We were lucky enough to interview author Alane Adams at C2E2 about the origins of her new Legends of Orkney series, how she created the world’s hybrid mythology, and the creation of BattleKasters (the exciting mobile game that accompanies the series).

Alane Adams is the brilliant mind behind the upcoming Legends of Orkney series. The first book, The Red Sun, introduces Sam, a seemingly normal 12-year-old kid. However, when his friends are kidnapped and taken through a portal to Orkney, a distant realm, Sam embarks on the biggest adventure of his life. He has to choose between saving his friends and saving Orkney from a terrible, sun-poisoning curse that could destroy them all.

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The inspiration for ‘The Legends of Orkney’

Alane Adams didn’t have to look far for inspiration. “My son, when he was 12, said, ‘Mom, you should write me a book that I can read,'” Adams recalls fondly. She decided then to create a series about a 12-year-old boy and started asking her son questions about what he liked and what he would like to read about.

From there, Adams dove into creating the world of the book. “[My son’s] favorite series was the Rick Riordan Percy Jackson series,” Adams explains, “and so I looked at it and said, ‘Rick, darling, you stole all of the good Greek gods so let me try a different approach here.'” She looked beyond Greek and Roman mythology and instead settled on Norse mythology because it has a lot of interesting elements to it, including the almighty Odin and the Yggdrasil tree. Of course, one of the things people always ask Adams is if she included Thor, to which she responds, “[Chris] Hemsworth ruined it! He’s so gorgeous! How could you ever top that? So, no Thor in my stories.” Fair enough!

Making Norse mythology her own

After settling on Norse mythology, Adams then went to work on giving it her own kind of spin. She focused on using the mythology in new ways as well as connecting it with other mythologies and supernatural tales. While vampires and other creatures have been done before, Adams realized she hadn’t seen all that much on witches. More specifically, she had never really encountered boy witches.

“We always think of warlocks [when we think of males and witchcraft],” Adams explains. “So I came up with this idea that, in my story, there were no male witches because Odin had cursed [witches] never to have sons.” Why? Because the last male witch was so incredibly evil and selfish that he cursed the sun because he wanted to be more powerful than a god. It’s this idea of male witches that not only gives the story an interesting sort of hybrid mythology and feel to it, but that also sets the tale’s events in motion.

In addition to writing new versions of mythological figures like Odin and creating a new sort of mythology, she adapted actual locations (that have a history in myth) for her story. Her magical realm of Orkney is based on the Orkney Islands that exist off of the coast of Scotland. They’re rich in Norse mythology as well as Arthurian tales and some witch mythology.

Adams wanted to have elements in her book that are grounded in reality while also fantastic in some way. Before Sam even learns about Orkney, we begin his story in his hometown of Pilot Rock, Oregon. Pilot Rock is notable for a giant boulder that’s actually a compass rock (or beacon). When settlers came across it on the Oregon trail, they would either turn left to get to California or go right to go to Oregon. So then, when coming up with the story, it made sense to have that rock become a portal to travel between the realms.

Sam’s ‘dark side’ origins

Believe it or not, Sam’s character rose from Adams’ son’s love of Anakin Skywalker. “It’s really interesting,” Adams explains, “because my son is the sweetest boy in the world but he loves Star Wars. He loves Anakin. He loves movie three when he goes full on to the Dark Side.” Villains and flawed people are the kinds of characters her son gravitates toward. With this in mind, Adams created Sam as a character with anger issues and a “real dark core to him” but who also wants to do the right thing.

Sam’s anger stems from his father abandoning him and his mother, as well as constantly being lied to. He’s a good guy, but he’s trapped in this decision to either save his friends or a world he doesn’t feel a connection to. His predicament, of course, worsens his anger, but his anger affects more than just himself. As Alane Adams describes it, “Every time he loses his temper, the sun gets worse… and it kills the fish, kills the animals, and just spreads a poison over the land.”

The arc of the story has Sam going to and returning from the dark side of himself. The first book is all about discovery, the second is about his journey to the dark side, and the third is where he really gets to fix things he’s done wrong and deal with the consequences of his actions by just moving forward. It’s the hero’s journey. Alane sums up Sam’s journey best with the idea, “We have to go through the things we go through to get to the place [we were meant to be],” which is something she wanted to get across in her writing.
 
