The inspiration.

Flight. It has fascinated Mankind since his dawn. What is it about the sky that obsesses us? That causes us to gaze upward for untold hours of our lives, dreaming of the clouds?

The Skyboarders series began one dusty California summer when the temperature was too hot to stay inside. I was about ten years old. Wandering the cracked sun-scorched asphalt of my neighborhood I looked up across a shimmering golden field full of dead oat grass to see the cool tops of eucalyptus trees waving against a profound blue sky.

Suddenly I could see it all: Skyboarders on their sleek minimalist steeds weaving through the heavy summer breeze, against the burning clouds, wending their way lazily through the air effortless. Landing on their treetop platforms that those like me, the ground-based peasants, could never reach.

Not without a Skyboard.

The stories developed over the next twenty years in leaps and bounds, each visit to the Valley of Karr filling out the mysterious blank spaces on the map until I had traveled almost the entire tiny nation from top to bottom. From the dense giant forests of Treetop City to the rumpled golden plains of the Northvalley, to the serene blue of the Litz Lake and down, through the jumbled ruins of Southside and the ragged Ridgewall, the radiation-scorched Keldlands, to the dangerous jungles of Atcratta and Centercity.

I met Blazecubes and mercenaries, criminal Grapplers and Sirra-star celebrities. And I wrote it all down.

This is the entire story of the last days before the Great Emperor, before the All-Valley War, before the Valley of Karr was almost destroyed. These are the people who fought to save the Valley, and who became legends in their own time.

Making the Valley

The Skyboarders story is probably my favorite out of all the stories I’ve written over the years. And it remains the favorite of everyone I know who has read a good number of my stories. We can’t talk about the Skyboarders stories without smiling. Something about the Skyboarders world is just elemental, an eternal summertime capturing a moment of forever childhood.

I wrote a variety of half-hearted attempts to capture the world of the Valley of Karr over the years, starting with a little story about Aleen, the first Blazecube. Stories are funny this way, they have a life of their own; the story writes the book, not the other way around. As soon as I began to write that first little story about Aleen, it crackled like fireworks. I’d hit a livewire; something about the story just felt real.

It kept happening. Every time I’d write something set in the Valley of Karr, it would turn out to be my best writing yet. Check out the first page of my second Skyboarders story, about a ladder-dueler star named Railen, penned at the age of 14 (I wrote this instead of doing homework).

It wasn’t long before the heat woke her up. The summer sun was at its apex, and the day was wasting. She threw away the sheet which had wound itself around her legs, and stood groggily on the floor, pieces of cracked tile breaking underfoot. She stretched lethargically, then glanced once into the scratched and mottled mirror. It was a whole one, a prized commodity.

She drew on her cut off shorts which were nearly too small for her and buttoned them down the sides. She tucked the many -pocketed shirt in and buckled the belt and pouch on which held many of her various treasures. She then stepped into her overlarge old hardened sandals, hand made, and took two steps to cross the slanted room.

She peered out the dirty, clouded glass at the street three stories below. It looked normal, troops of kids heading this way or that, the local graffiti artist at work on the wall, two little ones sitting on old crates in the shade eating lunch. She yanked on the door, then again when it stuck. It banged and rattled open, the breeze of its passing wafting across her sweaty face. A couple of ‘boarders flew past overhead, shouting to each other.

She stepped out onto the rickety sheet metal landing, heat radiating through the thin sandals immediately. She slammed the door behind her and descended the long hot ladder to the street below. She again surveyed her surroundings, and turned right, toward the nearest food dome. The children stared at her as she passed; to them she was old. She was sixteen.

It was humid and hot, heavy and still. In fact, it was close to ninety-seven degrees farinheight, but she wasn’t aware of this fact. She hadn’t ever learned to read well, and temperature gauges of any kind were rare. She simply knew that it was a good hot day for a swim at the lake, and a long afternoon rest to wait out the worst of the heat. After that perhaps she could meet her friends down at Jaffin’ Gamix, the hottest spot on the Litz Line.

The place leapt out at me from the page. I could feel it, I could smell it, there was an odd rhythmic beat to it. I squinted as I wrote it; it was as if the glare of the sun was coming right out at me from the lined school-paper I was scribbling on.

The dream stuck, and I could never quite leave Skyboarders behind. It seemed like almost every year I would add something to the Valley of Karr: another castle, another House or Pack, the pageantry of the All-Valley Games, pages of Skyboarder Lingo, the notes went on and on. Skycasting. The Gypsies. The Empire. It wasn’t until recently however that my co-author and I (my sister Shannon Biggs) finally sat down and got serious with the Skyboarders.

We had a massive strike of inspiration hit us that lasted three days. I don’t remember eating or sleeping, we just wrote down notes day and night, into the next day. Until our hands were aching from writing. Until we had to stop because we physically couldn’t go on anymore.

