Origin of the Dragons of Night
On Tuesday, February 23, 2010, I struggled all day to come up with a new idea to write. I had written three Space Operas, and I felt a little burned out. I wanted to do something special, but every idea that I came up with I could match to another Book, Series, or Movie that came before.
I was frustrated beyond words. My last book had made a splash with Horror Fans, and I couldn't get the cult success of Phara-un out of my head. It was a limited run, and it is no longer available anywhere, but people constantly asked me about it. I wanted to continue it. Words wouldn't flow. I was blocked.
That night, Brian and I went out shopping. About half way through the store, I had an strange image pop in my head. I sat in one of the benches in the back of the store, and opened EverNote, and added a strange note.
I could feel my skin crawling. Something strange lingered in the air. A musky bouquet wafted down from somewhere, muscling out the odors of the city.
He looked up, knowing what he would see, and there it was atop the Redd-Bishop building- an enormous black dragon perched on the pinnacle with its wings out stretched. He doubted anyone would see it. Its scales blended perfectly into the skyline. In a moment it was gone.
Relieved, he took several steps towards the restaurant before he paused and looked again at the night sky. What is a dragon doing in the city? He thought, then realized he probably didn't want to know the answer.
Hmm, there might be something there. I titled the note "Dragon Knight- Nathan". I rushed out to the car and tried to capture more of the idea. It didn't work. I ended up just reading these three odd paragraphs over and over again.
The next day, I remembered a note I had in one of my notebooks for my Space Opera Setting:
I am not going to say that it was necessarily an original idea, but it awakened a new idea in me. The idea had merit, whether it had a future or not.
I started playing with the idea, and experimenting with new formats.
“My biggest hurdle has been getting beyond the structures of the novel and the short story. I agree with H P Lovecraft that the best fiction is pulled off with the same craft as a well devised hoax. So I started playing around with ways to tell a story directly and from oblique angles. I would love to share some of these stories, but they may be included in the final project, so I don’t want to release them early.”
I wrote that post March 5, 2010, and explored the idea of a Epistolary Novel, crossed with a blog and a magazine until November 29, 2010. I still like the idea, but it felt forced and unnatural. I even explored doing an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) for a while, but again it felt strange and wrong.
During this period, I asked myself a very important question:
“To Wainscot or not to Wainscot– that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the tale to create
The beings and world out of nothing but my page,
Or to take with some of its history
And, creatively change them. To write, to make...”
That one badly paraphrased Shakespeare quote changed everything, and made be delve into world history and construct a world that developed a parallel history to the one we know, and gave a spin to special events.
This early seed of an idea eventually grew to the world I am sharing with all of you. I can only hope you love it as much as I do.