skip to main skip to sidebar
Monday, November 2, 2009
Dragons
Creatures of myth. Creatures of dreams or even nightmares. Tales of dragons are found in many cultures. Dragons of the air, the earth or the sea. All types of dragons have been imagined by men. Dragons sitting on their hoards of jewels. Dragons breathing fire to destroy towns. Dragons being hunted by valiant knights to rescue maidens or safe towns. Magic beasts. Ones engineered by science. Dragons who help and dragons who harm.
Dragons have many faces as shown in stories penned by authors.I've read many of the tales of dragons and have a number of stories on my shelves or in my ereader. Among my favorite are the dragons of Pern. Dragons who were engineered for a specific purpose. Yjamks to Anne McCaffrey for many hours of fun. Another of my favorites is Temeraire, a fighting dragon and the hero of a series of books in an alternate world by Naomi Novik. There are probably a dozen or more other dragons and writers who have brought their creatures to life.
On the shelf above my computer is a dragon collection, including one made by my oldest grandson by chance when he was doing splatter art in nursery school. There are cloth dragons, glass dragons, pens and lamps. I'm not sure the menagerie inspire me to keep writing but they have influenced two of my stories.The Dragons of Fyre is the story of dragons threatened by an evil man who sells their hides to the wizards of Fyre. A yellow dragon, the Old One, a green dragon, Verde aid the hero and heroine as they battle to save the dragons. These dragons are magical creatures but they do not flame. Their riders either physically fly on they or fly the dragons during a mind meld.
The Amber Dragon is a novella that will be released next year. Here a spoiled princess is turned into a dragon by an evil magician. To become human again, she must entice a prince to kiss her. Problem is, she has insulted all the princes in the surrounding kingdoms. She does encounter a prince transported from another world to hers. The story revolves around her attempts to gain her kiss and the prince's quest for a kingdom.
So tell me about your favorite dragons, either the ones you've read about or the ones whose stories you've told.
The Eclectic Writer is about writing and the things that effect a writer. About my books and those of others.
8 comments:
I have always loved the tune to Puff the Magic Dragon (no matter sub-culture message was apparently implanted!) ;>
Reading Pern was like popping Reese's bits when I was a kid and I gobbled the first books down, but no dragon beats Temeraire. Naomi Novik has drawn a more fully-dimensional character, with more depth, voice! and evolving character arc than most human characters you happen to meet.
From the moment Temeraire hatched on board Laurence's ship, speaking, bonding with Capt. Laurence and both ruining and enriching his life, becoming an avid reader and living to learn, from his babyhood, through adolescence and his silliness and petty jealousies over glittering baubles and such, to his steps into dragon civil rights and Napoleonic War politics -- through the moment he convinces Laurence that committing an act of treason was the right and reasonable thing to do -- I've been hooked every step along this journey.
I totally love Temeraire.
That was me. I didn't mean to be "anonymous." I can't totally figure this out. -- Terri
Terri, I knew it was you. Janet
Movies - Dragonheart / The Never Ending Story / Reign of Fire
Janet and I are rivals in our collections of dragons, but she's quite a bit ahead of me. Most of mine are green, so I finally chose my favorite one, who has amethyst eyes and wrote a story about him. It's The third book in my Temple Of Time series at NCP and possibly my favorite of the series. I love being surprised and when I started the book I had no idea why the wizard gave the heroine two amethysts when they both had to run for their lives. The dragon came from the first story, but I had no notion at the time that he'd become the hero of the third book. Writers are constantly being surprised by their characteres--and I'm no exception. Dragons--you gotta love 'em.
I love dragons. I have several dragon pendants and a beautiful blue ceramic dragon figurine nearly a foot tall that I've had for over 20 years. (His name's George. LOL)
I ended up writing about dragon shifters ("Boiling Point," writing as Tymber Dalton) when I was invited to be part of a special anthology. Since then, that one short story has evolved into a world not only of its own, but one that has merged with my wolf shifters of my Triple Trouble series in a way I totally didn't expect. LOL
Darn those willful characters anyway. *G*
I think dragons are neat. They represent a lot of different things, good and bad, depending on the culture they evolved from. (I prefer the good dragons myself. LOL)
What's even cooler is we have a lot of those little brown anole lizards all over our yard, and they love to get in the windowsills, so at any given time I can look out my window by where I work and see a "miniature dragon" sitting there sunning itself.
Hi there,
I never meant to write about dragons. To me they were sort of like unicorns-creatures that just hadn't ever captured my imagination. But I guess they were there all along. I was writing a story about a musician who could sing visions and had been thrown into prison without knowing why. As I started defining his world - and trying to figure out why he had been made captive at the height of his fame - the dragons showed up. They made his world terrible. These were not sweet, clever, or comfortable dragons, but tightly controlled, extremely dangerous weapons of war... Or, well, as it turns out... Ahem...my hero has to go looking for one...and makes some discoveries...maybe there is more, but they are not at all humans with wings and bad breath!
Well, anyway, Song of the Beast is the name of the book. And by the time I finished, dragons had taken on a much more definite mystique. I find I'm looking for them everywhere - and my favorite piece of "writerly jewelry" is the dragon I hunted for years until I found just the right wings...
Cheers!
Carol Berg
Post a Comment