Today, we're doing something a little different. This is our 20th guest author interview on the Marie Lavender's Books! blog, and fellow author Alex Pilalis is visiting us.
Hello! :)
Hi. Thank you for having me today.
Oh, it's my pleasure!
Can you tell us a little bit about your book? When did it come out and where can we get it?
My novel, Island Legends: The Awakening of James Island, is the first book of an epic fantasy adventure series. Set in a galaxy filled with aliens and different planets, it is part science fiction, but more strongly geared towards high fantasy. I like to describe it sometimes, in a very broad sense, as a cross between Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I wanted to create worlds with different aliens and cultures, and also have my characters running around swinging swords and throwing magic, which I feel gives it a fairly unique tone. It is a serial book series, where each book tells the next part of a long journey. A bit like if the Lord of the Rings books were split up into ten or so parts instead of three big books.
Along with the fantasy genre tropes of magic and high adventure, it is also a Story of self-discovery, particularly for James, and seeks to delve deep into the human psyche to ask such questions as ‘what does it truly mean to know who we are?’ and ‘how important are our past memories for shaping who our present selves are?’ I like to think of it as a character study, inspired by the varied and flawed characters forced to survive together on the television series Lost, or the daily lives of the intricate characters in Mad Men.
The novel was published by Solstice Publishing on January 15th 2016 (time perfectly with my second niece’s first birthday!), and is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback formats.
Interesting!
So, did anything prompt this book? Something that inspired you?
So, did anything prompt this book? Something that inspired you?
I first had the idea of the character of James Island somewhere around twenty years ago, actually. It sounds very cliché but I had a very quick image flash in my mind one morning when I was waking up – of a group of characters on a pirate ship. I drew the image that day (I drew everything back then) and had the name ‘James Island’ for the main character in my head. I started developing the adventures of James Island as a computer game concept, and to this day have amassed hundreds of A4 pages, several filled notepads, dozens of Word documents and even its own Wiki, collecting all the ideas and images of the world as it progressed and became what it is today.
Being a big science fiction and fantasy fan, and heavily inspired by classic adventure stories such as The Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars films and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I felt a great urge to tell my own story. The narrative that has become The Awakening of James Island is partially based off of the Heroes Journey (although most stories are) and maintains some of its computer game concept origins, in the sense of a group of characters going on a long and dangerous journey in the vein of a Final Fantasy RPG game. Spending many summer holidays visiting family in Cyprus, I’ve drawn on my experiences there to help shape the world that James Island lives in, forming a culture and lifestyle of a race of desert people similar to a Mediterranean culture, from a skewed fantasy perspective.
It was around ten years ago that I actually started writing the story as a novel – writing very on and off, some years with zero words – until I finally completed it at the end of 2014, having written it pretty much on my own, with little training or knowledge of how to actually write well. I uploaded the chapters onto Wattpad shortly after I discovered the site, and gained invaluable feedback on the writing and story. Through lots of rewriting and polishing, and finding that it still needed A LOT more work, I came across a Copy Editor named Melissa Manes, who looked over the chapters, giving the novel its first professional touch. Through my own edits and with Melissa’s great advice, the final edit removed about 10,000 words to the original manuscript, while still keeping the same story and character development – that’s the power of editing!
That's great!
So, when did you know you wanted to write? Or has it always been a pastime of yours?
