The Book Vault -4-
The Tom Clancy Era
Tom Clancy's Endwar
(Writing as David Michaels and Peter Telep)
As I wrote more books for editor Tom Colgan, I must have increased my credibility, because he reached out and asked if I would be interested in adapting one of Tom Clancy's latest video games, Endwar, into a series of novels. Other authors were adapting other games, with everyone writing under the pen name "David Michaels". I agreed, but over time, I was able to negotiate returning to using my own name, which was terrific and eventually led to working with Mr. Clancy himself on our big hardcover thriller. This series is fun, with supercharged characters and great military tech and drama. I had a blast researching and writing these three!
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon
(Writing as David Michaels and Peter Telep)
I was super excited to land this job since I was already a fan of the Ghost Recon games. I was able to, once again, work with the game designers, most notably Richard Dansky and Jay Posey, to create a series of novels that were as exciting as they were well-received. The game developers sent me "classified" material upon which I could use to build my stories, including the "Ghost Recon Story Bible," which was immensely useful. I also had the help of many military operators from the special forces community to make the books as authentic as possible. You'll notice, too, that I negotiated getting my name back on the cover of the third one.
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell
(Writing as David Michaels and Peter Telep)
This was an another amazing game franchise with a huge and devoted following of super fans and researchers like Ms.Jackie Fiest, who helped me tremendously with these books. Moreover, other authors writing as David Michaels had already written adaptations, so this work required me to read all of those books, play the games, and write detailed outlines for my books in the series. I'm most proud of Aftermath because I literally received a phone call from the FBI asking if I knew a certain Russian oligarch who is "fictionally" portrayed in the novel. The agent said it seemed as though I knew things only the Russians knew, but I told him I found everything on the web, ha ha! He told me, "Well, in the end, it's a hell of a read--more true than you know!"
