July 27, 2022

Post-flu and dragons

Another long break between blog entries – health has been challenging this year between Covid and now the flu. Nevertheless, Harmi’s Song has grown to 28,000 words, meaning it’s probably close to a third of the way in.
 
The more exciting news is that I submitted my official resignation letter a fortnight ago, nominating December 23 as my last official workday at Concordia College. Slightly more than three years ago, I was preparing to leave, but several issues prevented that happening, but this time there’s no going back. That will conclude twenty-three years at the one school – something I thought I would never do – and forty-five years as an educator. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was standing in front of my first class at Stuart High School in 1978. Time.
 
Writing from the dragon’s perspective continues to be challenging, insomuch as she is a character in her right rationalising her relationships with humans. The presence of her antagonist adds to her dilemma as to how she should or could act and why she would do what she is doing.
 
Dragons have featured in my overall worldview across the previous three fantasy series and also in an as yet unfinished series that is waiting for me to return to.
 
Introduced in the Andrakis Trilogy, dragons were represented as chaotic magical beasts either controlled by Dragonlords or reduced to predatory and dangerous creatures. However, sitting behind the view was emerging lore that dragons were originally large flightless forest lizards who were magically and genetically manipulated by the Dragonlords, using the latent magic from the amber Genesis Stone. By the end of the Andrakis series, the dragons are released on the world.
 
In the Ashuak Chronicles, set a millennium after the Andrakis tale, the dragons have achieved self-actualisation through the power of the amber stones and are plotting to establish their rule, using the Ashuak priests as their pawns (the humans think they control the dragons), but their plans are thwarted when they are portalled away from the Andrakis/Ashuak regions.
 
Hence, in the Dreaming in Amber books, dragons do not appear as that tale is set in the regions from which dragons were banished. Meg and A Ahmud Ki face the remnants of a far more ancient power – the Demon Horsemen; ghosts of the Dragonlords.
 
For The Last Wizard series, set in time between Ashuak and Amber periods, the fate of some dragons that survived the Andrakis era is revealed in that they form bonds with wizards, much as the Ashuak priests tried to initiate in a different part of the world. But the wizards and dragons’ united power is feared by humans who ruthlessly hunt them down and kill them, leaving, it seemed, only Eric and Claryssa as the sole surviving dragon and wizard pair. Tam, however, inherits Eric and Claryssa’s dragon egg and ultimately their power and the series grows from there.
 
The missing link is the unfinished series – loosely labelled as the Dragon Queen series for now: it will need a different title – where the fate of the dragons portalled out of Ashua is revealed as they seek revenge.
 
Back to the writing –