Mark Frost — American Novelist born on November 25, 1953,

Mark Frost is an American novelist, screenwriter, director and film producer, best known as a writer for the television series Hill Street Blues and as the co-creator of the television series Twin Peaks... (wikipedia)

I have traveled down this path before - 'List of Seven' and 'Twin Peaks' both have thematic similarities - but 'Paladin' took me much deeper into the intuitive underground. Always bearing in mind Joseph Campbell's Rule No. 1: When entering a labyrinth, don't forget your ball of twine.
Dear Internet: You are very good at spreading rumors. Truth is more valuable and much harder to come by.
The fact that people still talk and obsess about 'Twin Peaks', more than twenty years after the fact, is a great validation for what we thought we had going at the time.
The architecture for 'Paladin' - given that it's at least three books, with the possibility of more - turned out to be bigger than anything I've ever created, with multiple levels of reality, interlocking mysteries and a terabyte of time frame.
I've always had an idealistic streak about storytelling in that I believe we owe more to audiences than repeatedly bludgeoning them over the head while stealing their lunch money. We owe them inspiration. That's why I'm more interested now in creating new heroes than hooking up jumper cables to old ones.