Where did the idea of K’Changa come from?

I love adrenaline sports and anything ‘X’.

I’m hooked on snowboarding, fight sports, parkour, gymnastics, skydiving and moooooore so it only made sense that as an author I give Charlie Keeper the opportunity to feel every bit as alive as I feel when I go snowboarding.
So I came up with the name ‘K’Changa’ for the fantasy sport that the Tremen would play in Bellania but a name wasn’t enough, I needed elements to make this sport alive. When I was younger I used to play a lot of Capoeira and in my travels I had seen Chinlone (in the Golden Triangle) and Tekraw (Thailand) and I got to thinking what would happen if I ripped elements from each of these three sports and squished them together to make K’Changa…

Charlie’s painful learning and final mastery of it is my homage to all the old school kung fu movies and Hong Kong flicks of the ’80′s