{"id":1089,"date":"2011-03-07T09:22:54","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T15:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1089"},"modified":"2011-03-07T09:22:54","modified_gmt":"2011-03-07T15:22:54","slug":"dragons-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1089","title":{"rendered":"Dragons, Etc."},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the topics UK Editor suggested for a blog post for the Orbit Books site<\/a> was “favorite fantasy dragons” with a lead-in to Kings of the North.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Those of you around in the great burgeoning of SF\/F in the late 1960s and 1970s will remember that “dragons” were fairly common.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some belonged to older mythologies\u00a0 and some had been softened and tamed and made almost bland.<\/p>\n

But at the time I was writing the original Paks story-that-became-a-book and didn’t stop there,\u00a0 I “knew” (in the way writers do know) that my fantasy world contained dragons in principle, but that they would not be active in the story.\u00a0 It wasn’t about dragons.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So I put them in the past and shut the door on them.<\/p>\n

In five long books (counting the Gird & Luap books)\u00a0 dragons were merely legend.\u00a0 I did write part of a short story in which a dragon appeared, but it died.\u00a0\u00a0 Gird was at the Battle of Blackbone Hill, and Blackbone Hill was part of the legend of dragons, but no dragons or sign of them appeared.\u00a0 So fine…no dragons.\u00a0 Only the memory of dragons, the legends of dragons and the marvelous Camwyn Dragonmaster in his gold armor with his gleaming sword.\u00a0\u00a0 Children were named for\u00a0 Camwyn whose parents and grandparents for generations had never seen so much as a single scale of dragon or whiff of dragon-smoke.\u00a0\u00a0 Everyone knew that once there had been dragons, and now there weren’t (thanks to Camwyn) so telling tales of dragons was perfectly safe.<\/p>\n

Then came the invitation to write a\u00a0 story for The Dragon Quintet<\/em>, edited by Marvin Kaye.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The question of dragon reproduction had occurred to me years before (not how other people’s dragons reproduced, but how the Paksworld dragons had done it)\u00a0 and so, in a story-time set before Gird, and a story called “Judgment,”\u00a0 a naive young man going home to the village with his future father-in-law finds a dragon egg lying there untended.\u00a0\u00a0 And then another one.<\/p>\n

That dragon was not quite what I expected.\u00a0\u00a0 Still, that was then, and (in that universe) safely some considerable distance in the past.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This was not a story-world in which dragons (without specific invitation and a contract urging me on) were going to turn up in the book.\u00a0 The books already had “a gracious plenty,” as a friend of my mother’s used to say, of creatures and complications.\u00a0\u00a0 We didn’t need no steenkin’ dragons.<\/p>\n

Dragons, however, are not obedient to human planning.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I was happily galloping along in the late autumn, the last months, of Kings’<\/em> chronology, when the nature of something mentioned by someone I’d never seen before became clear to me–because I’d seen it before, in “Judgment.”\u00a0\u00a0 The sputtering of “But-but-but…!!” in my brain should’ve been audible to any telepath within a light year. \u00a0\u00a0 And the next thing I knew, there was a dragon in the book.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And I was a very nervous writer…because in common thought, a fantasy book with a dragon in it is a very different book from the same one without a dragon in it and–to many people–less worthy.\u00a0 Especially if written by a woman.<\/p>\n

I mentioned to Editor that a dragon had come into the book.\u00a0\u00a0 “Oh, great,” said Editor.\u00a0 “I love dragons.”\u00a0\u00a0 No chance of evicting dragon after that, even if dragon had not, in the meantime, dug claws into the story’s structure and begun to merge with it.\u00a0 Plot daemon was cackling with glee.<\/p>\n

So now you know.\u00a0 There is a dragon in this book.\u00a0\u00a0 And the next…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the topics UK Editor suggested for a blog post for the Orbit Books site was “favorite fantasy dragons” with a lead-in to Kings of the North.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Those of you around in the great burgeoning of SF\/F in the late 1960s and 1970s will remember that “dragons” were fairly common.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some belonged to older […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,81,5],"tags":[22,106,31,107],"class_list":["post-1089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contents","category-kings-of-the-north","category-the-writing-life","tag-characters","tag-contents","tag-the-book-business","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1089"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1089"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1090,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1089\/revisions\/1090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}