Hey Roz! hope you're doing well, what or who was your inspiration for the creation of Jack Salem?
Sorry for the delay in response--I don't come here very often. Salem is a very old character of mine--dating back to when I was in middle school. He's not based on anyone specific--he's partly an amalgam of a few characters from books and movies, but mostly the result of no one writing the type of characters and stories I wanted to read, so I had to write them myself. The stories with him I wrote back in middle school and high school had this weird post-apocalyptic setting--later while I was in college he stepped sideways into a different story setting, the SF Dream Machine universe. If you've been doing this as long as I have, there's a lot of cross-pollination between different universes.