I’m sure if I did some serious detective work I could figure out when exactly I wrote the first chapter of Jirale, but one thing I do know is that it must have been during Grade 10 (2000-2001) and a period of time (maybe as long as a year, but perhaps no more than a couple months) passed before Kat attached herself to the project and I began work on the rest of the story.
Let me be absolutely clear about something. I never would have gotten past chapter one without Kat. There are no if and or buts about this. If Kat hadn’t offered to start drawing Jirale it simply would have faded away as something I plan to finish one day, instead of becoming the main obsession of my life. However, the first chapter I did manage on my own, so let’s go back to that for a minute.
The idea for Jirale had been bouncing around in my head for awhile, and I had tried once or twice to start it (including a rather embarrassing attempt to tell the story with stick-figure in lieu of a real artist), but I never really had the inspiration to dive in – until I had an Escaflowne marathon with my older sits Sonya. To give you an idea of what Escaflowne is, here’s a fan-made music video:
I took a lot from Escaflowne. I don’t mean I took characters or story from it, but I definitely stole the devices it used for story-telling. The constant use of dreams and ghosts is something that comes up again and again in my own novel. I think the action/gore is also similar. The tone and a lot of the visuals really stand out to me as I re-watch this anime. The flying ship, the katanas, Hitomi’s crystal, the young man with angel wings, a lot of it showed up consciously or unconsciously in Jirale.
And yeah, the two biggest inspirations for this story involve mechas, and yet not a single mecha is anywhere to be found in my own novel. Of course, the other thing influencing how I wrote Jirale was this:
Basically, how I started my “career” as a writer was way back in elementary school. I would take notes on games I played with my friends. I would draw maps, invent languages, maths, write out family trees. I would write pages and pages on background stuff. In junior high I kept doing this, and in lieu of acting out this stuff with friends (which is still socially acceptable when you’re in Grade 6), I would begin to write short mythologies from these worlds. It wasn’t until I got into Tolkien that I realized I could apply my love of inventing worlds with a proper narration, a novel if you will. Writing Jirale coincided with The Lord of the Rings trilogy coming to film, so it was front and centre in my mind when I started writing it, meaning once Kat said she’d draw the comic, I got really excited and created more background information than I knew what to do with… and maybe I’ll write about that another day, when I’m not so drowsy on oxycodone.
Horometry 