Continue to page 2 to read all about BattleKasters, the other part of Alane Adams’ multi-platform Legends of Orkney experience!

How BattleKasters came to life

As she has mentioned previously, Alane Adams’ son is one of the biggest inspirations for the Orkney universe. After finishing the books she wrote for him, Adams noticed that her son, now 15-years-old, constantly walks around playing games on his phone all day. When she started looking at the meta data driving traffic to her book and her site, something clicked that made her realize a digital mobile experience would be a great way to draw people to her story and this new world she has created.

“As I was developing the series, this idea for developing the game kind of came out of that and I said, ‘Why not?'” Adams recalls. The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to develop a mobile game where kids could learn about the world, get curious about the characters, engage in the story, and then want to read the book. She’s tried coming at kids from so many angles to get them to read, but when they hear there’s a game for this series and they see the artwork for it, they’re into it. “My goal,” she says, “is to get them to read the book cover to cover, and then the next book and the next book.” The game is a way of enticing people who don’t normally enjoy reading to pick up the book.

Adams was driven to get going on the idea of a mobile game from the start. “I met with a lot of game designers and I settled on Artifact because of their unique group of talent,” she says. She can’t praise Artifact enough for their vision and understanding of her idea. Artifact’s most notable team member is Brent Friedman, who is known for his work on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the Halo 4 story, as well as his affinity for storytelling and world-building.

Brent and his team have gone through the book and picked out the elements that gave the biggest picture of the story as well as the most interesting images. Alane deferred to their opinions and trusted them to bring the world to life. “So far, I haven’t been disappointed in anything,” she says happily. In fact, their rendering of the Yggdrasil tree especially made her say, “I want that!”

How the game will draw people to the book

While BattleKasters does make some sense if you haven’t read the book, you won’t get the full experience without doing so. In fact, you can answer some questions without reading The Red Sun, but others are harder to do so unless you constantly guess.

The beauty of the game, though, is that the questions are provocative enough that they drive people to want to pick up the book. For instance, they could get a question like, “What kind of creature is this?” and, though they won’t know the answer, the drawings of the creature are so interesting it will drive the player to want to find out more. Putting in wisdom questions like that really help get people interested in the full story.

Another way the game attempts to draw players to the book is by using actual images and characters from the story. Adams explains, “The cards in the game introduce the characters so you kind of know them a little bit and get familiar with them… and it helps build the imagination.” It’s that imagination and mystique that drives people to want more and hook them.

Did the game in any way effect the way that Adams was writing the book?

Though it was created after the first draft of The Red Sun, BattleKasters did have a bit of an impact on Alane Adams’ writing. As she puts it, “The game development simply prompted a bigger look at the book.” After finishing the first draft and spending some time thinking about the game’s creation, she went back and added more perspectives, more points of view, and more scenes so that all of the characters could really come to life in the story. Both the game and Brent Friedman helped her to open up the world and develop each of the characters, not just the main character.

“The game helped me expand the point of view,” Adams says. “It didn’t change it; it just opened it up and made it more diverse so that the readers could engage with more characters.” When you’re in the point of view of one character, you don’t really see a lot of what’s going on with the characters around them. You only see what that one character sees and experiences. Multiple points of view allow the story to breathe a lot more life into other characters that play larger roles in books two and three.

So what’s next?

“As soon as I finished [the first book],” Adams recalls, “you can guess the first thing my son said to me: ‘When are you going to write the next one?'” Her son liked it so much that he read it in just three days! So, she sat down and finished the other two books in the trilogy. After that, she wasn’t planning on writing any more for the series. But, after a year, the urge started to return. Currently, she has the next three books plotted out.

As for the upcoming trilogy, Alane quips, “If I had my way I’d just print them all out right now!” Alas, she (and the rest of us) have to wait a year between each book. Alane and her publisher are editing the second book right now and are eagerly awaiting The Red Sun to come out.

To find out more about The Red Sun and the exciting upcoming BattleKasters game, be sure to visit Alane Adams’ website and LegendsofOrkney.com.

‘The Red Sun’ hits bookshelves everywhere this August, so make sure to pick up a copy!

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