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The Writing Show (WS): Wouldn’t you love to write a story in which you make up absolutely everything, no research or subject expertise required? Writing fantasy can be a lot of fun, but that’s not exactly the way it happens, as this week’s guest reveals.
Welcome to the Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m your host, Paula B. My guest today is Daniel Arenson. Born in Israel in 1980, Daniel Arenson lived in Manitoba and New Jersey before settling in Toronto, Ontario. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and enjoys painting in his spare time.
Daniel’s poems and stories have appeared in magazines such as Flesh & Blood, Chizine, Orson Scott Card’s Strong Verse, and many more. Firefly Island, which we’ll talk about today, is his first novel.
Welcome to the Writing Show, Daniel. It’s a pleasure to have you here.
Daniel Arenson (DA): Thank you. It’s great to be on the show.
WS: Tell us about Firefly Island.
DA: Firefly Island is my first fantasy novel. Thomson Gale Publishing released it this summer in hardcover, which I’m very happy about. Why don’t I tell you a little bit about the story?
WS: Great.
DA: Firefly Island is about an enchanted island where a king magically turned himself into stone, making his body invulnerable to any attack. Because his body is now solid granite, swords and arrows break against him, essentially making him invincible. Unfortunately, with this magic his heart turned to stone as well, turning him into a cruel tyrant who terrorizes the island.
Now, one girl on the island, whose name is Aeolia, has a special magic too. She can share all of her senses and feelings, so anything she feels or senses, whether it’s hunger or joy or even pain, she can magically make other people feel. So using this magic, this girl is the only person who can hurt the stone king by hurting herself and sharing that pain. When the stone king realizes that she’s the only person who can hurt him, he begins to hunt her across the island, and she must escape him and somehow find a way to defeat him and free the island.
The book was a lot of fun to write, and I’ve always loved reading fantasy novels, so I had a great time writing this one, and I’m obviously very happy that I found a good publisher for it and that it was released this summer. And so far, it’s been a lot of fun.
WS: That’s wonderful. I want to ask you more about the publishing of the book in a minute, but I want to go a little more into the story and the craft. These characters sound to me very much like standard fantasy characters. I don’t mean in the sense of being boring or trite or stock characters or anything, but they do sound like they are very much in the fantasy tradition.
DA: Right. I was very much inspired by medieval European fairy tales. Fairy tales often tell of magic and cruel kings and heroes, so definitely it has a strong fairy tale feel to it.
WS: And the setting. How did you come up with the setting?
DA: Well, I grew up reading a lot of fantasy novels, and a lot of fantasy novels have their own system of magic. They explain how magic came into the world, how people can use this magic, and I really wanted to come up with an idea for my own, very original system of magic for Firefly Island. So I came up with this idea of an island where fireflies glow every night and magic comes to the world through these fireflies.
On the island, there are four different kingdoms. Each kingdom has its own color of fireflies and gets its own special magic. For example, one kingdom has golden fireflies, which let people read minds. Another kingdom has orange fireflies, which let the people who live there morph into animals and grow animal traits. So it was just, I thought, a cool kind of idea for a system of magic where everybody has magic in his world, not only a small group of wizards, but pretty much anyone can tap into the magic of these fireflies and use it.
WS: I love that. It’s wonderful imagery, and you can do so many things with it. Did you play around with a lot of different possible systems before you arrived at that one, or did this one just kind of come to you?
DA: I did play around with a lot of different ideas. It wasn’t an idea that existed in the first concept of the book. The very first concept that I had was the idea of this girl who is able to share her pain using her magic, and using this magic, she is essentially the only person who can save the world from this terrible tyrant whose body is made of stone and nobody else can hurt him. The fireflies kind of grew from that story, and as I kept building the world, that’s when I came up with the idea of having these different kingdoms, each with their own fireflies, each with their own magic.
WS: One of the issues that I’m very interested in at the moment is how fantasy writers introduce their worlds to readers, and in fact, last week, I did a show just on that topic looking at Lewis Carroll and J. R. R. Tolkien. I’m very interested in getting your take on that. How do you get us into the world so that we know its conventions and its characters and its rules without overwhelming us with, as Mick Halpin, one of our guest hosts, calls it, an information dump?
