to leave his shadow behind in a London townhouse. We're also co-writing a Never Land (Island) Book series, featuring some of the characters who stay behind on the island after the first book concludes.

DAVE: When we started this, we thought we were going to write one fairly short children's book. Now it's getting to be a body of work more along the lines of War and Peace. Except of course War and Peace didn't have talking porpoises.

Q&A with Ridley Pearson, author of The Kingdom Keepers

Where did the idea for Kingdom Keepers come from?

When Dave Barry and I took our families to Disney World (my first trip ever to a Disney park) my then publisher, Hyperion Books, a subsidiary of Disney, offered to make our trip special. And special it was. Upon our return, I called Hyperion's contact at Disney Books, editor Wendy Lefkon, to thank her for the VIP treatment we'd received. She used that opportunity to suggest to me that there had never been a Disney-sanctioned novel set inside their theme parks. A few adult novels had used parts of Disney World before — usually the tunnel system beneath the Magic Kingdom — but never with Disney's blessing, nor carrying the Disney label. She wondered if I could come up with a suspense plot, aimed at a younger audience, that could get past Disney's own attorneys. I love a challenge. I called back a few days later and ran a few plots by her, including the story that eventually became The Kingdom Keepers. It took us eleven months to win Disney's approval to go ahead with the writing of the book and, upon its completion, another five months to gain copyright approvals and permissions in order to publish. But along the way I was treated to three separate research trips where I gained full access to Disney World—trips taken in the early hours of the day, before the park opened, studying the behind-the-scenes aspects of rides and talking with park operators.

Tell us about the research that went into Kingdom Keepers.

One of the many benefits of writing this novel with Disney's blessing was the park access afforded to me. Most anyone who has visited a Disney park, and all the rides, comes away wondering "How do they do that?" I was able tour inside the The Haunted Mansion, Small World, Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, Space Mountain, Fantasmics, and other attractions, when they were closed; to go behind the sets and discover the visual tricks utilized, the machinery, the special effects. Part of the thrill of Kingdom Keepers is that the book takes you places and shows you things about the park and the various rides that you might never have known before.

Another aspect of the research was being inside this enormous complex when it was completely empty. As a park guest you never see it this way, but it's quite the experience to walk around that pre-dawn park, Tomorrowland, Liberty Square, Tom Sawyer's Island, with not a soul in sight. It was quite eerie and surreal, actually.

Are there any particular research experiences that stand out?

I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes tour of Splash Mountain very much. When I toured the ride, it was closed down, and much of the ride was dry. The machinery involved in pumping these voluminous quantities of water to all areas of the ride was something to behold. Thousands of gallons a minute are pumped throughout the ride to lend the effect of a log boat riding on water, when, for example, the boat is actually climbing (on a conveyor system); but with tons of water rushing past, the illusion is that in you're in a boat in water, never mind that you're climbing a hill.

Another was Thunder Mountain where I met the ride's operational manager, a man named Wayne, who then became a central figure in the story.

You thank your co-writer of Peter and The Starcatchers, Dave Barry, in the acknowledgements. You seem to be almost teasing him. What's that about?

Me tease Dave Barry? Seriously? Dave happened to be in Orlando on business during one of my research trips, and so he accompanied me. We toured the maintenance tunnels beneath the Magic Kingdom--a tour that park guests can take as well if the proper arrangements are made. While visiting costume rooms that contain two million pieces of clothing, wig shops and a computer control center, as well as other wonders of the Kingdom, I took note of a system of large metal tubes that ran along overhead. Our guide presented a question to me: "Have you ever seen a bag of garbage in the Magic Kingdom?" The answer was no, of course. It gets you to thinking what happens to the garbage created by sixty thousand park visitors a day. Garbage that's never seen. It got me thinking, at least; Dave could have cared less—he thought I was nuts to be interested in a bunch of tubes on the ceiling when there was so much more to see down there. We still joke about it, so I had to jab him in the acknowledgements.

By the way: The answer to the trash question is in The Kingdom Keepers. Dave loves to ridicule and tease, and I still haven't lived down my fascination with those overhead pipes.

Tell us about the holograms.

I'm intrigued by technology. I often use advanced technology in my adult novels. In trying to conceive of something new Disney might someday add to its parks--but staying away from the idea of a new ride--I took an existing offering, the radio-transmitted Mickey tour of the park, and turned it from audio-only, to audio-visual. In the novel, Disney has just introduced DHIs—Disney Hosts Interactive—teenage host holograms, five "kids" to tour families around the park. These young hosts were computer-modeled off of local kids whom Disney auditioned and hand-picked from the greater Orlando area. In the novel there's a slight problem with the new technology: when the real-life kids go to sleep at night, they wake up inside a deserted park, as their hologram counterparts—at night. As it turns out it's no accident at all: they've been designed and recruited by a park old-timer to solve a treasure hunt, a series of clues, left behind years before by Walt Disney himself. If they can't solve the various riddles in time, the park is doomed.

Some of the rides literally come to life in The Kingdom Keepers. It's kind of creepy. Was that part of the plan all along?

Walt Disney had a wonderful dark side. He came up with a host of memorable evil witches and villains. These tend to receive short shrift in the park. The attention is on all the good characters: the princes, princesses and heroes. I got to thinking how this lack of attention must make the darker characters feel...

I have an active imagination. Guilty as charged. The deeper I dug into these rides the more fascinated I was with what might happen if various pieces of the rides came to life. If the evil forces began to gain power. You take a ride enough times, you know what to expect. You feel safe, even when it's at its most chilling. In The Kingdom Keepers, these aren't the rides you've come to know and love. These aren't your daddy's rides. Fasten your seat belts: you're in for the ride of your life—sometimes quite literally.

Good and evil are both four-letter words; the suspense lies in who will prevail.