The start of the Year of the Dragon has made me think about dragons. Though I don’t really need to be encouraged to think about dragons – the book I’m deep in the middle of editing has seven speaking dragon parts, and any number of minor spear-carrying dragons.  But this seems like a good time to celebrate other people’s dragons too!

My favourite dragon books include:

The wonderful heartrending dragon in CS Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is my earliest dragon memory.

The amazing How to Train Your Dragon series by Cressida Cowell, the funniest, cleverest, most exciting series of dragon books ever.  Though I’m not sure I’d want Toothless under my helmet.

Philip Reeves’ No Such Thing As Dragons, which is dark, spiky, tantalisingly short, and a fabulous novel for slightly older readers.

And the very similarly titled, but for much smaller people: There’s No Such Thing As A Dragon by Jack Kent.

I also love the splendidly distant dragons in Vivien French’s Flight of Dragons.

I have mixed feelings about Eragon and its sequels, partly because they are almost too big to hold, but also because I thought I’d been really original, creating a friendly female dragon, making her blue and calling her Sapphire.  Then shortly after First Aid for Fairies was published, I read Eragon, and met his friendly blue female dragon, called Saphira.  I’m very relieved about that final vowel.

I have a couple of favourite dragon reference books too (I’m not sure if you can call them non-fiction!)

My first dragon collection was A Book of Dragons, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green (though I see it has my wee brother’s name on the first page, in pencil. Perhaps I could rub that out, because he’s not getting it back now!)

And more recently, I’ve loved the wonderful tactile Dragonology books by Dr Ernest Drake (which aren’t mine either – they belong to my kids.)

And finally, my favourite dragon myths.

I’ve enjoyed telling dragon myths for years, partly because they come with inbuilt excitement (a dragon! fire! teeth!), partly because they come from all over the world, and partly because it feels right to share dragon stories when I’m doing author sessions about the novels with Sapphire in them.

My favourite dragon stories to share include:

A seven-headed Chinese dragon

A Greek dragon who kept a shepherd boy company on the hills

A Viking dragon defeated by a sheepskin

A Polish dragon, also defeated by a sheepskin (some dragons are easily fooled)

A Persian dragon who teased a horse

A Georgian dragon who was sung to sleep

And an Irish dragon who lost his tongue

(If you want to find out more about these dragons, you’ll have to ask me to come and tell you the stories!)

Dragons are universal, appearing as the monster of choice in many cultures and countries, so I’m fascinated by theories about where our dragon stories come from.  Do we need monsters for our heroes to prove themselves against? Did our ancestors need explanations for those big fossilised bones and teeth? Or maybe, just maybe, these stories are about real dragons, and they’re still out there, somewhere…

What are your favourite dragon books and stories? Please let me know!

(And here is the dragon who sits beside my computer – hand made for me by a Sapphire fan!)

(This is a replacement post for one which went missing when my website crashed on Boxing Day – something very similar to this, but not exactly the same, was originally posted mid December)

I’ve finished First Aid Four!

Which sounds very impressive, but really, though I’ve typed the words “The End”, this is just the beginning.

I’ve reached the end of the STORY, I know what happens in the end, and how it happens, but now I have to go all the way back to Chapter 1 and make it work properly.  I always end up discovering new things about the characters and the plot on the way to the end, which means I have to go back and tweak things at the start and in the middle.

Also this draft is far too long, very repetitive and not very well written.  Nope.  It’s not very well written. Which is fine.  I never worry about the words when I’m writing a first draft, I just try to follow the story and hear the characters.  So now I need to take out the clichés and the long-winded sentences, and make the language sharper and stronger.  I really enjoy cutting and tidying a story.  The first draft is my way of discovering the story, and the editing brings it to .

So having rattled through writing the novel I will now spend several happy months editing it.

However, I wasn’t always happy when I was writing it (quite aside from nagging feelings of guilt about all those dreadful injuries and terrible dangers).  In the last week of writing, when I was working out how to defeat the baddie and trying to find a happy ending for anyone left standing, I was starting to feel quite strange.  Nervous.  Sad.  And I couldn’t work out why.  Until I realised that this is the last book in the series.  There were only ever meant to be four First Aid for Fairies books.  And this is the last one.

So this is the last book I will write with Helen, Yann, Lavender, all their friends and all their enemies.  And I’m going to miss them.

I know I’m going to spend the next few months editing this book. And probably the rest of my life reading bits of all the books in the series out loud in school halls.  But last week when I was able to see the end of the story, it was like I was reaching the end of a journey with these characters.  Editing is really just writing the postcards and tidying the photos.  We’ve already done the exciting bit.  So I feel like I’m already saying good bye to them.

