Where Did Lost Under Two Moons Come From?

Recently, I was speaking to a group of teenagers about writing and was asked where I got my ideas for my two published novels. While I've described the initial inspiration for The Beast Hunter in various online interviews before, I realized that I've never told the story of how I got the idea for Lost Under Two Moons.

The first inspiration for what would eventually become my first novel came to me during my freshman year in high school. I remember sitting in a particularly boring study hall and going through my backpack trying to find something to entertain me. In one of the pockets I found an unopened package of notecards, and with nothing else to do, I opened it and began to doodle.

I've never been much of an artist, but it didn't seem to matter on a 3 by 5 card that I could always throw away. I started with a random shape and then began adding little details to it. Soon, I had a strange, round little creature with two legs and a body that was little more than a head with gigantic eyes and a gaping mouth. At the time, I had no idea that this simple little pencil sketch would one day be my first major published antagonist, the bigamouth.

I started doing all kinds of sketches, one for each card in the package. Some were just doodles, but most ended up being weird little creatures. By the time I had twenty or thirty of the drawings, I started to think about some kind of story involving them. I even tried starting a novel about a world-hopping cryptozoologist, but it never got farther than the third page and I soon forgot about it to focus on a play I was working on for an upcoming performance.

It wasn't until I returned home from film school in Canada that I thought about those doodles again. I’d decided to give up trying to get into the film industry, and figured I’d try my hand at novel writing instead. I had a novel I’d been working on for years already, but after ten years of work I still had next to nothing to show for it. Dissatisfied, I tried to think of some other idea I may have had at one time or another that I could work on, and thus began work on what would ultimately become Lost Under Two Moons. It took me more than two years’ work, but eventually I had a finished, published novel that started with a doodle in a particularly boring study hall.



Thanks to Jerry Staton for suggesting this week’s article. Leave a comment below if you enjoyed it or have a suggestion for a future subject.