Zookie's notepad

This week's word is: MAROON

2012-01-29T22:15:00.000Z

Tulips from Agent Ed

Hello, dragon fans. I know what you're thinking: Maroon! He's changed his mind and is going to write an eighth book and the cover will be a maroon dragon. Hooray! Sorry. Nothing to do with covers at all. I refer instead to the fact that the author has gone into decorating mode. In the past few weeks he has bought not one but TWO new sofas and they are both coloured maroon. I kid you not. Since completing the proofing of THE FIRE ASCENDING, he's been spending time painting and papering the walls of the rooms the sofas are in. We are all on tenterhooks wondering which of us is going to get sprayed with droplets from his paint roller next. This morning, he dropped some paste on the new grey carpet (maroon, grey, good contrast, yes?). Mrs Author does not know about this. SHUSH! He just managed to clear it up and push a chair over the wetted pile before she walked in with her breakfast. "What are you doing on your knees," she asked, "- with a flannel...?" He replied, "Erm, dusting the skirting boards..." which of course meant he had to do the whole room. He should stick to writing books. At least that would keep him out of trouble.

It would be tempting to think that the flowers you see were the author's way of saying sorry for the paste episode, but they actually came from Agent Ed, who spent a couple of days in the Den this week. It was great to meet Ed again. Despite the fact that Devon is basically 'closed' in the winter, we still managed to get out and see a few sights. Importantly, over a home-cooked dinner of pasta bake and tarte citron, Ed and the author discussed their plans for world domination (of the book scene). It seems that everyone would like to see our hero write another full on fantasy series. The author unveiled an idea we've been musing on that Ed seemed to think would be very well-received. Not wholesale fantasy, but leaning more towards intrigue and adventure - with a strong dragon element. We will be presenting this to the author's publishers over the next few weeks. Watch this space...

Finally, we feel honour bound to point out something to the scientific community. Recently, the dragons have been glued to the TV set watching Professor Brian Cox (a man who must have discovered the enchantments of time because he seems to grow younger every time he's on the telly) talking about stars. Brian likes stars. He's a physicist and he knows a lot about them. He knows a lot about the beginnings of the universe as well, but his time machine still hasn't allowed him to answer the conundrum of what happened in the millimillimillimilliseconds after the so-called 'Big Bang'. So he should have been tuning in to that well known British TV science show 'Horizon' which aired an episode on just this subject recently. What did happen at the time of the Big Bang? Another very youthful physicist tried to explain. He drew a ‘timeline’ of the universe on a blackboard – 13.7 billion years on a chalk line three feet long. Then he moved to the far right end of the line and said, “This is where we are now, in the present day.” He marked an ‘X’ on the line. Then he moved an inch back from ‘now’, put another ‘X’ on the line and said, “This is when the dinosaurs lived… And this is when DNA emerged…” (Another ‘X’) “This is when atoms were forming…” (Another ‘X’) “And this,” he said, moving to the left hand end, “is when the Big Bang happened. But it’s this infinitessimal moment of time before the explosion occurred that we don’t understand.” He stood back, juggled his chalk in one hand, then stepped forward and made another ‘X’. “Here be dragons,” he said. We are thinking of sending him a copy of The Fire Ascending just to put him out of his misery. It's all explained in there. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: HOROSCOPE!

2012-01-23T12:33:00.000Z

Hello, dragon fans. We deliberately didn't put up a blog post yesterday, but saved it for today instead when the new Chinese year begins. For those of you who don't know, the Chinese have an astrological zodiac that uses animals to deliniate its twelve parts. Eleven of the signs are well known animals such as monkeys or tigers or dogs. There is only one 'mythical' creature represented, which is the dragon, of course, ahem. Depending what year you were born in, you fall into one of the twelve signs. The author you might be surprised to hear, was born in the year of the horse, which probably explains why he likes horse racing so much! But any of you born in 1976, 1988 or 2000 come under the sign of the dragon. Interestingly, The Fire Within came out in the year 2000. You can google up the Chinese zodiac for yourselves if you want to know the characteristics of 'dragon types', but just for a bit of fun, Gwendolen has come up with her own 'horoscope' based on the more familiar star signs. Enjoy! Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

ARIES: You are so impulsive that you have probably pre-ordered your copy of The Fire Ascending already. If not, what are you waiting for?

