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Current Projects: A Dragon in Her Lair
For the last couple years, I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to contribute to the anthologies published by Zombies Need Brains each year. Well, they’ve kicked off their 10 year anniversary with another set of anthologies and, once again, you’ll find my work in their pages. What’s my topic this year? Well, I’m really excited because it is one of my favorite subjects:
Dragons!
Here’s the description of the anthology:
DRAGONESQUE: Since Grendel and McCaffrey’s Pern, readers have been enthralled with the magic and mystique of dragons. But it’s rare that we get to see the world through the dragon’s perspective. In DRAGONESQUE, you’ll experience an anthology of fantasy and science fiction stories told from, or through, or with, the dragon’s point of view. High fantasy, sword & sorcery, urban fantasy, dark fantasy, magical realism, and of course science fiction…DRAGONESQUE will feature a wealth of genres that even a dragon would be tempted to horde. Edited by S.C. Butler & Joshua Palmatier, DRAGONESQUE will contain approximately fourteen stories with an average length of 6,000 words each.
Now, I’ve written dragon stuff before. My story “Lord of the Cul-de-sac,” about a dragon moving to the suburbs, made it into one of Galaxy’s Edge “Best Of” anthologies. I really dig dragons and, in particular, I really like to insert dragons into the modern world.
So, by way of a sneak peak for the story I’m working on for this next year’s anthology, let me tell you what I’m thinking: a dragon who solves crimes.
A dragon detective.
A modern art loving dragon detective.
A modern art loving dragon detective who refuses to leave her lair and, instead, has her personal assistant/henchman doing all the legwork and dragging suspects to her palatial home and so on and then solves the crimes using her supernaturally keen senses and even keener intellect.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because it is a fantasy adaptation of my favorite mystery series of all time: none other than Rex Stout’s immortal Nero Wolfe mysteries, wherein gumshoe Archie Goodwin legs it all over town to help reclusive genius Nero Wolfe solve the crimes that leave the police scratching their heads.
Unlike Wolfe, my dragon (currently named “Angharad”) doesn’t collect orchids, she collects artwork. Collecting artwork costs a lot of money, and the way she sustains her habits is by recovering lost or stolen things, because I figured that there was very little that would disgust a dragon more than thieves.
In my dream of dreams, this won’t just be one story, but the first (or maybe second) of many. A linked series of dragon-centered mysteries. I’ve already written one of them (trying to sell it now) and either that one or the next one I write I hope to include in Dragonesque.
Now, I’m tempted to share an excerpt, but as I’m not sure whether the story I have done will be appearing in Dragonesque or somewhere else, I’ll just leave it at that and you’ll just have to wait. I’m excited and I hope you’re excited, too!
Want to make sure you meet Angharad and her loyal man-about-town, Sam Braun? Back the ZNB kickstarter, happening now!
I’m In Galaxy’s Edge!
Nice cover, eh?
Just out this weekend, my story “Lord of the Cul-de-Sac” can be found in this month’s Galaxy’s Edge. It’s a charming, light-hearted tale of a dragon moving to suburbia and the collapse of the housing markets in 2008. You can read it here. It’s free online, but you can also order it (and the rest of the issue) in dead-tree format by going here and following the links beneath the cover art.
Galaxy’s Edge is a great venue and I’m very proud that my work has made it there, sharing a table of contents with the likes of George RR Martin, no less (!). Go read the whole issue – good stuff!
In other publishing news, I’ve got at least three stories coming out in the next few months (well, at least one, but as many as three – the other two aren’t exactly upfront about their publishing schedules, shall we say), so stay tuned.
Also, a reminder that NO GOOD DEED, Book 2 in the Saga of the Redeemed, is coming out on June 21st! Pre-order your copy today (available everywhere fine e-books are sold)!
