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Hi, and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz Show on IHeart Radio.

My guest today is Kyle Becker.

Kyle is a former Fox News writer and producer, independent journalist, and the author of the excellent new book, Hypernia, The Cursed Kingdom. So nice to have you on, Kyle.

Thanks for having me on, Carol. Did I say that right, Hypernia? Hypernia! That is the correct pronunciation. So, yeah, no, it's been a long ride, but I'm glad to have the book out and people seem to be

enjoying it. So it's good to be able to maybe talk about that a little bit, if you like.

Yeah. So I've known you for a while on the old internet, but I knew you as somebody who wrote

commentary, nonfiction, politics. What made you make such a switch into fictional fantasy writing?

I think it's been a long journey because I got into politics, analysis, and commentary

because I appreciated Russian, which I studied in high school, and I was exposed to a lot of Russian literature,

which I found fascinating. And I feel like there's a lot of opportunity in English literature

for taking some of the great literary tricks that the best authors use to tell great stories

and adapt them to English literature.

And so that was one of the inspirations for writing my new book, Hypernia, The Curse

Kingdom.

It took about five years to get the whole process done.

So I'm really proud of it because I had to learn a lot and really

hustle and work. And just to get it published was not easy. And it didn't come through an agent.

It actually came through a publisher, a commuted press, an independent journalist colleague of mine, Brianna Morello,

helped me meet Anthony over at Permuted Press.

And so he was really great at shepherding this and spearheading it to get it to the final

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