TAURUS: You are traditionally good with money, so you've no doubt saved the necessary pounds or dollars to buy TFA the day it comes out. Well done. But just in case there's a rush at the book store, why not pre-order a copy now?

GEMINI: The sign of the twins. Having trouble working out what the heck is going on with the alternative characters in Fire World? Don't worry, it's all explained in TFA. Why not pre-order a copy now and know that in April/May your mind will be set at rest?

CANCER: The home-loving sign. How you must be missing the atmosphere in Wayward Crescent. Get your order in for TFA today, but be ready for a few surprises at number 42... All is not what it seems.

LEO: No-one hrrrs better than a Leo (except a dragon of course). You are natural leaders. Print out the TFA cover and show it to all your friends, just so they know that you were there first (they'll know, because you'll have written, "I'm cool, I pre-ordered The Fire Ascending. Hrrr!" on your leaflet.

VIRGO: Dependable, solid, hard-working Virgo. Why not find a Leo and lend them a hand promoting TFA? You'll feel so much better in yourself.

LIBRA: Oh, dear. Love is in the air for Librans, as always. But who should you swoon over, David or Tam (or Zanna or Lucy)? Who are the real heroes of TFA? Better pre-order your copy now. You don't want to hear it second-hand from an Aries...

SCORPIO: Oh, to heck with it. Just give in to those gothic impulses, you know that Zanna would love it if you did. And guys, you might want to check out the Shadow Prime, Voss. You'll only find him in TFA. Yep, play safe. Pre-order a copy now...

SAGITTARIUS: The most fun-loving, extroverted sign of the zodiac. Why not organise a Last Dragon Chronicles party, where you and all your friends can dress up and act out scenes from the books? Make sure you have a laptop available somewhere - for anyone who gets so excited that they feel the need to pre-order a copy of TFA...

CAPRICORN: Would you believe there are GOATS in TFA? I don't mean people born under the sign of Capricorn, actual goats. They turn up in the bit where Agawin travels back in time and meets... oops, you nearly had me there! If you want to know more, you know what you have to do...

AQUARIUS: You are ruled by the planet Uranus which makes you quirky and into all things mind-expanding, but it's time you stopped trying to imagineer a pre-publication copy of TFA and just ordered it! You won't find out how to imagineer properly until you read the book. Honestly!

PISCES: Ah, Pisces. The most 'out there' sign of them all. Liz's words 'dream it' could have been written for you, couldn't they? Well, stop dwelling on the opening extract of TFA and wondering how on earth it fits into the series, just treat yourself to a pre-ordered copy of the book. Amazon would love to hear from you!

This week's word is: OUT-TAKE

2012-01-15T19:27:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans. It's been such a busy week in the Crescent that we've hardly had time to stop and think. The author is lying down in a darkened room with a cold flannel over his head, saying he is 'proofed out'. What he means is, he's finished checking not just the US edition of THE FIRE ASCENDING, but the UK one as well. Everything is now on course for publication in the Spring- in both countries.

So, while he's out of action, we thought we'd send you another little clip from the section he had to chop out of the book. You may remember that Gwendolen posted a large piece of text that was leading up to an explanation of the parallel world, Co:pern:ica. Well, here's a bit more that follows on from the other bit (plus a short overlap). It's in Alexa's viewpoint again. If you want to refresh your memories, go back and read the blog post titled HAPPY first. We think you'll like this out-take. It tells you something about David Rain... Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

The rise of the Ix sent ripples of fear throughout the fabric of the universe. The Higher were confused (and somewhat dismayed – a condition completely alien to them). Never before had their intellect been challenged or dangerously corrupted.

They had to act.

They looked at ways of containing the outbreak. Perhaps they should destroy the Earth? A series of volcanic eruptions would have produced enough toxic ash to poison the atmosphere and choke the planet out of existence. But killing was a concept abhorrent to the Fain. Besides, the Ix would probably survive. They were, after all, a force in the likeness of the Fain themselves. The destruction of the Earth was not an option. The Ix must be isolated, caught and transformed.

But how?

