Plaistow, NH -- (ReleaseWire) -- 06/14/2016 --AnEx Publications announces that New Hampshire based author Richard Saunders began a hunger strike at midnight on Monday, June 6, 2016.

He is embarking on this potentially dangerous mission in an effort to draw attention to and save The Phoenix Foundation.

Saunders will weigh in every Monday at around 12 noon Eastern Time in a Live video presentation from his Facebook page. On 6/6/16, he posted his starting weight at 196.2 pounds.

The following is a Q & A between AnEx Publications and Mr. Saunders conducted on June 2, 2016.

AnEx: Why have you chosen to take this drastic action?

RS: I turned 60 years old recently and realized that time was running out to achieve a few goals that are extremely important to me and for which I have worked tirelessly to achieve. For several decades now, some of my Phoenix Foundation covert agents and I have self-funded our efforts. Most of us have full-time careers and do part-time volunteer work for the Foundation.

My long term plan is to leave the publishing and derivative rights to my novel, SecretAgentMan to the Foundation.

I hope to establish an endowment upon my death that will help ensure the long term viability of the organization after I am gone and to make it into a legal 501(c)(3) or similar corporation that has the potential to operate in perpetuity.

For this plan to work, my books will need to become bestsellers. With 3,000 new titles published each day, getting attention for a new author is an extremely difficult task. Each year, only a few new writers receive contracts and large advances from one of the five major publishers. The rest of us struggle to get noticed.

I have a strong belief that the media and a large number of readers will believe that my fiction and real-life adventures are worthy of attention and support if my work gets enough publicity to become well known.

My stories and claims are hard to believe at first glance, but I maintain that they will survive close scrutiny upon examination.

I have spent the better part of my lifetime secretly building my novel and engaging in the "method-writing" covert escapades that make my work unique and allows the novel to stand-apart from the vast majority of literary attempts.

As the inventor and practitioner of "method-writing", I accomplished many of my goals and among them are the following:

In 1994, I ran a sting operation against then Massachusetts Governor William Weld.

In 2007, I engaged in a protracted legal battle against Donald Trump that gained worldwide media attention at that time.

The record will show that I won both of these scrimmages.

In what can only be described as an incredible coincidence, two of my high-profile method-writing targets (Weld & Trump) are now running for the top two political offices in the United States.

Even more remarkable, these unlikely scenarios are playing out in front of an enormous international audience, just months after the release of Volume I of my novel.

My skirmishes with Mr. Weld and Mr. Trump are told in thinly disguised fictional form, where only the names have been changed.

This unique publicity hook for SecretAgentMan will all but disappear in less than five months, after the November Presidential election.

Without a high-priced and well connected publicity or PR team behind me, I am feeling intense pressure to find a way to shine the media spotlight on this situation and on my life's work right now, before this brief window of opportunity closes and time runs out on Tuesday, November 8, 2016.

As a first time author with a start-up publisher, I will need to use some extreme methods to make sure that my work gets noticed within this short time-frame. Traditional promotional attempts and polite emails to media types have gone unnoticed. I am now resorting to guerrilla marketing techniques.

I am encouraged to continue to fight for recognition because the response my work is receiving has been very positive. Journey / SecretAgentMan has garnered critical acclaim, been nominated for a Hugo award and I have an ongoing national talk-radio interview tour in progress. I just need to find some way to ramp Up the level of attention.

Another motivation is that I have spent most of my adult life self-funding The Phoenix Foundation and our covert activities, to the detriment of my own welfare.

At 60 years old, I need to finally start saving for my retirement years so that I do not become a burden to my family or to society.

With this new focus, I have recently stopped funding The Foundation. My agents and I can scrape up some intermittent funding here and there, but the only hope for it to survive my death is for Journey / SecretAgentMan to become a profitable series and eventually a franchise.

AnEx: We have been looking into this and The Phoenix Foundation doesn't seem to really exist. Can you comment on that?

RS: Yes. Officially, it doesn't exist. Unofficially, it operates as a small, covert organization with the mission to try and "Make the world a better place". We attempt to do this in ways both small and large, but mostly small.

In Volume I of SecretAgentMan, we give the readers a tiny glimpse into how we operate. In 2004, The Phoenix Foundation was contacted by Mr. Robert Easton, then Chairman of The Columbine Memorial Committee in Littleton, Colorado.

They were in the process of setting up a website and found that every Internet Domain name that was suitable for their purpose was being held by cybersquatters who were asking unreasonably high prices for the rights to use these various web addresses. Mr. Easton, on behalf of the committee, asked if we were able to help them solve that problem. That story is told in the book without any fictionalization.

Other anecdotal stories detailing a few of our adventures will appear in future volumes, but the vast majority of what we do or have done is covert and will not be made public.

This would have to change once we openly operate as a 501(c)(3) or similar legal entity. All operations would have to be made public.

I would be very happy to die knowing that a legally chartered organization was in place with an endowment and an ongoing income that was sufficient enough to guarantee its existence long after I was gone.

AnEx: How will you go about executing this hunger strike?

RS: It will be a severely calorie restricted diet, consisting mostly of fluids and very small amounts of solid food, along with vitamin supplements in pill form. Just enough to barely maintain sustenance. The longer it goes on, if it fails to draw any attention to the cause, it may get more and more constrictive and more dangerous to my health.

AnEx: Will this be medically supervised by a doctor?

RS: No competent physician would approve of this and I would not want to put someone in the awkward position of supervising such foolish and reckless behavior. I'm on my own here.

This might be my last chance to achieve the goals I have set. After November, there is less reason for the media to focus on what my book offers.

Here is a final thought - the only two places in the world right now where William Weld and Donald Trump intersect, is on the national political stage and in my novel, SecretAgentMan, available at Amazon and wherever books are sold.

http://www.amazon.com/Journey-SecretAgentMan-1-Mykl-Walsh/dp/1941758479
http://secretagentman.org/

Mr. Saunders Facebook page can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/RichFSaunders

Twitter = @RFSaunders