DA: Right. You definitely want to avoid an information dump where the writer explains a whole bunch of terms and a lot of details about the setting right away, where the writer is actually telling you, “This is how the world works,” at the expense of possibly describing the story itself. This was pretty easy to avoid with Firefly Island because at the beginning of the book, Aeolia, the main character, doesn’t really know a lot about the world. In the opening scene, we see her as a very young girl whose father is selling her into slavery. He sells her to an ogre because he can’t afford to feed both his children, so he’s forced to sell his youngest daughter. Aeolia grows up on the ogre’s remote farm, not really knowing much about Firefly Island, not knowing much about the magic or about how the world works. So as a reader when we’re reading this, we learn about the world as we keep reading, as Aeolia eventually learns more about the world. When the stone king begins to hunt her and she must escape and flee across Firefly Island, she really learns about the world chapter to chapter, and we learn about it with her as we go along.
WS: Did you struggle with this issue when you were mapping out the book or writing? I’ll ask you in a minute how you approached it, but did you struggle with it, or did it just sort of come naturally to you to introduce the world that way?
DA: I think that’s one of the things that I like about fantasy literature. I see fantasy books almost like travel books to imaginary worlds where you as a reader get to explore all these amazing locations that exist only in your imagination. So I really wanted Firefly Island to be that sort of book. You come into it; you’re reading chapter one; you don’t really know what the world is about, but you kind of take the journey with the characters. I very much wanted every chapter to be set in a different location, to describe a different setting on Firefly Island. So one chapter, for example, is set in a sort of medieval dungeon. Another chapter is set in a forest where mysterious forest people live in the branches of the trees. A third chapter is set somewhere else. So with every chapter you get to explore more and more of the world. And that’s really what I saw Firefly Island being like all the way from the beginning, almost like a travel book through this imaginary location.
WS: I love that idea, a travel book. That is wonderful. What were your influences in writing Firefly Island aside from the medieval fairy tales? Were there any other fantasy authors, for example?
DA: I grew up reading fantasy books, and I’ve always liked them. I think the first fantasy book that I read, I was probably about ten or eleven years old. I remember going to the library, and I think it was a book called Dragon Lands. It was actually a part of a series of books called the Dragon Lands books. I was ten years, maybe I was eleven. I saw the book in the library. I took it out from the library and brought it home, and that was really the first fantasy book that I had read. I don’t know if I can really point to just one or two that inspired me more than others. It was really a mix of a whole bunch of different people, not just reading fantasy books but watching fantasy movies, being inspired by fantasy artwork, and being inspired by other sources as well. I’ve always loved history. I’ve always been very interested in history. I’ve always loved reading history books, and I tried to base Firefly Island not only on fantasy stories but also on real world history, just studying battles that have occurred in history or conflicts that happened in history and trying to give the book that sort of authentic feel by basing it also on our real world too.
WS: Any particular battles or any particular historical events or periods?
DA: I don’t think that it’s based on one particular historical period or one particular historical conflict in general. If I had done so, then it would almost have become an analogy--the book, and I didn’t want it to be that. So I can’t really think, I can’t really pinpoint one time in history where this book derives its inspiration from. Also, because Firefly Island is very diverse, one kingdom kind of resembles medieval Europe, but another kingdom has a culture that is very different. It is almost similar to Native American culture. Every part of the island is a little different as well, so really you have a variety of inspirations.
WS: Before I ask you more questions, how about reading a little bit for us to give us the flavor?
DA: Okay. I can read a scene for you. I’ll set it up first. This scene happens when after fleeing the stone king across the island--the stone king is named Sinther-- Aeolia, the girl who can hurt him, is finally fighting back. She is leading a small army.
[He reads.]
This is a scene where Aeolia speaks to her soldiers from the Kingdom of Esire, preparing them for this battle.
[He reads.]
You asked me previously what historical periods influenced my writing, and as I read this scene, I realize that I was probably influenced by the campaign between Russia and France during the Napoleonic wars. This scene was kind of inspired by Russia initiating a scorched earth campaign to defend themselves from the invading French army, so that’s just an example of how this one particular scene was influenced by a specific battle in history.
WS: I’m so impressed by your success and your knowledge and your skill, and you’re so young. You’re still in your twenties.
DA: Yes, I’m 27.
WS: Right, and you don’t have a degree in writing--you have a degree in computer science--but you understand writing, obviously on a very deep level, and you just seem like such a remarkable person. I don’t quite know what I’m trying to say. I want to ask you how you managed to learn all this and do all this at such a young age.
