Dawn Chronicles: Legacy - The Beginning

Ever since I was a young boy, I always dreamed of being a novel writer and a comic book artist.  Some people dream of being rich, of being a big football star, or of being a famous actor.  I dreamt of writing stories and drawing pictures.  That was what I fell in love with and ultimately wanted to do with my life.

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.