Normally when I’m finishing a book, I find it fairly easy to say bye to the characters because I’m already making scribbly notes about a possible sequel.  But this time, I haven’t been doing that, and even though it was my decision to make this a series of four, because I have other books I want to write, I do feel very sad that I’m not going to spend more time with Helen and the fabled beasts.  I feel like I’m walking away from them!

So this time, the end really is the end.  But I still have all that editing to do, so I’d better get back to it…

I’ve now defeated baddies in four different novels. But that adds up to a lot more than four baddies.

I’m counting right now, and if you include minions, packs of slightly untrustworthy wolves, and creatures up to no good making the lives of my goodies more difficult, I think I’ve come up with ways of destroying, defeating, evading or embarrassing at least 13 different baddies or groups of baddies.

But when I started writing each book I didn’t know how I was how going to defeat any of them. I almost think that would be cheating, to have a baddie that I already knew how I was going to deal with.

Because the goodies don’t know. They don’t have any idea what they are going to do, and I like it like that. They are scared and nervous and confused and often don’t know what the baddie’s agenda is, or even all their powers. Usually, as the writer, I do at least have that information before them.

I can build the baddie to be as nasty or strong or clever or tricky as I like. But I certainly DON’T deliberately build in any weaknesses. I don’t have some kind of washing machine style built-in obsolescence.

Because I want a real baddie not a cardboard pushover.

When I’m writing, there comes a point about two thirds or three quarters of the way through the book when I start to see how the final battle or confrontation is going to happen. I call it the endgame, and when it slowly starts to form in my mind, that’s usually when I begin to see how to defeat the baddie.

In the book I’m writing now, the fourth First Aid for Fairies book, I knew who had to defeat the baddie (you’ll see who and I’m sure you’ll understand why when you read the book), I was starting to see where it had to happen, and once Helen made a very daft mistake, I even knew why it had to happen. But I didn’t know how. No idea. I have this great big clever powerful highly-armed baddie. And no idea how to defeat him.

This is ok. This has always happened to me. I’m starting to assume that it always will and that it’s just part of how I write.

But this time it was getting a bit worrying. I am now on chapter 26 of the book. There will only be about 30 chapters. I’m very nearly at the endgame. And last week, I had no idea how it was going to end. Not an inkling, not a tiny little clue. I’ve never taken so long to see how to defeat the baddie before… I was starting to wonder if this particular monster was too much for me.

But then I went back and reread the rest of the manuscript. I read the first trap, the four quests, the dragon riddles. I was actually rereading it to check I hadn’t left any silly loose ends. But while I was rereading, I suddenly realised how to defeat the baddie! It was there all along. It was in what I had already written. Everything I needed was already there!

This is why I have complete faith in the writing process, because whenever I have a big problem to solve, the answer is usually there in the small details of what I’ve already written.

A Scottish writer called Janet Paisley said pretty much the same thing at a workshop I went to years ago at the Edinburgh Book Festival: if you have a plot problem the answer is probably in what you’ve already written.

I’m pretty sure that doesn’t hold true for plot problems in the first two paragraphs, but if you’ve got thousands of words and a good knowledge of your characters, then you probably already have all the tools and weapons you need to defeat that baddie!

So, now I know what we’re going to do. Fabled beasts, let’s go get him!

I’ve been worrying about minions recently. I know the baddy for the next book, I’ve been working out his evil plan for a while, but I’ve been struggling with his minions. He’s a loner, you see, the only one of his kind, so he doesn’t have a ready-made band of followers or family like the Faery Queen had her footsoldiers in Wolf Notes or the Sea-through had his bloom of jellyfish in Storm Singing.

I kept thinking that I was getting stuck at an early piece of action in First Aid Four because I couldn’t see the next location (one of the dangers of a location competition – you have to wait until you’ve got the winner to write the next bit.) Now I’ve realised the problem was that I couldn’t see who or what was with the baddie, I couldn’t see who was attacking Helen and Yann. So all I have to do is find out who his army are, then the action can rattle on again.

I need some minions.

I asked the kids I met at the Wigtown Book Festival today if they could suggest any good minions, and got some truly splendid answers including fireproof snails, secret agent rabbits and haggises with fangs, which may not be perfect for a Fabled Beast adventure, but certainly got me thinking.

Mostly thinking about what makes a good minion. Sneaky? Smaller than the boss? Violent but not deadly? Daft? (Or cleverer than the boss? I think either works…) Lots of them, so you can lose a few?

And specifically, what do I want for this book? Probably creatures from Scottish myth and folklore, and preferably ones who haven’t had starring roles in too many other books.

So, if you have a perfect minion’s job description, or if you have any excellent minions you could suggest to carry out my evil plan, do let me know. Otherwise, I’ll just ask a few more kids, or else get in about my collection of Scottish folklore as soon as I get home …