DA: Well, first of all, thank you for the compliment, and I’m glad that you feel that I understand writing on a deep level, but I hope that you’re right. I grew up reading, and I’ve always been a bookworm. I’ve been living in Canada for the past few years, but I grew up in Israel, and back in those days, in the 1980s, there was only one TV channel in the country. It was black and white, and there wasn’t much on during the day, so really there wasn’t a great amount of distraction from TV. And I think that’s one reason why I ended up reading a lot of books and visiting the library very often and reading so many books from our local library. Probably also because I come from a family that reads a lot, and books have always been lying around the house, and my parents read a lot of books, so probably I just learned about story-telling by reading a lot of stories.
When I wrote Firefly Island, I wasn’t thinking back to any type of English class. Rather, I was writing the type of book that I like to read and the type of book that I would have wanted to read. You also mentioned my degree in computer science, which, of course, isn’t a degree that you would think has anything to do with writing, but when you think about it, actually there are similarities between programming and writing. A computer program has an algorithm the way that a novel has a plot, or a computer program has variables the way that a novel has characters, or it has its own type of complexity the way that a novel does. So in a way, when you’re writing a piece of computer software, it’s kind of like writing a story. So for sure, I would say that if anybody wants to learn how to write, you can just go and study computer science.
WS: I love that. That’s wonderful. Can you imagine a program that was turned into a story? Is that a possibility, or is that just ridiculous?
DA: Occasionally, you do see computer games turned into novels. I’ve seen that, so that’s kind of like that, isn’t it?
WS: Yeah, but those have stories. I was just wondering if you could take the structure of a program, or…I suppose vice versa would be more difficult, much more difficult.
DA: Yeah, it’s an interesting experiment.
WS: When you read the stories, did you read them in English, Hebrew, both?
DA: I grew up moving back and forth a lot between countries. My family moved a lot when I was a kid. By now, I’ve probably moved between countries four or five, six times, so my first years I did spend a lot of them in Israel, where I would read in Hebrew, but the family also spent some time living in Canada, and we spent some time living in the States. Whenever we lived in North America, I would read English books, so I grew up speaking both languages and reading in both languages as well.
WS: The books you read in Hebrew, were those Israeli fantasy writers, or were those just translations?
DA: There are not many Israeli fantasy writers. There are a few. There are a few Israeli fantasy books that I read and loved as a kid. There aren’t too many of them. Probably most of the fantasy books that I was reading as a kid living in Israel were translations into Hebrew.WS: Is there a difference in reading a story in Hebrew from reading it in English? Is there some change in meaning or in feeling?
DA: I don’t think so. I think the type of stories I like to write read are really about the story, about the plot, about the characters. The style of writing is obviously important, but that’s not what the story is about. So really, you can tell the story in any language, and it would have the same effect, so I don’t think it matters what language it’s in.
WS: Would you ever want to translate your work into Hebrew or any other fantasy novels into Hebrew?
DA: It would be fun if that happened. I don’t know if I would want to translate it myself, but it would be fun if somebody else wanted to translate it into Hebrew and have it published there. Currently, we don’t have any plans to do anything like that, but if it ever happened some day, obviously, that would be a lot of fun.
WS: Are a lot of people in Israel fantasy fans?
DA: I think that fantasy these days is popular everywhere in the world. It’s a genre that has really grown in the past few years with the success of the Lord of the Rings movies and the Harry Potter books and movies, so pretty much everywhere around the globe, people are reading fantasy. One of the great things about fantasy is that because it’s set in imaginary worlds, they aren’t usually set on planet Earth. It’s something that you can come from any country in the world and still relate to. I think that’s one big reason why fantasy is so popular in every country.
WS: I have a very strange question, and this is just something I’m completely ignorant about, so maybe you can help. It seems to me that a lot of fantasy stories have sort of a Christian background or a Christian mythology, and I’m wondering, first of all, is that true, and secondly, if it is true, how do people in Israel, most of whom are not Christian, relate to that? Or is my hypothesis just completely off?
DA: Well, probably the best example of a fantasy series with strong Christian elements is the Narnia books, so those definitely do have very strong Christian elements, but you don’t have to read the books from that point of view. You can read them on two levels. You can read them as an analogy to the Christian story, or you can just read them as a fantasy adventure. So even if you’re not looking for Christian meanings, you can still enjoy that type of book.
But in most cases where fantasy books are inspired by Christian stories, it is not that intense, and it is not that meaningful as it is in the Narnia books. If you look at Lord of the Rings, for example, you do see some of those Christian elements there, just the whole battle between good and evil. Gandalf is almost like a Christ figure sometimes, but again, you don’t have to read the books with that in mind. You can just read them as a fantasy story that everybody can relate to, and you know what? It’s not even about the religion. Sometimes you have a story that is just so powerful that it exists in religion, but the same story can exist in fiction as well, and just exist because it’s such a powerful and important story that people relate to, even if you’re not relating to it from a religious point of view. A lot of fantasy books don’t even have Christian elements in them. A lot of them are just based on fairy tales, or they’re based on history, and they don’t have any of that type of influence.
