Imora is a story told entirely from
a dragon's point of view. A real
dragon. You know those huge flying
creatures with evil streaks that the little people run in fear from? Yeah, that's what a real dragon is.
There are plenty of stories written
from the "bad guy's" point of view, from dragon and other monster's
points of view. These quickly turn into
stories about the misunderstood bad guy and worse, they human-ize the monsters
to the point where a "goblin" could easily be called a "human"
and the reader wouldn’t know the difference.
Even then, it seems like most books give only glimpses of the dragon's
point of view while the human characters get all the attention.
With Imora, I wanted to do
something different and experience what it really is to be huge, powerful, and
a little evil. I wanted Imora to be a real dragon. Real dragons don't shy away from eating
humans (hey, they have big belly's to fill!).
Imora is awake for decades at a time.
She's selfish, sure, but, you know, who isn’t a little bit? She knows she's powerful and has no problem
using that to her advantage. And it
makes her, I hope, wonderfully arrogant.
The challenge was making a
character like this sympathetic and show the disadvantages of being a dragon as
well. When she sleeps it's not for eight
hours, it's for a hundred years. Where
can she sleep safely for that long without some monster hunter coming to kill
her in her sleep? How would you hide
something the size of a jet liner for a hundred years and protect it at the same
time? Imagine how much the world changes
in a hundred years. What if you went to
sleep in the year 1900 and woke up in 2000?
How would you cope with and adapt to these changes? How can something the size of a jet liner
sneak around if it needs to? And you
know those pesky good guys always have an "instant kill" weapon specifically
designed to take out the bad guy. Well,
if you’re the bad guy, the monster that eats whole villages, well, that’s a
problem. How do face something like
that? How do you remind the pesky good
guys you are the power in the neighborhood so they don't come knocking on your
door hoping to steal all that treasure you love to horde?
How do you make a character like
this sympathetic? Well, that’s where the
plot takes us. It’s a story about a
mother trying to save her son. It’s a
story of survival not just against the hordes of good guys, but against nature
and time.
