Synopsis
Earth is gone and no one knows where it is. Hundreds of years after EarthFall, a woman, Andi Devaughn, is tasked to bring home a fled prisoner--a girl who escaped to a new, uncharted planet. Andi pursues her mission with single-minded efficiency, yet as she proceeds through Taralys, she learns more about herself, her past, and what actually happened to Earth.
Background
One time, when I was showering, I thought how cool it would be if dragons attacked spaceships. I didn't know how that would necessarily work out, but that's part of being a writer: You think of something random, then you let it stew for a while.
After some mental chewing, I got to the point of creating a new world where I could get that to happen--but I hit a snag. If I'm writing a book about spaceships, there's a certain level of scientific reality that needs to go into it. In other words, I needed to answer scientific questions about how dragons worked/evolved because that would be a natural thing for a space-faring race to ask.
Thanks to my beautiful wife (who studied biology in college), I came up with a raft of reason how and why the dragons would evolve the way they did. (It involved earthquakes--massive amounts of earthquakes.)
Once I started writing the story, however, things sort of spun away from me, and though the evolutionary reasons for dragons exist, they aren't the main point of the story. Instead, I focused on the character, Andi, and what made her unique. Her struggles, her past, and her insistent personality were all things that made me excited to write her story.
She does, I should note, freak out a little when she sees the dragon for the first time. But she's a pro; she gets over it quickly.
After some mental chewing, I got to the point of creating a new world where I could get that to happen--but I hit a snag. If I'm writing a book about spaceships, there's a certain level of scientific reality that needs to go into it. In other words, I needed to answer scientific questions about how dragons worked/evolved because that would be a natural thing for a space-faring race to ask.
Thanks to my beautiful wife (who studied biology in college), I came up with a raft of reason how and why the dragons would evolve the way they did. (It involved earthquakes--massive amounts of earthquakes.)
Once I started writing the story, however, things sort of spun away from me, and though the evolutionary reasons for dragons exist, they aren't the main point of the story. Instead, I focused on the character, Andi, and what made her unique. Her struggles, her past, and her insistent personality were all things that made me excited to write her story.
She does, I should note, freak out a little when she sees the dragon for the first time. But she's a pro; she gets over it quickly.
Magic and Technology
In fusing the genres, I had to world build in such a way that both the magic and the technology felt legitimate. To do that, I focused on light. Light is the way in which the magic system works (a person is born with the ability to absorb a certain wavelength of light, which gives them some enhanced capacity--speed, strength, memory, flexibility), so it made sense to use light as the way people traverse the stars. I did some research on light, colors, and what the genre does normally (read: Watched a lot of Battlestar Gallactica and played Mass Effect) to make my own version of what I thought was cool.
I think it's cool, anyway.
I think it's cool, anyway.