Risa Aratyr

Author's Notes

I have always told hero tales. When I was young, I told them to myself, acting them out on the playground or in my bedroom at night, when I was supposed to be asleep. When I grew too old to get away with public displays of phantom swordplay and old enough to be sharing my bed, my “overactive” fantasy life became a “secret” fantasy life--but the storytelling never stopped.

At the age of 33 and pregnant with my second child, my secret story of the moment was an arena-style combat adventure--basically, a slug-fest involving an ever-escalating number of opponents and an ever-changing variety of weapons. The fights were complex; I kept losing count. How many arrows had my hero loosed? How many bad guys had tumbled off the cliff? The only way to keep track was to take pen to paper, and write it all down.

Over the next few months, as my hand-scrawled notes and tallies evolved into a derivative, but full-blown trunk novel, another story-idea took hold of me. By the time my son was born, I knew the tale of The Hunter of Éirinn (my original title) from beginning to end. I also knew I couldn’t write it. My brief, self-indulgent foray into fiction had taken its toll on my family. I’d neglected the house, meals, laundry, and sleep, and neglected my husband and daughter, as well. If the experience had taught me how to write, it had also taught me that novel-writing was its own special brand of obessive-compulsive disorder, and highly addictive. How could I consider immersing myself in another book when I had “real” work pending, a home to manage, and an infant at my breast?

My resolve to keep Hunter on the back burner lasted all of three months. I had written and sold two family-oriented articles and was in the midst of a third, when the compulsion grew too strong to resist. I began sneaking onto the computer when no one was around, sometimes pecking at the keyboard with one hand, because the other was attached to an arm that was holding a baby. In the snatches of time that my son condescended to nap, I started building the world where the Hunter’s tale could unfold, constructing it from bits and pieces of nature, prehistory, folklore, fairy tales, legends, myths, songs, poems, and dreams.

While a work-in-progress, The Hunter of Éirinn was embraced by members of the erstwhile writers’ group, the Melville Nine, notably by James Killus, Joel Richards, Janet Berliner, Robert Fleck, and most notably by Dave Smeds, who created the map and championed the book among his peers and publishing contacts. Christopher Schelling, my editor at HarperPrism, showed enormous respect for my work by leaving it intact. The publishers asked for only one change; the marketing department wanted the Gaelic deleted from the title--hence, Hunter of the Light.

I requested one change, also. The Stag in the original cover art bore a marked resemblance to the dog in Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, down to its drab coloring and the pathetic rack of twigs on its head. Someday I’ll see if I can scan the illustration and post it on this site. True, the final cover artwork makes the Stag look more like a cuddly stuffed animal than the divine and dangerous embodiment of all the light in the world--but compared to the original, it’s a masterpiece.

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