WS: One thing I always wonder about--names in fantasy novels, because they’re usually quite exotic. Do they cause confusion for readers because they’re unfamiliar, or do readers just adapt as they go along? I know that’s sort of a general question, but if you have any comments on the whole issue of the names, I would love to hear that.
DA: Well, if a writer uses too many of these fantasy-type terms or names too quickly, then, yeah, that can probably get confusing. Sometimes you see fantasy novels where right on the first page you encounter a dozen new terms, like the names of imaginary kingdoms or the names of monsters or types of magic and of course the character names. So if you have a type of book like that where you open it up and right on the first page you read about the kingdom of Azrock and the King Throng who must climb the mountain of Kuzraf to get the magical sort of whatever, you encounter a whole bunch of foreign terms, that probably can and will get confusing for a reader.
With Firefly Island, that was pretty easy to avoid because even though Firefly Island does have a rich setting, which is full of new cultures and new types of magic and a bunch of fantasy characters, you only learn about the book as you go along chapter by chapter, because again, Aeolia, the main character, starts out being so young and ignorant, so she herself is not familiar with the world or with its terminology. When you start reading, you just learn the names of a couple characters right off the bat, and that’s pretty much as many foreign terms as you encounter for the next few chapters. Also, I have fun inventing these fantasy names just because it’s fun, especially for character names, to come up with names that fit the character’s personality. The villain in Firefly Island is this king who magically turned himself into stone. His body and his heart all turned to stone, making his body invulnerable but also making him cruel and heartless, so I named this guy Sinther just because I thought the name Sinther sounds creepy. It almost sounds like slither, like a slithering snake. So I thought the name, the fantasy name, really let me find a name that fits his creepy nature. The main character, who has a magic to reach past Sinther’s stone skin, I named this girl Aeolia. Some readers actually found her name a bit difficult to pronounce, but I thought it’s a pretty name, it sounds kind of soothing, very mellow, has a lot of vowels to it, so it matched her personality.
WS: And of course, it means “wind.”
DA: That’s right. That’s where it comes from, the ancient Greek word, I think, for wind.
WS: Is there such a thing as a fantasy novel that doesn’t involve a quest?
DA: I think so, yeah. There are definitely novels that don’t follow the quest formula. For example, right now, I’m thinking of George R. Martin, who’s a brilliant writer who writes novels set in an imaginary world which kind of resembles medieval England. These novels are about a lot of warfare and about conflicts between kingdoms in this world, but they don’t really involve one particular quest. So yeah, you do see a lot of those books that don’t necessarily have the hero, the villain, and the quest, but they are a little bit different.
I personally like the quest story, and I’ve always liked it, which is why Firefly Island does have a quest to it, but to make Firefly Island original and to bring it to the next level, I tried to add a bunch of elements beyond just the simple quest of a girl who has to defeat this stone king. I also tried to make this story a very human story, so I gave Aeolia a whole bunch of other issues to deal with besides her quest. For example, she struggles to find her family, which she lost as a young child when she was sold into slavery, and she struggles to understand where she comes from and to help her friends when they get into trouble and to understand the world she lives in. So I tried to give a lot of different elements in addition to just the typical sort of fantasy quest.
WS: I have a question about writing fiction in general. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot and have no answer to. Maybe you can help. When is it right to introduce new characters into a novel? What is the latest that you can get away with introducing a new character?
DA: The only thing that I try to avoid with introducing new characters is introducing too many at once. I usually don’t like introducing more than one new character at a time just because I want to give every character my undivided attention when I’m writing about it. I want the reader to only encounter one character at a time so you can really learn about this character and what makes him or her tick. So really, I would only avoid introducing three or four characters in one chapter; that can get confusing. But if you really take the time to develop one character and introduce him or her properly, then I think it’s never too late. You can bring in new characters even late in the book if they serve an important purpose.
WS: When would you not want to introduce a character late in the story?
DA: I don’t think there are any rules. I think every story is unique. If your story needs to have a new character in the last chapter, you can do that. I can’t think of any examples where I’ve done that or any examples of stories that do, but I think it would be possible if it fits the story.