While they meditated over their course of action, the Higher made one significant decision. Because the Ix were a product of the human psyche, the Higher created a powerful construct who could move among humans and monitor the actions of Ix on that plane. They planted their agent in a critical part of the Isenfier timeline. His role was to track down Ix assassins that would cluster to dragons as the Fain had done.

His name was David Rain.

Given false memories to help ease him into the household of Elizabeth Pennykettle (chosen because of her links to Guinevere) David wasn’t brought to full awareness until the spear of ice had entered his heart. It is important to stress that David was not charged with destroying the Ix; his role was to keep them and any lifeform attracted to them (ravens and sibyls, for example) diverted while the Higher’s most spectacular scheme was underway. Any physicist’s mind would have split in two if they had tried to comprehend what the Higher were conceiving with the strategy they labelled ‘Project 42’. An astonishing plan that would stretch even their resources to the limit. Not since the birth of the universe itself had anything like it been attempted before.

They were developing an alternative version of Earth.

Calling on every thread of creativity they had, the Fain encapsulated all the probabilities of multiverse theory and imagineered from it a single, unified, parallel world.

They named this world Co:pern:ica.

The Higher’s idea for it was simple, but profound. They intended to raise Co:pern:ica to a level of perfection that humans would call ‘paradise’. A place so full of harmony and joy that their souls would willingly migrate to it, leaving the Ix:Cluster behind and isolated. Templates of existing human forms, based on the data filtered from the multiverse, were all made ready. Interestingly, due to what Arthur called ‘quantum fluctuation’, they appeared as different versions of themselves. My family was a good example of this. Arthur, for instance, was known as Harlan; Lucy Pennykettle was Penny; Zanna was Rosanna (Rosa for short); Elizabeth, Eliza; Bonnington, Boon. The one exception was David, who, because of the nature of his being, was always called 'David'. He could switch between the worlds as fast as he could think, though he was not always aware that he had done it...

Monday's word is: PROOFED!

2012-01-09T22:13:00.000Z

Hello, dragon fans. Forgive the very short blog post yesterday. We really were up against a tight deadline, reading through the proofs of THE FIRE ASCENDING - the US edition! Bizarrely, the US team is slightly ahead of the British one with this book, but TFA will still be published first in the UK (April) followed a month later in North America and Australia. It would have been dragontastic to get simultaneous worldwide release, but that kind of thing is out of our hands. We're just glad that no one will have too much longer to wait.

So, what is a proof? I hear some of you asking. Well, before a book goes for printing, the layouts are checked and rechecked for errors. This is done by someone called a copyeditor, but we read through the story as well, of course. This is the author's last chance to fiddle with the text, which he normally does right up until the last second. Can you imagine it? "STOP THE PRESSES! I FORGOT TO PUT A VITAL COMMA IN ON PAGE 249!" However, this time he was very good. He made hardly any changes at all, which shows how much he thinks of this book. His editors like it too. One of them called it 'fantastic' and the other one called it a 'masterpiece'. Wow. Bet you can feel his head swelling from where you are. Seriously, there is so much to like about TFA it's hard to know where to begin. The author tweeted this week that you should look out for part six, the bit where someone vital gets captured and a werewolf turns up and a major character is created from a rag doll... And there isn't a dragon in sight! Not in that section, anyway. I am going to try to persuade the author to let us include little snippets of the story (really little snippets) in some of the blog posts up to publication, just to give you all a taste of what's coming. Here, for instance, is the epigraph, the quote from the front of the book:

Time is like water; it finds its own levels...

That's a direct quote from one of the characters - but who?

Have fun guessing! Until next time, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SORRY!

2012-01-08T21:42:00.000Z

Dragon fans! The author is desperately hard at work reading the proofs of the US edition of The Fire Ascending (and I am helping him, of course), but expect a proper blog post tomorrow. In the meantime, here are a couple of pictures taken at a recent school visit to the brilliant St Peter's in Gloucestershire. Hrrr!

This week's word is: HAPPY

2012-01-01T20:27:00.000Z

As in New Year! Happy New Year, dragon fans. We hope that 2012 will bring all your hopes and wishes to fulfilment. The author does not make resolutions, simply because he forgets them within a few days! We have a resolution, though. And that is to bring you the best book of the Chronicles so far. THE FIRE ASCENDING is well on course for publication in the Spring. We all know it will be the last in the series, of course, but I can tell you now that we are already working on new ideas with the author. One at least will involve dragons.

