What is Dragonlines?
Dragonlines is the first in a series of urban fantasy novels--supernatural spy thrillers--that follow the escapades of Anglo-Indian spy Felicity Whitehall and the ghost of her grandfather, Crispin Whitehall. While I have story sketches for at least seven books, Dragonlines takes place relatively early in Felicity's career: she's twenty-eight, has been a spy for about four years, and has established herself as a competent and valued member of her intelligence organization, a small, super-secret organization within the British government known only as "the Kennel."
When I originally created Felicity, I very much wanted her to be the antithesis of James Bond. I love Bond movies, and have a special fondness for the books, but there's much about the character that is exceedingly problematic to a 21st century audience. Where Bond is chauvinistic, I had to have a character who was a woman, and whose peers would not even remark on the fact that she's a woman (although I do address this sentiment in a flashback to a certain degree). Where Bond was a casual racist (probably due to when the books and early movies were made rather than an intrinsic quality in the character), I wanted to have a person of color in the role of the super spy. I also wanted her to not use her real name for her spy craft--which always felt so strange to me. This is a little less tropey in the Bond novels, and in a couple of the early movies he uses an alias for a short time, but they actively ignore the fact his name is like the most famous name in the world to the spy community 99% of the time. Felicity spends most of Dragonlines undercover in China, using the alias Matrika Devaki.
From these starting points, Felicity's character grew organically: what if she was Desi, as in half-Indian and half-Caucasian? What if her grandfather was actually a previous head of the Kennel, during the Cold War, and still haunted her, trying to guide her into what his view of British power meant, rather than what hers might mean as a child of two cultures?
My inspiration to use a ghost as the primary supernatural element comes from my mother's family. All of the women in my family are exceedingly long-lived; I knew my great great grandmother, and my great grandmother helped raise me, often staying with use for months at a time when I was a child (she died in her 90s when I was 20 or so). These grandmothers (and my great aunt Ida) would tell me stories of strange and supernatural things. They believed in psychics, aliens, and ghosts. They'd lived through hardships like the Great Depression and World Wars. Their stories inspired me to write my own. So I wanted Felicity to have a very specific interaction with her heritage, one similar to my own.
The image below is an illustration done for Felicity when she was in her infancy, for a version of the character that I played in a Shadowrun game. Art by my talented friend Matt Clarke. She's changed a bit since then, but I'm still enamored of this drawing.