My semester is wrapping up and I’m starting to gear myself towards what my summer writing project will be. It’s a bit up in the air (currently talking with an agent about best career moves – exciting stuff, but I can’t really say more yet), but there are good odds I’ll be looking to dig into Book 3 of the Saga of the Redeemed and possibly plan on having a solid draft finished by the end of August. Either that, or giving the Saga a rest for a bit and working on a new stand-alone or maybe series. Hard to say at this point, as I’m at something of a crossroads in my career. My contract with Harper Voyager is complete with the delivery of NO GOOD DEED, but I don’t feel the series is finished – it’ll take two more books, I think. However, the series, while selling modestly well, isn’t selling anywhere near enough and isn’t getting enough attention to necessarily warrant 2 more years of my time to completing, as much as I love it. If there are better options, I might be better off taking them and circling back to this series later on.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, go and check out the May 2016 issue of Galaxy’s Edge!
That Way Lieth Dragons
A few months ago I started a short story. It went like this:
Not Pictured: Two-Car Garage, In-Ground Pool, Eat-In Kitchen
Once upon a time, a dragon got a good deal on a modified, split-level
ranch with aluminum siding and a big yard—2.9% APR for a 15 year fixed, no
points, no closing costs. His credit was mighty indeed.
It went a little further than that (by a few pages) until I had a bunch of gossipy neighbors playing poker on the other side of the cul de sac. That’s as far as it got.
There are a lot of jokes inherent in this premise. I think it could make a fun story. Maybe.
If only it would go somewhere.
A friend of mine asked me once why it took so long to write a novel. He wasn’t being facetious – he was honestly curious. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d just write all day long for a couple months and have it finished.” He wanted to know why I didn’t do that; if that was what I wanted to do (write novels), why not put the pedal to the metal and just grind them out.
The idea has merit. Indeed, most writing advice you’ll find involves some variation of ‘write every day’. Not all of us, though, are Isaac Asimov. Even when I do write everyday (and I do whenever I can), much of what I write just doesn’t go anywhere. I have, at last count, six short stories that I’ve started but not finished. It isn’t because I don’t want to, but rather because I don’t have them figured out yet. It’s uncharted territory, as of yet. If I blunder onwards, without notion or care of where I’m going, the story is going to wind up in the trunk – I’m going to have to rewrite the whole damned thing, anyway. Why go through the motions when I can trace this stuff out in my head beforehand? Short Stories are great like that – you can fit them all inside your brain at the same time and weigh each and every paragraph against its neighbors. I can, anyway.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing process, lately, and how it varies when I’m writing short stories as compared to writing novels. When I write a novel, I’m a machine – I churn out pages at a solid rate, week-by-week, month-by-month, until the first draft is in the can. Then I go back and do it again. And again. It’s a sculpting process – chipping away pieces of stone here, chinks of rock there, smoothing and polishing, until the David is revealed from the block of marble that encased it.
Short fiction is a different animal, though. You can’t blunt-force your way through a short story (I can’t, at least). For me, they come out mostly fully-formed. I write it and there it is. I do edit, of course, and I change endings, delete characters, etc. Most of that, though, is less like sculpting and more like smoothing the icing on a cake. Once the cake is baked, it’s baked – you can’t fix it except to start all over again. So, what I do instead is I dump my ingredients out on the counter (dragon, suburban house, cul de sac, etc.) and let them sit there. I stare at them. Sometimes I have the ingredients to five or six metaphorical cakes sitting there at the same time. Occasionally I see new things I can bake from the morass and, in a twinkling, I’ve got a cake I never expected. It isn’t, though, a matter of sweat and blood. Not really. It’s like catching fireflies – not about the running, but about a certain kind of bloodless patience, waiting for the moment to strike where BAM – the story becomes clear.
It’s worked for me thus far. Is it the right way to do it? Hell if I know. I’m not sure I want to know. Perhaps some questions are better left unanswered.