But for now, we know you like to see outtakes from the books, so we thought we'd show you a piece that was left out of TFA. You may remember that the author wrote a very long chapter that he decided to cut - but he didn't throw it away. It was all to do with Alexa summarising what had happened at the end of DARK FIRE and what happened next. We're not going to show you all of it. We'll leave some for another time (in other words, here comes one of our famous cliffhangers!) But this is a world exclusive for blog followers. This might appear in the US version of RAIN AND FIRE later this year. But right now, it's presented for you. So here's Alexa, talking about Scuffenbury Hill and quantum physics etc. She is one smart cookie! Until next time, happy reading. Hrrr!

Somewhere over the vale of Scuffenbury, four darklings were destroyed by my father and the brave companions who fought alongside him. One of them was the queen dragon, Gawaine, brought out of stasis by unicorn magicks. Although the queen lost her life in the course of the battle, the Ix:Cluster was plunged into the fire eternal. For one sweet blink of time, goodness reigned and a new light dawned across a troubled Earth. Humans were awoken to their Premen past. Guardian dragons were poised to return. This planet that had once been their breeding ground was adjusting its environment to cope with their impact. Victory seemed assured.

But the dark fire was now about to make its mark. A unicorn became infected with the evil. The Ix, far from being removed or transformed, tainted Gaia and rose as a Shadow from the core of the planet. I was all the while monitoring this. I could not prevent the advance of the Shadow, but I flew to Scuffenbury with a force that could: the writing dragon we called Gadzooks.

As we arrived, the Shadow was beginning to coalesce into some kind of physical form. It was too late to mount a challenge outright. We knew nothing of its strengths – or weaknesses, for that matter. But that did not prevent it from attacking us. It recognised the power Gadzooks could wield and sent out a spike of dark energy. The bolt struck his pencil and fused to it. But by then, Gadzooks had done his work. He had visited all possible outcomes of the battle and returned to write the one word the Ix could not cope with: ‘sometimes’. The ambiguity of the word caused chaos within the Shadow. The battle stopped and the timepoint was suspended. The threat was not extinguished, merely checked. Help would be needed to defeat the Shadow.

A beacon was sent out across the universe.

Now, there was a strange, unexpected side-effect to this. Although the battle had taken place on Earth, the nexus covering the three linked worlds of Earth, the Fain dimension, Ki:mera, and the mirror world of Earth the Fain called ‘Co:pern:ica’ was suddenly tipped in favour of Co:pern:ica. My father saw what was going to happen just as Gadzooks was writing on his pad. I heard him warn my mother that ‘things might be different’. And so they were. Our collective consciousness was dramatically switched to the Co:pern:ican dimension, a place where we all had a very different presence. For a contemporaneous period of time our awareness would focus on a slightly altered state of existence. This affected everyone connected to Gadzooks, but only he and I were fully aware of the shift. Even my father, so used to Travelling between worlds, would be slow to recollect his parallel life on Earth. In fact it was another member of our family who first began to work it out.

Arthur Merriman, Elizabeth’s partner on Earth, was a professor of physics at the nearby university. He was an intelligent, thoughtful man, admired by everyone, especially my mother, who had treated him as a confidante during the years my father was missing. Arthur himself had been the victim of an Ix attack. He had lost his sight when the dark thought-beings had invaded his mind, narrowly escaping neural failure. The natural world was gone from his eyes, but Arthur was not entirely blind. He could commingle with Bonnington and use the katt’s sight as a visual aide. Mostly, however, he just looked inward.

In his quest to understand the workings of the universe, Arthur, like many physicists of his generation, was striving to come up with a ‘theory of everything’. His favourite notion was that the universe was not one bubble of existence, but an infinite number of parallel universes (a ‘multiverse’) which our souls could jump between and even lead different lives therein. In Arthur’s mind these universes were connected by consciousness and choice, though how it all worked was a puzzle to him.

