Daniel Sherrier

Comic books made me do it. Well, they made me feel like I needed to create my own super-heroes and write their adventures. At age nine, I was writing and drawing my own homemade, very terrible comic books, and by middle school I had pretty much given up on drawing. I never figured out how to stop writing, and I kept branching out to other forms, like books, plays, and screenplays.

With Earths in Space, I basically mixed some of my favorite things and put my own twist on it. The cast dynamic is similar to that of a super-hero team -- they all have their special skills and colorful personalities. It's a pretty tight group that can facilitate all sorts of fun pairings, but no one is super-powered here. They're almost like a Star Trek crew without any of the random red-shirted officers who get killed every episode. The series shows a love of exploration similar to what we see in Doctor Who, though EIS has no time-travel or aliens. In fact, I initially pictured the lead character, Amena, as a sort of female Doctor, in part, though after writing I realized that another character, the mega-genius Sela, has at least equal claim to that title, probably more as the series progresses.

With RIP, I had this random idea: "What if a person had to physically beat up ghosts?" But the series didn't take shape until I thought of the good ghost Serissa, a lively dead girl who's trying really hard to earn a place in Heaven, even though she doesn't know for a fact such a place exists. And she can't touch anyone except Rip, with whom she forms a sort of intimate yet strictly platonic friendship. She's slowly going bonkers but persevering anyway. Because of her, I knew I had a series.