Go ahead, ask me about dragons!

I've been working on Blue Fire Dragon for a while now. I have 22 chapters, which I think is very good progress, but now I'm getting into some heavy dragon lore sections.

What do they eat?
How do they breath fire?
What is their physiology?
Do they have spikes and horns?
How long do they live?
Are they telepathic?
Do dragons have two feet and a pair of wings/arms, or four feet and wings for a total of 6 appendages?
Do I want to go with Flight of Dragons where they eat limestone and Thor's Thimble lights the spark, or do I go with Reign of Fire and the dragon spits two chemicals that react together to make natural napalm?

Now, I could go the easy route and mimic past writers. While doing internet research, I have found that many people like the "Dragons of Pern" series. No, not "like;" they worship it! These people think they were dragonriders in another life. That shows a very talented writer, to have such a fanatic following. However, I'm decidedly avoiding reading any of those books until after I'm done with this novel. I'm restricting my reading to the classics and serious studies of dragon anatomy (if they really existed, they would have to be hollow boned, else they would never get off the ground, and the wingspan would be massive and involve huge wing muscles, leaving little physical room for the idea that they had four legs plus wings, and dragons themselves would be much smaller than the knights of yore claimed, frickin baggarts!)

I'm stretching out to a variety of cultures: Japanese, European, Russian, Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Babylonian. If they had a big lizard, I've read the legends. Wyverns, wyrms, drakes, ouroboros, amphipter, the lindworm, naga, cockatrice, basilisks, you name it!

After all this studying, I'm left with a dragon that I hope is unique, bit of a blend of numerous legends with my own twists. Kismet (my dragon) is a cute little guy right now, two swooped back horns on his head (for aerodynamics) with eye ridges (like eyebrows, but bone) and protective horns over his spit glands (two lumps on the corners of his mouth, as many dragons are described having). He has two legs and a pair of wings, a "wyvern" style apparently, but I was thinking a bit more like raptors with wings. For dang fierce chickens! I wanted to keep the physicality to a dinosaur style, and although my husband wants me to change it to four legs and wings, physically this works better. Something like a swan meets a bat and breeds with a lizard. Uh, yeah.

The fun part was coming up with a unique yet physically plausible way of flaming. Dragons in my story use a mix of gastrointestinal fumes (smelly burps) and the spit glands which ignite upon contact with oxygen and is intensified by the gas.

I'll scan in my concept drawing later. I'm no artist, but it helps me get an idea of what I want. Lots of playing around with the design.

Dune Inspirations

I've drawn a total blank in writing Shadowstrider. I took a bit of a chance, thought I'd try my hand at a scene with a sort of James Bond feel to it. Actually, it's a bit more like "Splinter Cell" in the whole sneak in and don't get caught idea, not the suave libertine like Bond who comes in dressed to kill and introduces himself to every pretty girl in the room. Anyway, I decided to makes this the finale of Book Seven, got it set up real great, even wrote an outline, and I never use outlines. Then as I started up writing and... blank!!! Just blank. I haven't been able to write more than a couple paragraphs since the New Year.

I need some sort of escape from all the depressing crap going on in my family, so I've switched to a story I haven't worked on in years, a nice little dragon fantasy. I'm hoping it cheers me up and gets me through this block on my main project.

However, this story has heavy Middle Eastern influences. The setting is a desert planet, very Dune-esque. Most of the characters have Arabic, Jewish, or Persian names with a few African, Indian, Turkish, Albanian, Japanese, and even Swedish influences throughout. Things like food and fashion are all desert style, with abayas and salwar-kameez and dupattas and keffiyehs and eating baba ghanoush and drinking qawah. Very fun to write.

Now my husband is wondering why the hell I'm looking up all this Arabic information. He raises an eyebrow every time I start mentioning about Islam and various beliefs and traditions I find interesting and try incorporating into the story. He's worried that too much obvious Middle Eastern themes will hurt the book by drawing heating attacks, both from the Muslim community who may think I'm mocking them, and from Muslim haters who will think I'm a terrorist supporter or something. I'm left wondering why I can't give a nod to Frank Herbert without it becoming a political issue.

I may post an excerpt in a couple days. One thing about my story that goes against the "traditional" dragon lore yet follows the more modern assumptions about dragon physicality: my dragons are vegans! Wohoo!!!