In the garden at Wayward Crescent, he would sit me on the swing and talk about it. As he pushed me back and forth, he would muse about the unsolved laws of creation, which centred around his favourite subject: a branch of physics he called ‘quantum mechanics’. In his mind, he was never really talking to me (at least he didn’t think he was talking to me), just using me as an object to bounce his ideas off. He would say, for instance, “For all we know, Lexie, when the swing is in my hands you are in one universe, and when it flies away from me you enter another. If you giggle, then you enter a different world again. If you scream as you lose your balance, another. It’s what I call ‘the apple in the fruit bowl’ hypothesis. If you pick up the apple, you’ve entered that timeline and all of its possible consequences. But what happens when you throw away the apple core, for instance? Is it picked up by a bird? Does a pip fall onto soil and become a new tree? Does it just rot away? If you walk past the bowl then none of this happens – or does it? Do those options with the apple core already exist within the multiverse – or do we create each event according to desire?”

Little did Arthur know that I understood his hypothesis fully. But the limitations of Alexa’s vocabulary, plus the Higher’s ruling that I should stay ‘hidden’, meant I could not explain things to him. If I could have spoken freely, I would have told him that the nexus we were on was a small-scale example of his multiverse model. Earth and Co:pern:ica were parallel worlds linked through the Fain dimension, Ki:mera. What is there to know about Ki:mera? Nothing that can be easily explained in words. Ki:mera was more of a concept than a place. A state of being that humans, in their search to understand themselves, unknowingly aspired to. A state completely free of physical boundaries. Happiness defined by creative expression.

Purity of being.

Is-ness.

Is.

Yet despite this seemingly idyllic condition, the Fain had a strange, paradoxical weakness. Having evolved from the shackles of physical form, bizarrely they yearned to experience it again.

So it came to be that the Higher descended through the energy planes and commingled on Earth with many different forms of life (often causing leaps in the chain of evolution). At this time, dragons were the dominant species. The planet was a volatile, changing place but there was little to challenge the dragons’ superiority. The Fain looked upon dragons and saw that they were good. In them lay the pathway to complete fulfilment. By combining with a dragon’s inner spirit or fire, they could experience illumination.

But it wasn’t easy. Commingling with the auma of a low-vibrational neighbour species – a bird, for instance – was simple; the dragons proved more resistant. It was dangerous enough to attempt to combine with their physical body (like a child at the controls of a space shuttle, Arthur used to say), but their fire was almost impossible to bridge. That required the dragon’s total compliance. Many Fain were ‘extinguished’ in the earliest attempts, though that simply increased their desire to succeed.

And there was a growing complication. At the time that dragons ruled the blue planet, the Earth was sustaining its first full wave of a strongly-evolving biped species. The new lifeforms had reached a rapid level of self-awareness and were starting to question their place in the universe. Their potential was nowhere near as great as dragons, but their dexterity with tools and their gift of solving problems appealed to the thought-beings nevertheless. In an experiment they hoped would close the gap with dragons, they attempted different methods of neural engagement. The evolutionary tree once again jumped a branch and a new breed of human called ‘Premen’ was born. It was from here that things began to go wrong.

Unlike dragons, the Premen showed a tendency towards competitive aggression. They desired not to share the Is, but control it. Their combative instincts not only caused the Fain to retire from the project but had a disastrous consequence. The irreversible fusion of some units of Fain to some units of human resulted in a dark inversion of type. Fain with negative intent were created. They polluted the whole idea of the Is, even mocking the word itself.

They called themselves the Ix.

They had to act.

This week's word is: TREAT!

2011-12-25T11:24:00.000Z

Happy Christmas, dragon fans! There is only one thing on the agenda today - an extract from THE FIRE ASCENDING. Just click on the link at the top of the blog and you'll go straight to it. The author is enjoying what he calls some 'pipe and slippers' time today i.e. no writing. But the dragons are always here to serve.

Have a lovely Christmas and we'll be back in the New Year. Until then, happy reading!

HRRR!

This week's word is: BIRTHDAY

2011-12-19T00:42:00.001Z

Hello, dragon fans. It might seem hard to believe, but the author was 57 this week. He thinks he's getting old, of course. But in dragon years, he'd barely be out of his egg! He wants me to thank everyone who wished him happy birthday, both on twitter and via the website. He says you all got the day wrong (basically, never believe anything you read on Wikipedia). We'll leave you to work out the exact date for yourselves. We're not telling.

