Dawn Chronicles began as a short story titled Twilight in 2005. The original idea was something straight out of a horror movie: A woman alone in an empty building at night has to fend off a supernatural creature. The creature in this scenario was a werewolf, a monster that I've always felt was heavily underrepresented in a lot of modern entertainment (probably because it's a bit simpler to throw some makeup and a pair of fangs on someone than it is to create a functional full-body werewolf suit).
Twilight was intended as a single piece, but I later wrote another short story that functioned as a semi-sequel to it called Dusk, which upped the stakes as it revolved around a group of people trapped in a building during a blizzard with a clan of werewolves attempting to get in. Both Dusk and Twilight would later be integrated into the Dawn Chronicles book, albeit in altered forms.
It was after I wrote Dusk that the idea of expanding the universe created within those two tales into a novel came to me. Laurel Dawn would be the central figure in the story. At its birth, the book was simply titled Legacy. However, before I decided to publish it, I changed it to Dawn Chronicles: Legacy to keep the series together once future installments were published.
That was just the starting point. The next challenge would be developing a compelling antagonist to carry a full book. I believe in duality and opposing forces and that for every up must be a down. If the Dawn family was going to be poised as the "good" set of werewolves, then there needed to be a "bad" set as well. Enter the creation of the Lobos family, a complex group that I will elaborate on in my next post.