Flying Cavalry: A Tactical Guide
So you want to ride a dragon into battle, eh? Take a number, pal. There’s a line that wraps around the earth full of people who want to dig their spurs into a dragon or a griffin or a pegasus or a hippogriff and so on: it might be a long wait. My job here is to have a real conversation with you would-be fly-jockeys about what the heck you’d hope to achieve in the ‘saddle’ of a flying beastie, so pay attention.
What exactly does that guy think he’s going to whack with that thing?
Rule #1: Swords are Mostly Pointless
If you have the idea that you’re going to be lopping off heads with your trust cavalry saber whilst flying about, please report to the medical tent to have your own head examined.
A sword – even a big one – isn’t going to have a blade much over 60″ (and that’s being pretty damned generous). Most single-handed blades will be much less than that. If you’re on the back of a giant dragon or griffon or wyvern, the odds of something ever getting within sword-reach are extremely remote. Why? Well, because the thing you’re on is going to have a wingspan of much, much more than you and your sword can reach. The only way that sword will be useful is if an object somehow gets closer than the flapping wings of your mount. If that happens, you likely have already had a mid-air collision, so the sword is sort of useless by then.
Instead, practice your aim with a crossbow, get good at throwing javelins, see about using a bow (good luck with that – see below), or learn to throw fireballs or something. Better yet, if your mount is one of those fearsome aerial predators, try teaching it to be the weapon. Waaay more efficient that way, and it leaves both your hands free for holding on to something.
Rule #2: Don’t Fall Off
This would seem to go without saying, but it seems to happen all the time anyway. The saddle you use should do more than a simple horse saddle – we’re talking about something more like a cross between a gondola and a roller-coaster seat. You should be strapped into that shit. Tied down. Everything from the waist down should be secure. Lots of hand-holds, not just one lousy pommel. Given the speeds and angles at which aerial combat seems likely to occur, you want to make for damned certain that you are not falling off your mount. Unlike a horse, where being able to leap free of a falling horse is an important survival tactic, any fall from the back of a flying griffon is worse than falling with the griffon. So, safety first: strap in, boys.
Maiming the critter so it can only fly with your assistance is a pretty solid plan.
Rule #3: Control the Beast
Let’s give some serious thought here as to how we are going to get this multi-ton flying monstrosity to listen to your commands because, let’s face it, if it bends around and bites you, you’re dead. If it decides to fly off into the sunset, you are less than useless. If it doesn’t like you, you’re doomed.
You’ve got a couple options here. Briefly, you’re going to perform some combination of the following: imprint yourself on your mount (raising your baby dragon from birth as its mother), create some kind of elaborate harness to give it orders (spurs and reigns might not do it, depending on size and anatomy of the beast), utilize magic/supertechnology to somehow meld your mind with its own (e.g. the Na’vi), or clip its wings in such a way that the only way it can fly is with your say-so/assistance. There might be other methods, too, but those seem the easiest and most practical. Of note, extremely intelligent mounts (like those capable of speech, etc.) are much more dangerous than those that are more like animals. Don’t ride dragons that talk unless you and the dragon have a good working relationship. Sometimes not even then.
Rule #4: Consider Upkeep
Keeping a hippogriff is no easy task. You think horses are hard to care for? Try taking care of something that expects to eat 600 pounds of raw meat a day. Sure, an angry horse can kick you to death, but it doesn’t see you as a snack, at least. You’re going to need a team of handlers, a secure ‘sable’ (or paddock or rookery or Pit of Despair or whatever) to keep it from eating local schoolchildren, and lots and lots of its preferable food. Not feeding a carnivorous mount is a great way to lose fingers, arms, and heads.
Rule #5: Is This Even Worth It?
