A mild obsession with talking dragons in my fantasy books

Posted on October 25, 2018 (Subscribe to Blog)

Dragons have been a part of my life since before I was married 22 years ago. In fact, I actually made a dragon and used it on our wedding cake instead of the usual bride and groom figures. The same dragon was featured in our wedding invitations. Yes, my wife and I are nerds of the highest order.

Snap the Dragon

That dragon -- a cartoon character I created -- was imaginatively named Snap. I used to draw him everywhere, and then one day I started on a full-fledged comic strip like you might find in the "funnies" section of a newspaper. I was a huge Calvin and Hobbes fan, and Bill Watterson's artwork inspired me. You'll see a vague resemblance in the way I draw huge trees with shadow under them... but I'm nowhere near as good as Bill Watterson.

Snap and Calvin

By the way, two of my favorite quotes come from Calvin and Hobbes. The first is deep and profound:

The surest sign of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is that it hasn't tried to contact us.

The second is for procrastinators:

I've nearly started!

Most people quote the likes of Karl Marx and Einstein. I quote Calvin and Hobbes. I told you I was a nerd, didn't I?

Anyway, back to Snap the Dragon. So I drew a comic strip, then photocopied, folded, and stapled it. My very first book! You can see that comic book here...

Snap the Dragon Comic Click to view, then zoom in and read from left to right

I should add that the sentiment of the unfolding story (a dragon pining for his love!) reflected my real-life situation where I lived in England and my future wife lived in America. Long story short: We were pen pals, wrote for five years, finally met, got engaged, and then had to wait until we got our ducks in a row before she could join me in England. We were married shortly after, lived in England for five years, then moved to America in 2001.

Sometime before moving to the USA, I wrote a novel. I'd started novels before, but this was the first I'd actually finished. I was super-proud of my effort. I still have it, unpublished of course; it's called The Secret of Gromble Gorge, and it's a fantasy for middle-graders about a girl named Rebecca Tinklepott who discovers she has a frightening power. Think Stephen King's Carrie. Anyway, she bumps into a dragon and realizes she alone can communicate with it. I called the dragon Snap in this novel -- her witty name for him.

The story isn't bad. If I rewrote it today, I would of course ditch the name Snap, but I would probably ditch the dragon as well and make him something else, perhaps a griffin, just to be different.

There are some nice ideas in the book, including a chasm stretching from east to west, where the sea pours in at each end of the land. I admit the chasm idea came from Piers Anthony's Magic of Xanth series. However, in this book, when you fall into the chasm, you fall for a long time and eventually slow down until you're merely floating in a weightless void. This is the halfway point, where up is down and down is up. Those with wings can fly on through to the other side -- the underside -- because the world is flat, and the chasm goes all the way through. It's a great book for flat-world theorists. I was going to write a Book 2 following Rebecca's adventures on the "underside," but it never happened.

Here's an excerpt. The Word document suggests this was last edited on April 10th, 2005, but I actually wrote it a few years earlier than that...

The Secret of Gromble Gorge
"Now go!" the witch shouted, pointing urgently towards the chasm's edge. Rebecca repeated the instruction to Snap, but he needed no translation -- he took a few paces towards the chasm and leapt over the edge, seemingly with complete and utter faith in his new wings.
They plummeted. Rebecca screamed. Snap whooped, his wings beating furiously and Rebecca hanging on grimly as the whoosh of air threatened to flap her out of her perch. The noise of the sea increased, now joined by the rushing of air through her bristles, the beating of Snap's wings, and his yells of excitement. It seemed that they were plummeting for ages, downwards towards churning, rushing water that tumbled into the mist, and beyond the mist the blackness of the chasm. For a moment Rebecca thought that they might fall straight into the churning water, but those fears were replaced by fears that they would miss the water after all and plummet straight into the misty blackness, to be lost forever. But then she felt a shift in direction, and her stomach dropped. She felt herself plastered to her perch, getting heavier and heavier, as Snap began to level out. He seemed to be getting used to the way his wings were supposed to work, and while he was not beating quite so furiously, he was angling them a little differently and beginning to glide.
Stunned, Rebecca watched as they dropped below sea level. From this angle she could see a mountain of water, churning and frothing and steaming between the two walls of the chasm. Now the mists that always hung around the so-called bottom of the chasm blurred her view, and then she could see nothing but patches of gray. How was Snap going to be able to see where he was going? she wondered in fright. He might smash straight into the opposite side of the chasm! But Snap seemed more in control now, gently beating his wings in a thoughtful, more technical way that his previous frantic effort. He was mastering the art of flight.
The mist suddenly puffed out of existence. They had dropped below it! Snap was now leveling out and their descent was slowing, but they were still moving at an amazing pace, flying -- or at least gliding -- along the chasm. Rebecca began to breathe more easily. Perhaps this madness wasn't going to be the doom she feared. She looked up, amazed to see the mists above her, with daylight showing through some distance above. The chasm stretched out head of them, two dark walls of meandering rock topped with puffs of mist. Rebecca peered down over Snap's shoulder -- and frowned.
"Snap!" she called loudly, suddenly realizing that the roar of water was already far behind them and that the only sound now was the rush of air of her face and the steady beating of Snap's wings.

Hey, look, that's not bad for a first novel! One day I'll take another look at this old book and see what, if anything, I can salvage from it. It would be a total rewrite, but I do like the overall structure and most of the ideas.

It was after this book that I started Island of Fog. And there's that dragon again. You could say that Abigail plays the part of Rebecca; in fact, Abigail was originally going to be named Rebecca for that reason. The story is totally different, though. Many years later, I wrote Sinister Roots and used something similar to the chasm idea, where you fall into the earth and eventually slow until you're floating in a void...

I'm amused to find that Rebecca is a shapeshifter. She can turn into a... hedgehog! Yes, indeed. Hey, vampires turn into bats and nobody scoffs, so what's wrong with a girl turning into a hedgehog? I used to sign everything with a hedgehog doodle; it was my thing back in the day.

And speaking of our shapeshifting heroes, I've now finished my edit of Book 5 of the Island of Fog Legacies, Death Storm, which is due for release later in November. It's available right now on pre-order at a lower price than normal.

If anyone wants to beta read it, just email me at keith@unearthlytales.com and I'll shoot you a private copy before the end of October. No obligations or anything -- my hope is that you'll read it, make note of any typos, mention anything that needs mentioning, let me know what you thought, perhaps even review it on Amazon when it's released (which would be awesome and very helpful).

Or just pre-order it now to get the final, polished book when it's released on November 15th.

I also plan to release Death Storm as a double box set alongside Forest of Souls. That should be right around the same time.

Until then, I'm already thinking about my next project...

Comment by ARANTZA on Saturday, November 10, 2018...

Wow, what an amazing post! This pet drawing thing feels very familiar, my hubby still keeps drawing a Dino on every card he has to write. Have you ever thought of illustrating some of your books? Maybe the subject for another post...

By the way, I don't know if it's happened to any of your other subscribers, but I never got the email/notification for this one, I just happened to see it by chance when I went to visit your site. Glad I did now :-)

Comment by KEITH ROBINSON on Saturday, November 10, 2018...

Thank you! I always drew a hedgehog as part of my signature — the same hedgehog in the story. Sadly, I don't have much call to use a pen and paper anymore!

It doesn't surprise me that you didn't get the email notification. Sometimes, mail just goes missing. Check your spam and see if it's there? If so, make sure to whitelist me. But I've noticed once or twice your address shows up on my bounce list because your email service just refused to accept the email. Again, frustrating but hard to do anything about. For one reason or another, the open rate of emails is only about 27% on average. That's considered normal.

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