One current project is drawing me back through the past projects in developing dragon history across my world and fantasy series and it’s fun looking at how the concepts have developed. There are plenty of optional dragon histories I could draw upon, some seen as lore by advocates of history or writers or games. I’ve chosen to create my own and this blog is really to show an aspect of the thinking involved behind what is now five fantasy series (17 novels).
 
At the centre of my fantasy works is a magical substance the characters refer to as amber because of its colour. It’s not amber as we traditionally know it, but a highly energised crystal structure capable of transferring thought into energy, matter and action. It’s the ‘wild magic’ of my writing and it originates from extraordinary meteorites that crashed into the planet at the time the Elvenaar were dominant.
 
The Elvenaar discovered one meteorite which became known as the Genesis Stone – gecyndboc stan – because it was the source of powerful Elvenaar magic. Over time, the Elvenaar, among many activities, used the amber to morph small lizards into magical flying pets they called the Alfyn – meredragons. The Alfyn surprised the Elvenaar in that the transformation also gave the little creatures high intelligence and empathy and made them amenable companions. In return, the Elvenaar made the Alfyn the protectors of the Genesis Stone.
 
The Elvenaar then experimented on giant forest lizards until they developed protodragons. Over more time and mutations that involved implanting shards of the amber in the protodragons, the Elvenaar created the first flying, fire-breathing dragons and used them in their wars with humans – Eyano – who were growing in number and aggressively encroaching on Elvenaar land, although it was disease, not war, that eventually led to the demise of the Elvenaar populations. The dying Elvenaar Lorekeepers entrusted the ongoing protection of the Genesis Stone to the Alfyn.
 
As a final and desperate response to the human expansion, five Elvenaar brothers embedded amber shards in themselves to become the Dragonlords – dracabrego – and they used the magic and the brutally powerful dragons to dominate their domains, until humans also learned about the Genesis Stone amber and forged fragments of it into magical weapons that they used against the Dragonlords and their dragons. The death of the final Dragonlord led to the release of the dragons into the wild.
 
No longer controlled by the Elvenaar, the dragons survived by a combination of their wits and terror, hunting and killing animals and humans, making them dangerous to humans for a long period of history. At the same time, the dragons grew in intelligence and understanding as they bred and proliferated, and, with self-actuation, they learned their history and recognised why the Genesis Stone was central to their existence, and why they needed it to expand their population and ensure their descendants were as magically powerful.

Creating characters is always a fun activity, but it’s fraught with critical attention and some of that criticism is ironically annoying when it is used to disparage the work. For example, I’ve read and heard so many criticisms of authors’ works based on their characters being stereotypes. By definition, a stereotype is “a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing” (various dictionary sources, 2023). You can think of plenty of examples, some of them sexist, racist, bigoted, ignorant, ageist and on and on: the character of a particular gender who falls in love too easily, the driver of a specific age, gender and origin country, the individuals whose skin hue and language identifies them as potential housebreakers, a specific gender that is prone to violence – all fall into the character stereotype list.
 
I do want to deconstruct stereotype versus flat characters first. While, by definition, stereotypes can produce an oversimplified character I position that aspect of the definition as being the basis for defining a flat character, not a stereotype. A flat character has no depth, no complexity. Flat characters exist to contextualise a story, but seldom exist to engage readers. At best, they are unfinished or simple sketches. By contrast, I believe a stereotypical character can have significant complexity, even insofar as that complexity still being an example of prejudice or profiling.

This morning I received an email from a reader who enjoyed the Andrakis series way back when. In his words, “A Ahmud Ki…I remember… as the most fascinatingly complex character of any story I read in my childhood,” followed by his satisfaction that he can source the books online for his children. You can imagine that an email like that has made my day.