Behind the Scenes of Dragons, Magic, and Me

I want to take you behind the scenes of my new fantasy novel Dragons, Magic, and Me Volume 1 The Box to give you an insider’s view of the novel’s direction.

A dragon’s lifetime spans over 500 years. Unlike humans, they breed once every ten years at most. (If they bred as humans do, dragons would be the most populous species in the universe.)

Dragons as a species have subspecies based upon colors, such as red, black, green, white, gold. Just like humans, the various types don’t necessarily get along with the others. Further, the red and black dragons tend to have an evil bent and certainly detest humans, while the gold dragons respect humans and sometimes befriend them, if only for a short while (as far as a dragon is concerned). Currently, the numbers of each dragon type are fairly well in balance.

Dragons can Shadow Walk from one world to another world, as long as they are familiar with the destination world. Hence, dragons historically are spread out among a number of original planets, often in which the human population is seldom more advanced than an Iron Age.

A particularly brilliant Black dragon, Adler, discovered other worlds in which the human population is in a Modern or Space faring age! That is, humans of some worlds fly among other worlds via silver flying machines (ie. spaceships). Thus, Adler has set himself a new goal: to find many new worlds, but only share them with Black dragon close allies, the Red, Green, and White dragons. Purposely, he isn’t telling the Golds and other types about these new worlds. This way, his kind will have a powerful advantage over the other types.

However, his first problem is getting a Black or Red dragon to one of these new space faring worlds. He observed that the crew of these ships are frantic for good looking escorts and such when they land on a world. Every space port has a red light district close to it. Adler devises a very clever scheme. He confiscates one of these escort services and via some help from an unethical psychiatrist who is pursuing his own lines of illegal research involving implanting behavior patterns, he sets up the Unarmed Escorts. He kidnaps “ugly” young women, uses magic spells to alter their physical forms but disguises it as a bio-genetic DNA alteration that’s permanent in nature, and lets his psychiatrist implant the desired behavior in them, turning them into armless, but highly attractive beauty queens. Thus, he sells these women to wealthy men on these new space faring worlds, but insists that a caretaker accompanies each woman. The caretaker is a dragon, of course. Once that dragon becomes familiar with that new world, it Shadow Walks back and brings many other dragons back to this new world.

At the start of this story, Adler has “opened up” over a dozen new worlds that the Gold and other dragons know nothing about. However, in doing all this, he learns that some of these advanced worlds have developed “test tube babies” and DNA alterations and cloning processes. Now his plans change. He must find one of these worlds on which he can have Black and Red dragons cloned as well as baby dragons grown in quantity. Within say fifty years, the sheer number of Black and Red dragons could outnumber the others ten to one. At last, they could exterminate the Golds and other lesser dragons!

The Box was build by an Archmage. Its goal is to bring help to those in critical need, and on whatever world they live. The Box is highly enchanted indeed. The weenie to convince others to travel in the Box and help those in need is the gift of learning magical spells at an extremely rapid pace. Only certain types of would-be mages will succumb to this challenge, particularly those who lack patience or are in a hurry to learn all. It would be these type people that would be motivated to provide the help the various situations require.

Part of this story is to see how the close relationship between the Gold dragons and the select humans develops. Second, I wanted to show how other worlds and civilizations can well have very different traditions than our own. This is particularly illustrated by the noblewomen of the Rainbow’s End world. It also illustrates the alternate forms slavery and cruelty can take in these other societies.

Above all, it is to be an exciting, fun read for the reader, who I hope can’t put it down until the end. So yes, it is showing highly imaginative worlds and people, while emphasizing a long running plot that the characters unravel as they go from world to world situation, using what magic they do know to handle all manner of situations, unlike the usual fighter hack and slash approach, and also develops the tenuous dynamics between humans and dragons.

Also, I’ve added some intriguing twists and romance too. I hope you enjoy this new dragon series.

Vic