Okay, so you might want to know where I got the idea for Lightbringer and the series of books to follow. You might not want to know either, since no one is reading this blog, but someday, someone is going to read this blog, and they might want to know. So bear with me, all right?
Blame my wife, Pauline, she was always nagging me, "David, why don't you write a fantasy book already, ya lazy bum!" You should use Alice Kramden's nag voice (from The Honeymooners) when you try to imagine that. That's the truth, really. Well, okay, except maybe for the nagging part. She probably said it much nicer than that. "Dave, I really think you should write a fantasy novel. It would be brilliant," said in the voice of Carol Brady from the Brady Bunch. Yeah, that's a little closer to the truth. I wanted this to be different from the other types of fantasy books out there, since many of them had a similar feel to me. I grew up loving Greek, Norse, Celtic, and many other world mythologies and imagining myself in those stories. Yes, I wanted to create a myth. So I did what George Lucas is reported to have done; I read Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces," and I got to work.
It was around 2003 that I started hashing out this whole idea. The biggest problem I had to address, was the world. The fantasy world is crucial to every fantasy writer's story. I played Dungeons & Dragons growing up and that was the initial inspiration for wanting to write a book of this type. Problem there, is that they have all this trademarked, copyrighted D & D world stuff and they already have their own authors writing books based in that world. I didn't want to go there and I didn't really know how. Frankly, creating a brand new world from my imagination terrified me. I thought of all my favorite fantasy writers like JRR Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Lieber, and Piers Anthony, and the worlds they had created. I did not think my imagination was up to the task.
So I decided to set it on earth, sometime in a distant, post-cataclysmic future, where technology has ceased to exist. This allowed me to change the landscape a little, when I felt the need. That was the answer then; earth, long after the Apocalypse. Who doesn't love some good, post-apocalyptic, references? I know I do. I figured I'd even throw in the occasional Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand. Irradiated mutants, walking corpses, and talking apes seemed cliche', so I needed to come up with some other kinds of monsters to populate my world. This is where mythology came back into the picture. I was creating my own myth, so I would use the creatures of myth, legend, and folklore. Now, it's not that this sort of thing hasn't been done in other stories, like the Percy Jackson series, for instance. The trick to was to dig deeper and and use the less familiar creatures of folklore. So while you might find ghosts and witches in my story, you will also find exotic creatures you probably have not heard of, like the Scottish Nuckelavee and the Icelandic troll, Gryla. I decided to have my hero go on an epic journey around this not-what-you'd-expect type of futuristic world so that he could encounter some of the strange beings in it. At the beginning of Family Guy's Star Wars parody "Blue Harvest," they say "a long time ago, but somehow in the future..." If you just flip that around, you get what I did to create my world "sometime in the distant future, even though it feels like ancient history..."
Blame my wife, Pauline, she was always nagging me, "David, why don't you write a fantasy book already, ya lazy bum!" You should use Alice Kramden's nag voice (from The Honeymooners) when you try to imagine that. That's the truth, really. Well, okay, except maybe for the nagging part. She probably said it much nicer than that. "Dave, I really think you should write a fantasy novel. It would be brilliant," said in the voice of Carol Brady from the Brady Bunch. Yeah, that's a little closer to the truth. I wanted this to be different from the other types of fantasy books out there, since many of them had a similar feel to me. I grew up loving Greek, Norse, Celtic, and many other world mythologies and imagining myself in those stories. Yes, I wanted to create a myth. So I did what George Lucas is reported to have done; I read Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces," and I got to work.
It was around 2003 that I started hashing out this whole idea. The biggest problem I had to address, was the world. The fantasy world is crucial to every fantasy writer's story. I played Dungeons & Dragons growing up and that was the initial inspiration for wanting to write a book of this type. Problem there, is that they have all this trademarked, copyrighted D & D world stuff and they already have their own authors writing books based in that world. I didn't want to go there and I didn't really know how. Frankly, creating a brand new world from my imagination terrified me. I thought of all my favorite fantasy writers like JRR Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Lieber, and Piers Anthony, and the worlds they had created. I did not think my imagination was up to the task.
So I decided to set it on earth, sometime in a distant, post-cataclysmic future, where technology has ceased to exist. This allowed me to change the landscape a little, when I felt the need. That was the answer then; earth, long after the Apocalypse. Who doesn't love some good, post-apocalyptic, references? I know I do. I figured I'd even throw in the occasional Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand. Irradiated mutants, walking corpses, and talking apes seemed cliche', so I needed to come up with some other kinds of monsters to populate my world. This is where mythology came back into the picture. I was creating my own myth, so I would use the creatures of myth, legend, and folklore. Now, it's not that this sort of thing hasn't been done in other stories, like the Percy Jackson series, for instance. The trick to was to dig deeper and and use the less familiar creatures of folklore. So while you might find ghosts and witches in my story, you will also find exotic creatures you probably have not heard of, like the Scottish Nuckelavee and the Icelandic troll, Gryla. I decided to have my hero go on an epic journey around this not-what-you'd-expect type of futuristic world so that he could encounter some of the strange beings in it. At the beginning of Family Guy's Star Wars parody "Blue Harvest," they say "a long time ago, but somehow in the future..." If you just flip that around, you get what I did to create my world "sometime in the distant future, even though it feels like ancient history..."
i have read this book i am ready to start collecting the rest of them....Bring me the soul of the lightbringer!!!!
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