Given the expense and risk of training these mounts, you’re going to have to ask yourself what they grant you. Aerial cavalry is fast, but unless your mount breathes fire, the kind of offensive output you can expect is limited. A griffon that tries to engage land targets is going to wind up grounded if for no other reason than it will quickly be injured by concentrated blocks of troops. A non-fire breathing dragon can be expected to eat a fair number of enemy combatants and instill fear into the enemy soldiers, but it’s only a few ballista bolts away from doomed (and, once injured, you can’t reasonably expect to control these things as well). Additionally, give some thought to range. Given the apparati needed to maintain such a beast, you can’t reasonably bring it along with a marching army – the supply train would quickly get ridiculous, and some of these beasts might need certain assistance getting airborne with a rider + armor + weapons, not to mention the potential psychological impact on your fellow soldiers.
To this end, barring the occasional super-huge fire-breathing dragon of doom, your run-of-the-mill pegasi, hippogriffs, griffons, and wyverns would probably best be employed defensively. If stationed at a watchtower or similar, they could quickly and easily patrol open ground much better than cavalry. Likewise, they would be adept at picking off small enemy parties, chasing down enemy scouts, and harassing the flanks of advancing armies. During siege situations, they could be used to transport some small quantity of supplies and personnel into and out of the citadel in question, not to mention making it possible to stage raids upon the besieging force. Will they wipe out entire enemy armies? Well, probably not. That said, they could be quite useful and effective provided you can afford the expense of keeping them.
So, buck up, would-be aero-knights! Someday you, too, could fly bloodthirsty aerial predators for the purpose of knocking over half-built siege engines while enduring a rain of enemy arrows. Ah, the glory!
Fighting Giant Monsters
Dragons, Giants, Hydra, Titans, the Kraken: all monsters of superhuman size and strength, and all popular foes in much of specfic literature, and frequent guest stars in role playing and video games. When done well, facing these incredible beasties is some of the coolest, most exciting moments of the story. When done poorly, they suddenly don’t make a whole lot of sense.
This guy is screwed. Good thing he has fairy magic to bail him out.
One of my favorite scenes like this is an oldie but a goodie and, thanks to my daughter, I see it a lot. Disney’s Sleeping Beauty reaches its climax as Prince Phillip finds himself facing the evil Maleficent in the form of a giant black dragon. Immediately both Phillip and the viewing audience realize he is out of his depth. The dragon has no fear of his puny sword, his enchanted shield is barely sufficient protection, and his triumphant ride to his sleeping love becomes a desperate retreat through burning thorns and up jagged cliffs. Driven to the edge of a precipice, deprived of his shield, almost losing his balance, Phillip, but for some timely sorcerous intervention, is pretty well doomed. Now, while there are some holes in the battle (like ‘how does his horse survive’ and ‘how does he avoid going over the cliff with the dead dragon’?), generally it captures exactly what a battle with such a massive opponent ought to look like: it’s tense, terrifying, and you really don’t see how Phillip is going to get out of it until the fairies show up. There are other stories that do the giant monster battle pretty well, too (Luke Vs Rancor in Jedi is pretty decent; Sam Vs Shelob in Return of the King is pretty fabulous, etc.), and all of them follow a few basic rules of engagement:
- Monsters Don’t Fight Like People: You don’t stand toe-to-toe with the beastie and swing your sword like it’s an orc. Honestly, unless you’re really lucky, your sword is almost worthless, your armor isn’t really that useful, and most of your martial arts training isn’t going to help very much (Legolas excepted).
- Monsters Chew the Scenery: If you think you can have a fight with a twenty foot giant and not destroy a lot of property, you need to have your head examined. If you’re in a house, even money says its coming down.
- Monsters Can Move: You know how we are able to move around, turn, jump, run, and all that stuff? Monsters can do that, too. Sometimes they can do it even better than we can. Unless you’re a Jedi, don’t bet on running between its legs.
With these rules in place, it becomes rapidly obvious that, in order to defeat the beast, the hero or heroes will need to think outside the box. This isn’t a case of simply ‘hit it with your sword until it dies’ (a flaw in logic I’ve examined before); the toe-to-toe engagement is unwise. The heroes need to run around, hide, use their small size to their advantage, strike the weak points, and so on.
