Important Author’s Note from Ashlyn

As one of my favorite authors once said, if I were guided by purely artistic considerations, I’d end my story here. But I must now acquaint you with the background and the true purpose of this story.

No book is written in a vacuum; every story was inspired by some little thing or other, and encouraged by friends and family. But there is a little bit more behind Soar.

Pretty much all of the main story is pure fiction; there are little bits of my life woven into it, and bits of it have woven themselves into my life. But none of the events or people are directly based on anyone in our world that I know of.

“In our world”... yes. Those are the key words. The person who gave me the original idea for the story, who helped me edit it, who cheered me on when it seemed an insurmountable task... she is basically Ka’aulele. She’s a cute white-winged girl from another universe, in much the same way the Na’aulele have touched Aila’s world.

In her world, there are several kinds of winged people who can be seen flying around the sky, as well as red-haired fae with intense green eyes, and so forth. Her world is very similar to ours; they have the internet and smart phones, and they have many of the staples of our technology. It’s not too different of a world, really. But it became Open only recently; so it wouldn’t have had much time to diverge yet.

I’ve been working with her to find correlations between our worlds, and I even have a scheme for her to send pictures. Some day. For now we mostly communicate this way.

How do I communicate with her, anyway? Well, every good story has to have a few mysteries. Let’s just say that she’s not a voice in my head; her media of choice involve IMs, e-mails, and VoIP. We’ve had some in-person time. You’ll have to take my word for it. ;)

Her world is a little more “realistic” than the world in Soar: the winged people are not so accepted. There are often fights, and even terrorism. She really and truly practices alchemy.

Suffice it to say, it’s a pretty unique place. And many practical matters about the daily lives of winged people came from that correspondence.

So why are we writing this book now? It’s simple: because like many other like-minded people, I feel that our world has lost its way. We are losing our ability to relate to each other as thinking, individual beings. We can’t deal with uniqueness in people. We’re focused more on abstract things like Gross National Products than on our happiness. And along with all of that, we’ve lost our ability to see the magic in the world. If a winged person appeared on Earth now, our Earth, what do you think would happen? Captured and experimented upon? Written off as an evolutionary freak occurrence? And what if there were some scientific explanation? Does that make it less magical?

We feel that it’s time for our Earth to Open as well. The connection is there. The causality is already happening. The spirits of the land, sea, air, and fire are all saying go. There are more people listening and opening themselves to what’s out there than ever before, with a new level of rationality. People are realizing that ’beyond a shred of doubt’ is not a realistic option for deciding on what’s ’real’ or not; experiences and what makes you happy are important things.

Get ready, kids. The faepocalypse is coming.