Among the cards he received was one from his Aunt (not Aunt Gwyneth, we hasten to add) who sent him two old photographs. One of him when he was six, and one of his mother and father, which is sitting on his desktop as we blog. We did think we might put the mum and dad one up, but plumped in the end for the young author - here he is... Cute or what? Weird haircut...

As for presents. Well, we gave him a conker in its shell that G'reth had found in the garden. Mrs Author bought him his new computer and a DVD of a TV series called 'Rev'. Mrs Author's mother bought him a coconut bar that we in England know as a 'Bounty'. But possibly the best present came from a friend, and that was a remote-controlled helicopter! Guess who hasn't done any kind of writing since his birthday? In all honesty, we didn't really expect him to be scribbling stories while we're waiting for the proofs of THE FIRE ASCENDING to come in for checking, but it's a good job it wasn't deadline week this week! Everyone is having to learn to duck expertly when the thing comes near. The last I saw, it was buried somewhere in the boughs of the Christmas tree with smoke pouring out of its engine...ahem.

So, next week is Christmas Day. Tune in then for an extract from the book! Those of you with very long memories might remember it began, "I was a boy of 12 when I watched a dragon die..." And it's not David doing the watching - it's Agawin. All will be revealed next week. Until then, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SCREENPLAY

2011-12-12T17:51:00.004Z

Hello, dragon fans. Please accept our sincere apologies for the lack of a blog post yesterday. The author has bought a new computer, which he insisted on trying to set up himself. It seemed to take rather a lot longer than the manual described. Of course, if he'd allowed Gwendolen to do it there wouldn't have been a problem. Some people never learn...

First, we have to say a big hello to all our new fans in Oakham and Leicester and thank the lovely librarians, Lucy and Henrietta respectively, for inviting the author into their schools. Both events went extremely well. The charming Marcus Sedgwick, whose books we like, was at Oakham School.

Amongst the many questions the author was asked at the schools was, 'Now that you've finished the dragon books, what are you going to do next?' This was also a popular question at the Orchard Christmas party in London last Tuesday. The truth is, we're not really sure. I have scribbled down a few ideas to discuss with the author over the Christmas period. One project under consideration is a proper prequel to The Fire Within. Regular blog followers will know that The Dragons of Wayward Crescent series was supposed to collectively form a prequel, but for some reason those books never took off, and it now seems they will be limited to just four. A prequel would be excellent, but it may not happen just yet.

No, the only consistent reply the author has made to the 'what next?' question is this: "I'm going to write a screenplay." Over the years, so many of you have written in wondering why we've never made a movie from the books. Well, it's not quite as easy as you think. First, a producer has to register their interest. This has happened in the past, but no one seems to quite know how to go about filming the books - but we think we do. We believe we should miss out TFW altogether and basically film ICEFIRE, cherry-picking some scenes from later in the series. We think we'd start with the sequence in DARK FIRE where Bergstrom discovers dragontongue in a cave on the Hella Glacier, then cut to David at Wayward Crescent, just before he meets Zanna at college. Sadly, Sophie probably wouldn't be in the movie. But you can't have everything.

This week's word is: TEXAS

2011-12-04T19:17:00.002Z

Hello, dragon fans. This is the author, Chris d'Lacey, here. Gadzooks is having a sleep. He's been working his scales off all weekend to finish the final edits for THE FIRE ASCENDING. It is DONE. YES! Tomorrow it goes off to my editor at Orchard books and the publication process for the UK edition begins. It's expected on April 1st 2012. Next up will be some tweaks for the US edition. There are always a few changes that have to be made for the American market because I'm British, of course, and I write that way. I have an excellent team in New York who prepare the text for the US and I expect to be liaising with them soon. I know they are very excited to see the new book. If you're reading this guys, get ready - it's a good one.