During that mega-download of inspiration, we hammered out the notes for no less than eleven full-length books that would comprise the main story arc for the Skyboarders series, from the day we meet Tarek to the beginning of the All-Valley War. To finish the series to the end of the War, we’ll probably add two or three more books to that number.

Why so many books? Because we have so much detail, even just following a small handful of characters it’s impossible not to explore the many-layered history, culture, politics, and geography of the Valley of Karr. The plotline is driving, exploding into action and doesn’t lag, but there is a lot to tell. Even a fast plot is going to stretch on when we have to build a plot that turns out as big as this one.

We don’t write books for people who don’t like to read. Personally, if I like a story, I want it to go on for at least three books, maybe more. Usually an author can’t sustain a plot that long, fizzling out after the first book and getting progressively more boring with each following one. We don’t have that problem. I’d say we have the opposite problem: the further we get into the story, the more intense the plot gets, the more twists there are, the more we have invested into our favorite characters, and the more danger there is that a favorite character isn’t going to make it.

Well, after we’d gotten the plot worked out into rough notes, it was time to sit down and write, this time starting with an enigmatic character named Tarek. Again, when I started this time, it just sizzled out of the computer screen…

The grasses of the Northern plains sped by at over eighty miles per hour, an undulating sea of wild wheat and barley toasted by the summer sun. Day had just vanished over the top of the Western mountains, painting the sky with furious colors of fire dimming to bruises.

They ‘boarded like a group of hornets in black: a rangy, wild band of twenty-one who had fought together, bled together, eaten the same crummy food together for nearly four years.

In the lead was Tarek. He had no other name. He was a child of the glare pits, a scavenger who had learned to fight with bare knuckles over scraps of bread dropped in Glare City by the patrollers. He’d grown up like an animal in a zoo where all the animals were kept in the same cage. The wildness of his past could still be seen in his eyes, which were golden-hazel, the same color as the sun scorched fields. A long jagged scar ran across his face from forehead to cheek and his uncut sun-bleached hair whipped behind him in snarls and tangles, never combed and ragged to hang down in his face. His jaw was forever set in a determined line of anger.

At his side was Jarvis. She had no other name because she wouldn’t tell it. Her white-blonde peroxide hair was shorn on the sides of her head to within a half-inch of her skull, the top spiked up to just over an inch. She wore silver mirrored goggles, and had tattooed the Jelka pack symbol down the right side of her face. She wasn’t beautiful, but she didn’t care. Every day she silently lifted her body in pull-ups and worked out brutally until she had larger muscles than Tarek, her official man, and could trounce anyone who challenged her.

She rode a medium-weight battleboard that the famous old hermit ‘boardmaker Charlie had custom-made for her, white on one side and black on the other with a jagged line down the center. It flashed with chrome battle-racks and its name was scrawled in red across the bottom: “Paine.”

She ‘boarded like she didn’t care: right arm trailing, loose, left foot leading, slouched back to let Paine carry her. Tarek ‘boarded like he was constantly at war: forehead-first, eyes on the target, body curled forward with his arms at the ready to grab the handle of the aluminum bat that he kept in a sheath on his back. They were reman and rella, a matched set that had ‘boarded together for six years, ever since Tarek had saved Jarvis from a gang of thugs.

Now it was usually she that saved him.

Tarek and his rella, Jarvis, came roaring out of the page. Jelka Base, a place I’d grown complacently familiar with, came to life as I’d never seen it. The torches in the night, glittering like a thousand stars about to die. The red-orange smear of the sunset. I could smell the sour odor of Glare City on the wind, the cold bite of darkness.

The story began at a gallop, and never slowed pace. I have scenes written for this story that even give me chills, and I wrote the thing! Of course, with a story like this, even the author doesn’t know exactly what is going to happen in a scene or what the characters are going to do, because these characters are rocket propelled fully developed personalities. They have their own will, and the author had better just let them do their thing and get out of their way.

Of course, as much as I love it, I’m sure there’s good parts and not so good parts. Still, a story has to be taken as a whole; and as a whole, Skyboarders rocks. Of course, I’m saying that myself… don’t take my word for it, read the first episode and see what you think about it.

Human beings have always dreamt of flight; not by airplane or glider, but some kind of elemental flight with a constant danger of falling. A flight based on skill, balance, poise, power. A flight where it’s just one mistake away from what the Skyboarders would call a jello-maker.

Movies can’t give us this. It takes a book, because a book is raw; it’s words taking control of our soul, with nothing to shield us from the experience. We go inside the words like we can never do with any other media, we live someone else’s life. Skyboarders teach us to fly.

About the Authors

This About page is dedicated to the Skyboarders story itself. If you would like to get to know the BiggsBooks authors and read more about the people who created the story, please visit their Authors pages at: http://www.biggsbooks.net/authors.html.