Dragons. Unicorns. Elves in the forest and wizards in the tower. I love classic fantasy as much as anyone, I grew up on it, but when I began writing The Magical Dumligo, I made myself a promise: I would not simply borrow the furniture of other people’s worlds. I wanted to build something that felt like it had never quite existed before.
That’s where the Dumligo came from.
At first glance, the Dumligo is a fairly ordinary-sounding fantasy creature: a three-horned animal, magical, loyal to the right kind of person. But I wasn’t interested in another sword-wielding hero riding into battle on the back of a beast. I wanted the beast itself to be the weapon, and I wanted that weapon to be invisible.
In the book, the Dumligo can transform into powerful weaponry that only the wielder and its enemy, the shapeshifting cyclops Terominus, can actually see. Everyone else, every reader, every islander, every innocent bystander, sees nothing at all. Just a battle fought with empty hands and impossible outcomes. I loved the idea that danger could be entirely real and entirely invisible at the same time, that the greatest weapon in the story is one you have to trust exists even when you can’t see it. There’s something almost emotional about that. Isn’t that how courage often works in real life, invisible to everyone except the person wielding it, and the thing they’re up against?
The orange-skinned islanders of Far-Ago Island came from a similar instinct. So many fantasy worlds default to familiar, faintly European aesthetics: stone castles, pale skin, gold crowns. I wanted Far-Ago Island to look and feel like nowhere else. So the islanders dye their skin orange and their hair golden-brown once a century, to mark their centennial year, a tradition so specific and so strange that Billy and Annie, my thirteen-year-old twins, must adopt it themselves just to move safely through the world. It’s not decoration. It’s survival, culture, and belonging, all painted onto skin.
I think the trick to writing fantasy that feels new isn’t to abandon the tropes readers love, the portal, the quest, the villain, but to ask an unexpected question of each one. What if the magical creature’s power was defensive, not offensive? What if the danger were something almost nobody could see? What if the ticket to belonging in a new world wasn’t a map or a spell, but a color?
I also think familiarity has its place. Readers need something to hold onto: the shape of a quest, the comfort of good triumphing over evil, the warmth of siblings supporting each other through fear. The Magical Dumligo keeps that scaffolding intentionally, because a story that is unfamiliar in every single way can feel cold rather than magical. What I tried to do instead was take a handful of very familiar bones and dress them in details nobody has quite seen before.
That, to me, is the real challenge of fantasy writing: not invention for its own sake, but invention in service of feeling. I didn’t want readers to be impressed by the Dumligo’s originality. I wanted them to feel the tension of an invisible fight, the strangeness of orange skin under moonlight, the thrill of stepping through a mist into somewhere entirely new, and somehow, entirely believable.
If a young reader finishes this book and looks twice at an ordinary shadow, wondering what might be standing just out of sight, I’ll know the Dumligo did exactly what I hoped it would.