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So, I said I would take the yammering about dragons to a post in my own journal (as opposed to the comments of someone else's journal).
Terry Pratchett has a theory about human mythology, that it is turtles all the way down. There are a lot of how-the-world-was-created myths which involve turtles, and a number of cultures have at one point or another believed that the world is carried on the back of a turtle or tortoise.
For me, it's dragons all the way down. I started reading stories about dragons at some point in grade school. I'm pretty sure one of the earliest things I read was Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, consisting of Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling on Dragons, and Talking to Dragons. I still have my battered paperback copies, although I like the covers on the library's hardcover copies better.
Then I read everything my small library had with dragons in the children's section. During middle school, I got access to a new library, and discovered Ann McCaffrey. I'd already read Jane Yolen's Pit Dragon series (it was in the children's/j section for some reason, while McCaffrey was in the YA section).
In sixth grade (middle school started at 7th, so this was before Pern), I wrote what I considered a novel (about 80 typewritten pages, single spaced) about a girl who went through a portal in our world and ended up in a fantasy kingdom which she happened to be the long-lost princess of. Yes, I was twelve. There were dragons, and in order to drive off the evil guy trying to take over the kingdom she had to hike into the mountains and find the dragons and ask for their help. There was a boy living with one of the dragons, in a cave. Again, I was twelve.
I read this out loud to my entire sixth grade class, and to one of the second grade classes, when the teacher heard about it. I thought I was so cool. And of course, I was going to be an author when I grew up.
In eighth grade we had to make a magazine as an English project. We could pick any topic we wanted, but we had to design a cover, write a letter from the editor, a short story, a book review, and an ad. I picked dragons, of course. Then I had the problem that all the dragon books I knew of I had already read. The teacher insisted that we had to read a new book for this. So I went to the library and ran a subject search. I came up with two books I had not read with the subject of dragons. One was Terry Pratchett's Strata, which turned out to barely have dragons in it (which won it a less-than-enthusiastic review from FLAME magazine), and Douglass Adams' Last Chance to See, which is the funniest book I have ever read about endangered species (the dragons were komodo dragons). I wrote a story about a girl finding dragon eggs, which is in an entirely different setting than the first one, an ad for a dragon BBQ service (dragon shows up to BBQ your food, not the other way around), and included both book reviews.
The dragons were dormant for a while, though I continued to read fantasy and the occasional book with more dragons. Then I had this assignment in grad school - write up the mission, goals, and vision statements for a library (real or imaginary). Clearly, this needed to be more fun, so as in eighth grade, I added dragons.
THAT idea stuck around. A couple of years after the assignment, it was still kicking around in my head, and I decided to try to write a novel. I've tried this before - I have the beginnings of two other novels on my hard drive. But this one actually made it past ten chapters. It's not done, even over a year later. But its dragons, which is not a surprise to anyone who knows me.
Dragons. All the way down.
Terry Pratchett has a theory about human mythology, that it is turtles all the way down. There are a lot of how-the-world-was-created myths which involve turtles, and a number of cultures have at one point or another believed that the world is carried on the back of a turtle or tortoise.
For me, it's dragons all the way down. I started reading stories about dragons at some point in grade school. I'm pretty sure one of the earliest things I read was Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles, consisting of Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons, Calling on Dragons, and Talking to Dragons. I still have my battered paperback copies, although I like the covers on the library's hardcover copies better.
Then I read everything my small library had with dragons in the children's section. During middle school, I got access to a new library, and discovered Ann McCaffrey. I'd already read Jane Yolen's Pit Dragon series (it was in the children's/j section for some reason, while McCaffrey was in the YA section).
In sixth grade (middle school started at 7th, so this was before Pern), I wrote what I considered a novel (about 80 typewritten pages, single spaced) about a girl who went through a portal in our world and ended up in a fantasy kingdom which she happened to be the long-lost princess of. Yes, I was twelve. There were dragons, and in order to drive off the evil guy trying to take over the kingdom she had to hike into the mountains and find the dragons and ask for their help. There was a boy living with one of the dragons, in a cave. Again, I was twelve.
I read this out loud to my entire sixth grade class, and to one of the second grade classes, when the teacher heard about it. I thought I was so cool. And of course, I was going to be an author when I grew up.
In eighth grade we had to make a magazine as an English project. We could pick any topic we wanted, but we had to design a cover, write a letter from the editor, a short story, a book review, and an ad. I picked dragons, of course. Then I had the problem that all the dragon books I knew of I had already read. The teacher insisted that we had to read a new book for this. So I went to the library and ran a subject search. I came up with two books I had not read with the subject of dragons. One was Terry Pratchett's Strata, which turned out to barely have dragons in it (which won it a less-than-enthusiastic review from FLAME magazine), and Douglass Adams' Last Chance to See, which is the funniest book I have ever read about endangered species (the dragons were komodo dragons). I wrote a story about a girl finding dragon eggs, which is in an entirely different setting than the first one, an ad for a dragon BBQ service (dragon shows up to BBQ your food, not the other way around), and included both book reviews.
The dragons were dormant for a while, though I continued to read fantasy and the occasional book with more dragons. Then I had this assignment in grad school - write up the mission, goals, and vision statements for a library (real or imaginary). Clearly, this needed to be more fun, so as in eighth grade, I added dragons.
THAT idea stuck around. A couple of years after the assignment, it was still kicking around in my head, and I decided to try to write a novel. I've tried this before - I have the beginnings of two other novels on my hard drive. But this one actually made it past ten chapters. It's not done, even over a year later. But its dragons, which is not a surprise to anyone who knows me.
Dragons. All the way down.
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