WS: Would it have to be a minor character, like somebody just there to perform a quick function? An example that comes to mind is mysteries where you certainly can’t have the murderer being introduced at the end where it’s someone no one’s ever heard of.
DA: Right. Usually, the main characters are introduced in the first few chapters. You have a main character, then they usually have a role to fulfill throughout the story from beginning to end. That’s something that makes openings different. Writing the opening few chapters is a very different experience from structuring the last few chapters, because in the first three or four or five chapters, that’s what you’re doing, you’re introducing the story, you’re introducing the characters, and you definitely do less of that as the novel keeps going. Once you have all your characters set up, you just let them play out the plot. So yeah, I would say it would be pretty rare to introduce an important main character late in the story, but it’s possible, and it can happen, especially if you have a sequel and that character becomes important to the next book.
WS: There are stories in which someone is talked about from the beginning and you don’t actually see them until the end.
DA: Right, but in that sense, the character already exists, even if you don’t see them. The character is there, and the character is an important character. I am thinking, for example, of the play “Hamlet.” As far as I recall, you don’t actually see Hamlet right at the beginning, but a lot of characters talk about him and set Hamlet up, so that’s a good example where people talk about the character before you actually get to meet him.
WS: Let’s talk a little bit about how you work. Do you outline everything in advance, or do you just start writing, or how do you form your story?
DA: I did outline Firefly Island quite extensively before I actually started writing the book. It started as a brief outline. It was only a few pages long and was based on a character that already existed in a short story that I wrote. I wrote the short story about the character. I soon realized that this character and this story need a lot more than just a short story; it probably deserves a book-length type of project, so I wrote the outline. The outline kept changing. I kept tweaking it and modifying it. It grew pretty large toward the end. By the time I started writing the book, this outline was almost fifty pages long, and it was very detailed. It really included details on every scene in the book. It even included important bits of dialogue in this outline. I really had to know the story very well, know where it was going, know how it ticked before I sat down and started typing away at the story itself.
WS: Did you experience your characters running away with you at all? Some people say, “My characters are getting out of control, and they want to do things I don’t want them to do.”
DA: When that happens, I think that’s a good thing. I try to reach that stage where it does happen because that means that your characters are well developed enough that they’re telling you where the story has to go because they know themselves so well. The characters know what they would do in this situation, and that makes the novel appear very realistic. It makes the characters be very realistic, because you’re not forcing them into the plot that you as an author need them to be in, but they’re writing their own story.
That happened in a sense in Firefly Island too. When I sat down and wrote the first draft, it came out pretty different from this very detailed outline that I had written previously, so even though I had planned the outline very carefully, the story itself, once I wrote it, took on its own life and developed as I was writing the draft and went through drafts after that. I’m very happy when that happens, if a character becomes such a real life-like person that he or she writes their own story, in a sense.
WS: Do you feel that maybe the next time you won’t do such a detailed outline because you expect your characters to run off, or will you do that again?
DA: I think that there will always be an outline. I don’t know how detailed it will be. I think it has to outline at least the important bits of the plot. I don’t know if my next book will have an outline that’s so detailed that it really drills down into individual scenes, but I think even if you write any type of outline, things will change as you write. And after you write the first draft, you’ll let your friends read it; then they’ll maybe make comments, and you’ll change things based on their comments. So draft two might look very different from draft one, and by the time you reach a final draft, it will probably be very different from the outline that you initially wrote.
WS: Tell us about how you got published. I’m always curious. And you have a wonderful publisher too.
DA: When I first finished writing Firefly Island, I didn’t know a lot about publishing, and I didn’t know a lot about the world. I wrote Firefly Island just for fun because I enjoyed writing it and because it’s the kind of book that I like to read as a reader. When I had this manuscript and I was thinking about publishing it, I didn’t know the names of any of the big editors that I should send this book to, so I kind of started to look into it. I had a couple offers from small publishers who wanted to buy the book, and I looked into these publishers. I was considering accepting their offer. I didn’t really like the way that these publishers worked, so I held out, and I didn’t sell Firefly Island right away. I waited until I found an offer from a good publisher that I thought was the right publisher for the book. So I was very happy when Thomson Gale decided to publish it, and they’ve done a great job so far, I think.
WS: Did you go through an agent?
DA: No. I sent the book directly to them, and they bought the book, and I didn’t need to use an agent.
WS: Wow. Do you think you’ll look for an agent now?
