Sunday, February 21, 2016

IMORA – INSPIRATION

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.