Too often, in video games and RPGs especially, the battle with the giant monster becomes more of a case of surrounding it and plinking away until it falls down. Never mind that most of your weapons are only hitting its shins and never mind that it can just as easily step on you to kill you as anything else and there is no way you can impede its movement. Not only is this unimaginative, it’s also dull. These conflicts can and should be among the most memorable and terrifying of the story; they should be set pieces, major plot events, and they should be given the time and attention they deserve. Recognize that if your hero faces a dragon on an open field, there are few plausible ways they ought to survive outside of technological or magical power enhancing their normal human capabilities. Like any good fight scene, you need to plot out how this can go down so that you build tension without violating reason. Heroes that face such enemies without forethought or who are surprised should find themselves in retreat or defeated, as a hero who summarily slays a dragon without much thought or substantial effort means both the dragon and the hero aren’t being used to their full potential. It begs the question ‘why use a dragon at all?’
More in common with a carnival ride than a scary beast.
To provide a counter-example to the one I mentioned above, do you folks remember the movie Willow? Ah, who am I kidding, of course you do! Anyway, the two-headed monster that shows up in the Tir Asleen battle is a great example of extremely lame monster-fighting. Now, granted, many of the problems are related to the fact that the film’s budget was only so large and they didn’t have CGI to make this thing really move, but still we have a whole battle in the middle of the movie with a giant monster that doesn’t really move, doesn’t really destroy anything, and that is killed just by stabbing it in the head. I mean, it’s sort of scary, but it doesn’t really steal the scene at all. In fact, a lot of the battle keeps going on while this whole giant monster is sitting there, eating Nokmar soldiers. Now, while I do approve of the idea of sticking a monster in the middle of an unrelated battle, this one doesn’t really do much more than act as scenery. The soldiers just kind of surround it, it sits there, and we patiently wait for Mad Martigan to kill it. It’s a fun scene, yes, but it’s nothing compared to the Cave Troll in Fellowship or the first time Paul faces a sandworm in Dune. This monster isn’t working to its full potential.
In the end, all I’m really saying here is that the massive monsters of mythology ought to be given their proper due when facing our heroes. There is just too much potential there to be wasted.
The Physics of Dragonslaying
I'm sure your teeny little sword is a real concern for him.
The dragon is pretty much the grand poobah of mythical monsters. Nothing else gets as much press, nothing commands as much respect, and nothing quite measures up to a 50-ton winged lizard that can breathe fire. They’ve been the classic fantasy villain ever since Beowulf went toe-to-toe with one in the 7th century or so. No hero throws around as much clout as one who says he hunted and killed a dragon. There is a pretty good reason for that, too: it would be practically impossible for your standard medieval hero to do so.
For starters, lets leave out all discussions of magic for the moment. As soon as we throw magic in the mix, anything is possible, so there’s little point in discussing it. If you like, we can say the dragon’s magic cancels out the hero’s magic and leave it at that. What we’re looking at here is whether and how a person with access to the standard armory of the pan-medieval fantasy world could kill a dragon.
The Dragon’s Defenses
Okay, so let’s size up the opposition. Dragons are reputed to have the following capabilities:
- Massive Size: Dragons are usually said to be 20 feet long or longer, putting them on par with dinosaurs or whales–10 tons at the low end, maybe even 100 at the high end.
- Armored Scales: Dragon scales are thick, flame resistant, cover the majority of the body, and are hard to get through. Some places they are described as ‘hard as steel’, though we can presume this is a bit of an exaggeration.
- Flight: Dragons have wings and can fly. This is a major advantage, obviously.
- Intelligence: Dragons are fairly smart. In some cases they are shown to be as smart as people, while in others they are simply very cunning predators of standard animalian intelligence.
