And like many aspiring authors, from a young age, I have been in love with words. I still recall the first book I wrote in 5th grade about a small gecko running across the desert, painting it with color as it scampered across the burning sands (a child’s imagination for how the painted desert came to be). Perhaps it’s something my parents still have, shoved in a box of my old childhood possessions.
As a young pre-teen, my dad encouraged me to read. He had a small library of sci-fi and fantasy books and decided that I, with my reptile obsession, would love Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books with her firelizards and massive telepathic dragons. Needless to say, he was not wrong. From The Harper Hall Trilogy to the Dragonriders of Pern, it was an adventure. Now, this may be telling my age, but this was more at the start of the internet era, and somehow I had stumbled upon text-based play-by-email (or PBEM) groups that allowed fans to create their own characters in McCaffrey’s world and write their own stories. I made lifelong friendships through these groups and the text-based games (MU*s) I eventually moved onto.
Yet after a while of playing in McCaffrey’s world, I longed for… more. Something that would allow me freedom, fewer restrictions, and thus, at fourteen, I took the one thing I liked from her world and created one of my own. Truthfully, the only similarity was that it had telepathic dragons that bonded to humans. I added more, then sprinkled in magic, and came up with my worlds, my own playground for us to create new life and love in.
But ideas always shift and change. And the years did indeed bring change as my likes and dislikes came and went. As things I thought were ‘so cool’ at the time did not hold the same luster when I looked at them ten, then twenty years later. The world I created in those early teenage years is a far cry from where it has landed today, but I feel it’s important to tip my hat to its roots, to what began this craziness.
Lervana is a continuous labor of my imagination spanning over more than a quarter of a century. It has been mashed up, crumpled, erased, rewritten, redone, edited, changed, and morphed into its current form. I love so much about my world, the planet I’ve created, and the beings that inhabit it. I hope to bring that world to life for anyone who decides to embark on a journey through my books.
This tale offers a glimpse into Ismira and Nythor’s story, and I had a great deal of fun writing the chaos they went through.
Image created by the talented Meep!