My influences
for Hirapis are many and varied: Narnia, Middle Earth, the
Galaxy,
Hogwarts, Klah, Myst, and Ptolus.
All of these
creations involve a
world where anything can happen and usually does. As a child, I
dreamed of entering my own magical world as a way to escape from the
loneliness of real life. As an adult, this fantasy needed to
become tangible as my real life was not what I wanted in terms of
career and goals. Thus Hirapis became the world in which I really
wanted to live. The world needed to include magic, because magic
is an integral part of fantasy worlds. But my husband and I are
both technophiles, so I wanted Hirapis to include many of the
technologies I love and rely on every day. The hardest part was
integrating the two aspects of the world in a way that's logical to the
discerning reader.
Another aspect of the Hirapis series that I wanted to accentuate is the
concept of gray characters. In many of the books that influenced
me, most of the characters are either distinctly good or distinctly
evil. Only Severus
Snape from J.K.
Rowling'sHarry
Potter books
has any real gray to him, and the reader doesn't discover this until
the end of the fourth
book. In the Hirapis series, I wanted my
characters to have many shades of gray so the reader cannot always tell
who is good and who is bad. Frequently the characters are both
good and bad, as are people in the real world. We are all human
and have our flaws, and that's what I wanted to bring out in the
characters of Hirapis. I also shied away from an entire species
as being either good or evil. Individuals needed to be
differentiated to add more depth, more gray, to the story.
The Cats in Hirapis are not taken from George Orwell or
the Star Trek cartoon (in fact, I
never
have read Animal Farm nor
have I ever watched the animated Star
Trek series); they come from ancient Egyptian
mythology,
the drawings of Diana Harlan
Stein, and my own love of cats. I studied the
various species, especially lions and bobcats (my favorite
outside of
the domestic breeds),
and incorporated many of their traits into my
world. Of course they are anthropomorphized, but that was
needed to create the characters. Many aspects of the world, how
technology and magic are used, were derived from how these cats behave.
I knew from the beginning that making my lead character a female would
relegate my books not only to children's
literature, but to the
narrower scope of girls'
literature. I knew this would limit the
success of the series, but I also knew that females of all ages needed
a heroine they could genuinely appreciate. My greatest departure
from all of the above mentioned worlds is that my central character is
a girl who comes of age in two vastly different worlds. By the
end of the series, she must choose in which world to live forever.
Hirapis.com
