I am excited to welcome author Nick Cole, who is getting ready to celebrate the release of his new novel, Soda Pop Soldier, on Tuesday!
When the virtual world gets real . . .
Gamer PerfectQuestion fights for ColaCorp in WarWorld, an online combat-sport arena where megacorporations field entire armies in the battle for dominance over real-world global-advertising space. Within the immense virtual battlefield, players and bots are high-tech grunts, using dropships and state-of-the-art assault rifles to attack the enemy.But when times are tough, there’s always the Black, an illegal open-source tournament where the sick and twisted desires of the future are given free reign. And what begins as PerfectQuestion’s onetime effort to make some cash quickly turns dangerous.
All too soon, the real and virtual worlds collide when PerfectQuestion refuses to become the tool of a madman intent on hacking the global economy for himself and fights to stay alive—in WarWorld, in the Black, and in the real world.
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Send in the Clown
In my new novel Soda Pop Soldier I wanted to write about gamers. The main character is a professional gamer named PerfectQuestion. He’s an everyman with a sense of right and wrong, and that gets him in over his head pretty quickly in the world of online illegal gaming (Sort of World of WarCraft meets the bottom of Vegas).
I did something unique in this novel. I wanted to put the reader as close to the action as possible, which is saying something for a novel that’s about people playing video games, or in essence, living life through their digital avatars. So, the entire story is written in first person immediate. Or, you’re inside PerfectQuestion’s brain the entire time. Watching the digital Armageddon he’s fighting his way through as a ColaCorp soldier, or hacking and slashing his way through that WarCraft meets Vegas thing called The Black.
But there are some other characters in the novel I want to introduce you to, and one in particular that resonated, unexpectedly, with the beta readers and everyone who’s had a chance to read it so far, including Publisher’s Weekly.
But first of all, there’s Kiwi. Oh yeah, maybe I need to explain that I don’t use a lot of names in this novel. Most of the characters, all the gamers in fact, go by their gamer tags. Gamer tags are your online identity, and most people who play games out there in the digital-verse have one. Sometimes they say a lot about a person. So Kiwi, he’s from Australia. Imagine a hulking, tribal tattooed version of Manu Bennett from Arrow. That’s PQ’s best buddy. They fight for ColaCorp in a fictional Southeast Asian campaign called Song Hua. Then there’s Riotguurl. Think Alison Scagliotti from Warehouse 13. Riotguurl is ColaCorp’s number one dropship pilot. Her avatar’s punk rock, and PerfectQuestion respects and wants to get to know her better.
But the character, and this surprised me immensely, that readers especially dug is called JollyBoy. He’s the Intel Specialist for ColaCorp and he may or may not be completely sane. Think the Joker meets… well, the Joker. I admit his dialog: absurd, witty, and always jokey, was fun to write. But I didn’t see him being as entertaining as everyone found him to be. Time after time I’d get a comment back from an editor or a reader telling me he was one of their favorite characters. I don’t know. He was random, unpredictable, sociopathically lethal, and outright dangerous. He carries a couple of long-barreled 45’s that can dispense digital lead or a “BANG” flag should he feel either to be situation-appropriate. NOTE: His version of “appropriate” is much different than the rest of us sane people. A couple of micro-uzi’s for back up and Pagliacci-style cammo face-paint, and I thought he’d just be a nice bit of background to the novel. Well, the clown messed things up and people enjoyed him… a lot.
Soda Pop Soldier is out this August 12th and you can check out JollyBoy, PerfectQuestion, and the rest. It’s a fun thrill ride through the future of video games and if you enjoyed Ready Player One, or Call of Duty, or Diablo, then this one is for you. Game on!
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Meet Nick Cole!
Nick Cole is an Army veteran and working actor living in Southern California. When he is not auditioning for commercials, going out for sitcoms or being shot, kicked, stabbed or beaten by film school students, the author of The Old Man and the Wasteland and The Wasteland Saga can often be found as a guard for King Phillip II of Spain or a similar role in the Opera Don Carlo at Los Angeles Opera.
Contact Info: Website | Twitter | GoodReads | Amazon
Want to purchase Nick’s novels?
Soda Pop Soldier
The Wasteland Saga (omnibus)
Wasteland Saga
- The Savage Boy
- The Old Man and the Wasteland
- The Road is a River
