Dragons! Everybody loves them and they wing their way into all sorts of places in the fantasy genre. Author L.R. Lam was determined to find a fresh spin on the familiar creatures, however, and in Dragonfall, they may just have found one.
L.R. LAM:
For years, I’d really wanted to write myself a Big Ol’ Dragon Book. Like many fantasy fans, a dragon on a cover was my kryptonite as a teenager. The Dragonriders of Pern even “tricked” me into reading my first science fiction (technically, since the dragons are aliens on an alien planet) when I was about ten. But it felt like there were so many dragons, and so many approaches had already been taken. How could I find my own unique spin on dragons? Or, if not unique, at least a little different than what we’d seen before. So I kept writing other things, but a little corner of my mind held space for my eventual dragon book.
Sometimes you get a big, clear Eureka moment for a book, and sometimes you get little details where you’re like “well that’s a cool for worldbuilding, but that’s not a story.” I was wandering around a museum in Berlin in 2011 and there was a collection of ancient Assyrian cylinder seals. The placard mentioned they were sometimes considered magical amulets. For the rest of the museum visit I zoned out, daydreaming about a fantasy society where everyone wore seals and they were carved with symbols of indelible identity, and signing a contract with them was magically binding…
Dragonfall: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Read more at: The Big Idea: L.R. Lam
Recent Comments