About the Book

I've had a passion for writing for as long as I can remember. Perhaps not even writing so much, but stories. When I was much younger, my older sister would write and illustrate stories for me if I was upset (she also happened to love art, which helped). I spent countless hours playing with toys, creating whole universes forthem to explore, and envisioning huge, epic stories for them to conquer and sprawling networks of relationships between them. I guess I never wanted to leave that part of me behind. I take great pride in my imagination (well, most of the time), and, perhaps through a certain amount of denail, I never wished to completely renounce my childhood and the games that meant so much to me.

Legacy began as a concept of several human warriors on a desert planet who could change into armoured, mechanical animals using powers and technology handed down to them from an alien artefact generations ago. It was sort of like Power Rangers meets Trigun. The characters each had a different colour and a different animal, and at the time I didn't have any names, so they were simply known as 'white fox', 'black wolf', 'green shark', 'blue tiger' etc. Eventually the relationships between the characters was so intrinsically tied to their animal forms that I decided to make the characters animals themselves, and the story developed around these. Kyru and Aeryn were first to manifest completely, even though I already knew they weren't the main focus of the story.

I enjoy using animal characters. My favourite author, Robin Jarvis, had a great influence on me when I was getting into longer, more adult books at the age of six/seven. Since then, I would get fed up with certain conventions of fantasy and science-fiction where differences between species are determined, generally, by variations in height and facial hair. Short hairy things hate tall, baby-faced things, and vice-versa. Average-height, average-haired species are viewed with ambivalence on all sides. There's so much more depth to using animals, in my mind. It requires less initial explanation, for one thing. Most people will know what a fox is when you mention it, so that already gives you an idea of its look and personality. It might seem lazy and arbitrary just to plonk a different species on a new cast member, but as everyone will have a different view of a particular creature even before knowing the character, it allows for people to appreciate the characters differently, and experience the story in a different way.

But even then, in essence it almost shouldn't matter what the creature is; the story is written for the characters themselves. Place a human face on any, every character in Legacy and it would read just the same, and I would hope it would be appreciated as much.

Essentially, Legacy's convoluted origins came from my constant frustrations when I was younger of stories not going how I wanted them to (in particular characters who did the wrong thing or were misused by their creators/directors, as well as overdone plot elements and tired archetypes), and being annoyed that nobody who wrote popular fiction, directed films or TV series seemed to cater for that particular section of my imagination that was being ignored. Since I couldn't guarantee anyone would come up with a story I'd be entirely happy with, I started daydreaming about my own.

That isn't to say everything else is rubbish- far from it! I'd never wish to sound so arrogant. There have been so many inspirational books, films and TV series that I've loved to pieces and just immersed myself in completely. But this is my own creation, a manifestation of everything I've been dreaming of for years. People are welcome to criticise as they like, but it will always be mine, the story I would tell. And that means... so very much.