DA: I would probably want to finish my second book before I found an agent. I don’t think I would need an agent before I actually had a second manuscript which is ready to sell. A lot of writers only find agents once they have a contract they haven’t signed yet. You can get a big contract from a big publisher, and only then do you start looking for agents and shopping the book around, saying to people, “Look, I have this contract. I’m looking for an agent,” and that’s when you can really find the agent that’s right for you and the good type of agent that you need.
WS: I guess I’m a little confused. If you already have the contract, why would you need an agent then? I thought the agent helped you negotiate a good contract.
DA: Perhaps I shouldn’t say “contract” so much as “offer” because usually a publisher would go to an author and give them a certain contract, which is just the initial offer. Then an agent can look at that and get you an even better contract or improve its terms or get you a bigger advance or even shop the book around between different publishers, and that’s something that agents are very good at. But the really good agents are usually reluctant to work with authors who don’t already have an offer from a publisher. Sometimes, they do pick up new writers, even writers without any offers from publishers, but it’s definitely easier to find the right agent, and you can entice the right agent better if you have the contract on hand and you have the offer, the book is ready, and everything is set to go. I’m writing my second book now. We’ll see how it goes, and whenever it’s done, then I’ll take a look and see if I want to find an agent or sell it directly to the publishers. I still don’t know. Firefly Island was just released this summer, so I’m still busy working on Firefly Island and having fun with it. We’ll see what happens next.
WS: If a publisher gives you an offer, do they give you enough time to respond so you can run out and find the agent, or would it expire?
DA: No, you definitely have enough time. It’s not something that you have to sign right away. When I had the offer for Firefly Island, I wasn’t ready for an agent yet, but I definitely took some time. I looked at the contract and let some people read it, and I eventually came back to them. It seemed like a good offer, and it turned out to be a good offer, and it worked out really well.
WS: Wow. I just learned something I didn’t know. That’s great.
DA: It’s an interesting business, publishing, for sure.
WS: Yes, and changing rapidly.
DA: Right. I’m learning a lot about this business as I go along too, because I came into this not knowing a lot about it, so I’ve been learning a lot, too, from Firefly Island and just being involved with it now.
WS: What was it like working with your editor? Did they recommend a lot of changes, or did they accept most of what you had written the way it was, or what happened?
DA: My editor didn’t have too many changes that he asked for. He was pretty happy with the book as it was when I first submitted it, and this is a book that I had revised extensively, too, so I, myself, was able to catch most of the typos and the little mistakes just because I went over it a million times before sending it to my editor. He did have a few changes that he recommended, and we went over those changes, and we fixed a few small things, and then it went over to a second editor, a copy editor, who found a couple things that he wanted to change, but there weren’t any drastic changes. What you read is 99% of what I initially wrote before an editor ever looked at it.
WS: That is just fantastic. I love hearing a story like that. You don’t hear that very often.
DA: Yeah, I was very relieved because obviously I was worried that the editor would want to make a lot of changes to it and take the story in different directions, but he didn’t. He basically accepted it the way it was. Most of the changes were just a few words here and there.
WS: That is wonderful. There’s something I’m really interested to ask you about. Of course, everything I’ve asked you about I’m really interested in, but this is a little different, and that is that your readers can contribute their own illustrations to Firefly Island. Tell us about how you came up with the idea, and what can readers do if they want to do that?
DA: I don’t know how I came up with the idea, but I do know that I’ve always enjoyed painting and illustrating. It’s not something I do professionally, but it’s fun to do. I like to sometimes paint on my own. It’s something that is relaxing to do, and I have especially always liked fantasy art work. Even as a kid, I remember looking at fantasy art work, looking at fantasy books and being very impressed with the illustrations.
I was also very impressed with the cover art that Thomson Gale found for Firefly Island. I thought the artist did a great job, and I was very happy with the cover art for this book, too. So on my Web site, I do feature a few illustrations for Firefly Island. There is cover art, and there are a couple other illustrations there, as well. You can find the Web site at DanielArenson.com if you want to take a look. And you can find my email there, if you did want to send me any illustrations that you’ve done. I’d be happy to feature it on my site. I think it could be a lot of fun.
WS: That’s wonderful. I love that idea. Anything else you’d like to talk about today, Daniel?
DA: Unless you have any more particular questions, I just want to thank everybody for listening, and everybody who has read the book and enjoyed it, thank you as well. If you do want to learn more about it, you can visit my Web site, DanielArenson.com. There’s a free chapter, and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that you can do on the Web site, so I hope to see you there.
WS: Thank you so much for being with us today, Daniel. I have learned so much from talking with you. I’m very inspired.
DA: Thank you for having me.
© Paula Hollywood, Inc. 2008