- Fire Breath: Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the dragon is its capacity to breathe fire. Any attempt to slay a dragon needs to take into account some way to survive a blast of flaming breath (which, we can presume, operates more like acid or napalm than simple fire, as those are more plausible explanations).
- Teeth, Claws, etc.: To top all that off, the dragon still has the standard array of deadly claws, fangs, horns, and so on that should be sufficient to pulp anybody who messes with it, anyway.
Given this, no sane individual (or team of individuals) would go after a dragon. Just give it the virgins, already, and move on with your lives. Points 4 and 5 alone are sufficient to guarantee that any idiot wanting to kill a dragon will be dead long before he’s finished challenging it in the name of St. George. They don’t make stuff in the middle ages that can take a soaking in napalm and let the user walk away. Nevertheless, if the dragon needs killing, folks are going to try anyway. Let’s consider their weapons.
By Sword
Don’t be an idiot. Even provided you do make it past the flaming breath and it happens to stay on the ground and you don’t get crushed by giant claws or gobbled up by a giant fang-rimmed mouth, you’ve still got the scales to get through. Even if you do that, what makes you think the sword will actually kill it? If it’s a sufficiently huge dragon (like, Brontosaurus sized) it’s going to take you a long, long time to hack it to death with a sword. It would be like trying to kill a person with a dessert fork–you could do it, sure, but the person pretty much has to be tied up and you need plenty of time and/or a keen grasp of human anatomy. Try hunting a dragon with a sword and kiss your butt goodbye.
By Spear/Lance
Better, certainly. The weapon is larger and longer, meaning you have a chance of puncturing something vital with a
Now *this* I can believe. 5 people versus one young hatchling. Good odds.
strike. This is how they kill whales, after all, and so it’s not entirely without merit. It can still fly away, though, and can still melt you with fire, and it’s still armored in a way that whales aren’t. Furthermore, the way they actually managed to kill the whale with the lance was to harpoon it, exhaust it, then move in and kill it. Given flaming breath, flight, and all that, it seems unlikely you could pull this off with a dragon. If you were to do it, you’d need a big team of people (like a series of whaleboats, except on the ground) working in coordination and you’d need a dragon to be no smarter than your average whale. As a lone dragonslayer? Forget it.
By Arrow
Let me put it this way: Bard got stupidly lucky with Smaug. Skilled hunters do use bows to hunt large game like Cape Buffalo, but a Cape Buffalo is tiny compared to a dragon. Furthermore, such hunters today are using modern bows and modern arrows that maximize the kinetic energy needed to kill (read this article for more on the physics of hunting large game with bows). Granted the bow keeps the dragon from being able to fly away as easily, bypasses some of the dangers from flaming breath and the teeth/claws, but it is going to have a hell of a time penetrating the dragon’s hide by enough to wound it in any mortal capacity. You’d need dozens and dozens of skilled archers with the most powerful bows and sophisticated arrows in the world, and even then they’ve got fair odds of being roasted.
Conclusion
Essentially, the lone dragonslayer thing is extremely unlikely to the point of being implausible without the use of the idiot ball in some way. You’d need a team of dedicated professionals using things like siege engines, laying traps, and, most importantly, using dirty tricks. Poison its water supply, collapse its cave on top of itself, or, of course, some kind of magic. Beyond that, you are fresh out of luck.
Now, much of modern fantasy lore is well aware of this. George RR Martin points some of this stuff out in A Song of Ice and Fire, and, in one of my personal favorites, Barbra Hambly explores just how impossible a task this is in her 1985 novel Dragonsbane (which I recommend, though I haven’t read it since high school and my memory of it may make it seem better than it is). It should be noted, even, that Beowulf himself died in his struggle with the dragon (though he killed it with a dagger) and had help from his friend, Wiglaf. In any event, I feel it is important to give dragons their due when trying to take them down–the frontal assault isn’t going to work, guys, and you’re going to need help.
Auston Habershaw 