Introduction
Invisible Moon was actually my first novel, completed prior to Festival of Bones. It was quickly written, a bit too short, and very nervy—but it was also pretty good. The scene transitions were very similar to those I’d written in my StarChild comics, and some of the dialogue had parallel echoes as well; but what this meant was I was learning and mastering my craft. I was using the tools I’d developed as a graphic novelist to successfully transition to prose, and doing so with just enough wide-eyed innocence to keep the traits that make a beginner’s work interesting.
There are still rough spots (to me), and parts I wish could have been better written. But the earnestness of the story comes though, especially with some of the characters. Where they began and where they ended up are separated by a huge amount of learning on the author’s part—and they could not have been written any other way.
This book is also the origin of Silvertown, which in most of my biographies has been listed as the town I live in, even though there is, in fact, no such place. The place in the book was physically based on my actual hometown in Arizona, even though I set it along the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York. I wrote what I knew—and in the process, ended up including some of my friends and contemporaries as background characters.
The names of most of them have been changed to protect the innocent—or the guilty, as it were—with a few exceptions that I’ve been permitted to keep. Glen and Delna are real and cherished friends—and among those least likely to turn into trolls. And Oly was definitely real, and mean as all-get-out. He was a dog along my paper route, and is the reason I learned how to use Mace. Still, as a character, he was, and is, unforgettable—which is why I included him, even though almost every bit of dialogue he has contains a swear word. But it’s okay—it’s always the same one. Dogs are nothing if not consistent.
A number of the references Hjerald discovers in Chapter 5, which in the story were gleaned from several different books, actually came from one source:
http://theunexplainedmysteries.com/barbarians.html.
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