Legacy follows a mysterious young man with an unknown past and his loyal friends, who is catapulted into a leadership role he doesn’t want and is unprepared for when his world is brought under attack from a brutal force beyond the stars. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I’ve always been fascinated by the image of people circling a fire or sitting around someone in a tavern—one voice holding everyone captive with a tale of heroes and distant wars. Today we gather around a screen instead of a campfire, but the need is the same: we want to lose ourselves in a story.

Dark’s journey truly begins when life unapologetically hits him hard. Suddenly, he is faced with challenges he never saw coming, things he couldn’t have planned for. It’s the origin story for many heroes of tales old and new.

I find the world you created in this novel brimming with possibilities. Where did the inspiration for the setting come from, and how did it change as you were writing?

I am a big fan of Japanese animation, Western comics and cartoons, RPGs, and world mythology. These things influenced my imagination when I was younger.  Characters and stories came to life as I played. To start off with I created a race of beings by fusing together three things that I was a fan of into one. After doing that, they needed a home, and so Utopia was created. I forget where I first heard of the word, but I liked how it sounded. Though my world Utopia definitely does not live up to the word’s meaning. It may be beautiful, but it’s far from a paradise. The stories that formed when I was a child remained with me. While writing the story it did have to change a bit here and there. Things that worked when I was younger, didn’t quite work as well now that I am older and more knowledgeable. Trying to figure out why this or that happens has been a challenge at times, when it didn’t matter how it happened when I was younger, it just did. That works sometimes but not all the time. In some ways the story grew even larger as I was writing it as new questions or problems with the logic of things popped up.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Adventure was a major theme for me. I enjoy exploring areas and walking along paths in the woods, at times veering off the trail. Going out for a drive and just going somewhere you’ve never been before.

Loneliness and self-doubt play a strong role as well. But to counter that is the theme of Love and Friendship. Love in its purest and most innocent form and the type of friendships that truly are unbreakable. The pillars one leans on when all else seems lost.

Where does the story go in the next book, and where do you see it going in the future?

In regards to where the story goes in the next book, to put it simply, to the stars. “Legacy” is the start of a series that is going to explore a vast universe. There are a lot of stories, worlds, and characters yet to be explored that are just dying to be told. Beyond that…my dream is that I am creating a series that can and will stand the test of time. The Legacy series will hopefully be a strong foundation to build upon for years to come. This isn’t just Dark’s legacy, it’s mine.

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