*Reposted from 2016
My travels have been a big source of inspiration for my fiction. I was living in New Zealand when I first had the idea that inspired Airwoman. So it should come as no surprise that the world-building for my novel has been influenced by this amazingly beautiful country.
In our first house in Auckland, New Zealand, from our dining room window we looked out onto Auckland Harbour. Rising up out of the middle of the harbour is a volcano—Rangitoto.
Rangitoto has a typical volcano shape and is covered by thick vegetation. It is an imposing presence on the harbour and makes it a beautiful and unique place to visit. In the two years we lived in New Zealand, I never tired of looking out over the water towards the amazing view of Rangitoto.
Rangitoto is a young volcano, dormant but not inactive. Maori legends tell of the appearance of Rangitoto about 800 years ago. A Volcano Room in the Auckland Museum provides an audio-visual experience of what it would be like if Rangitoto erupted. My kids loved visiting the Volcano Room—every time we visited the Museum (many, many times), we watched Rangitoto erupt again.
Rangitoto is absolutely beautiful in the harbour and living in such close proximity to a volcano must have seeped into my subconscious because, as I was world-building Taraqa and the Dragonverse, I knew there would be an active volcano rising out of the sea.
And so Mt. Reve was born!
It should come as no surprise that the world-building for my novel has been influenced by this amazingly beautiful country
I visited Rotorua several times when we lived in Auckland. Rotorua is renowned for its adventure sports and is a great place to go if you like mountain biking, hiking, parasailing, stand-up paddle boarding, riding the luge, a zipline, or the ZORB, and many more besides. It also boasts of many natural hot springs and is a great place to go for a little self-indulgence.
New Zealand is situated on two tectonic plates–the Pacific and the Australian–and these plates are constantly moving and pushing against each other, giving New Zealand lots of geological activity, including geothermic activity. Rotorua is one such geothermic area. It is renowned for the geysers and bubbling mud pools. It’s also renowned for the sulphur smell.
The geological instability of the whole area intrigued me and, on the drive home from a weekend in Rotorua, I had the idea that geological instability would be a sign of nearby weakness in the barriers (or portals) between worlds. Places like Rotorua—awash with geological instability—was a sign that a portal to another world would be nearby. It was awhile before this idea took seed in the world-building for the Dragonverse but, in Airwoman, you will see that several features of geological and geothermic instability in the worlds Jade visits.
Want to know more about the inspiration behind Airwoman? Send me your questions in the comments.