You must be wondering about the header by now. Well, some weeks ago, Zookie put up a post which promised news of another trip to America. And here it is. I've been invited to go and speak at a librarians' conference in Texas in April next year. This is very exciting for several reasons. First, it will be great to be back in the USA. Last time I was in New York & Washington, which was fabulous. BUt I have always wanted to visit the deep south. I like country music (the hard-edged kind) and would love to visit a honky tonk bar! In fact, I've already polished my cowboy boots in readiness! I knew some cowboys once who played in a band called 'Lore and the Legends'. I asked one of them what Texas was like and he said, "Hotter than dog s-" Well, I won't continue that sentence. I'll be sure to take my sun block, don't worry. On a more literary note, librarians are fantastic people to talk to because books are their life. I always enjoy meeting large groups of them. And it's perfect timing for the release of TFA. Plenty of promotional opportunities! And...get this. I've been asked to appear on a panel with none other than Christopher Paolini, author of Eragon and most recently Inheritance. How cool is that? What will Zookie make of him, I wonder?

Honestly, I'm really looking forward to meeting CP. I have to confess, I've only read book one of the Inheritance cycle. I didn't stop there because I didn't like it, but because I rarely have the time to read much anyway (and they are BIGGGG books). We are very different writers, of course, though fans of Christopher's work will probably love the opening 20,000 words of TFA, which is pure fantasy genre. I read a few reviews of Inheritance on the net and was disappointed to see that some fans were unhappy with the ending. I was worried about this for TFA. Readers who've followed a series this long (nearly 12 years!!) have great expectations, and rightly so. All I can say is, an author will only write what they feel works. The final few parts of TFA are brief - and unusual - but they do explain an awful lot. And they're very moving. I hope you'll all be happy with it. I know I am - and Zookie is too. Until next time, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: ANNE

2011-11-27T17:47:00.004Z

Hello, dragon fans. The author was saddened this week to learn of the death of the novelist Anne McCaffrey, who passed away at home, in Ireland, at the age of 85. If you're wondering who this lady is, then you clearly haven't read her books. The author is often asked if he can recommend other novels or another series of books for his fans to read. And while he will frequently point them in the way of Tolkien or the two Philips Reeve & Pullman, or even Patrick Ness and Jonathan Stroud, when it comes to dragons it's either Christopher Paolini, of course, or the wonderful Anne McCaffrey. Waaay back before Eragon was finding dragon eggs, Anne McC was writing fantastic books about a planet she called 'Pern'. Does that name ring any bells? Remember the alternative planet in Fire World, Co:pern:ica? This was inspired by the scientist, Copernicus. But there was also a nod in there to Anne McC. The author read most of her novels shortly after marrying Mrs Author, who was a huge SF fan. The books are a kind of science fiction/fantasy cross. Most of them have the word 'dragon' in the title (Dragonsong, Dragonflight, The White Dragon etc.) A good one to begin with is Dragonsdawn, which tells how Pern was colonized by settlers from Earth. Pern is a lush, glorious planet full of vegetation, but is under threat from something called 'Thread', these are spores that fall from space like rain and destroy organic matter. The only things that can combat Thread are fire lizards. They can burn the spores (and do a heck of a lot more as well). Realising the lizards themselves are not enough to protect the planet, the colonizing scientists genetically upgrade them into full blown dragons. These dragons are ridden by humans who can bond with them telepathically, hence giving the major series its memorable name: The Dragonriders of Pern. If you haven't read any of these books and you're stuck for something one day, pop into your local library and ask to borrow one. They're probably most suited to 'young adults'.

Talking of libraries, you perhaps remember that a couple of weeks ago the author visited Teignmouth Community College to open the new library in the primary school. If anyone from TCC is reading this, hello! It was a lovely morning, thank you. And the new library was brilliant. I thought for one moment it might all go horribly wrong when the author produced a piece of genuine dragon scale and invited a boy up from the audience to touch it. As any dragon enthusiast will know, touching dragon skin when you're not used to it is liable to set your hair on fire. Fortunately, the boy survived with nothing more than warm hands and intriguing memories. The author only allowed him to touch the scale briefly, which made the boy go 'ooh'. People have since told us the boy has been seen in school with steam coming out of his ears, but we don't believe a word of it... (a-hem).

You'll be pleased to hear that editing on THE FIRE ASCENDING is 90% done. Just a few more tweaks then off to the printer it goes. The author was asked on Twitter if he'd put up a picture of the cover. Click on the link at the top of the page you'll go straight to it. Very soon, we'll put up a piece of sample text, but this will have to be approved by the publisher first. In the meantime, here's a pic of our hero at Teignmouth, showing where ideas come from - a pinboard behind his head! Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: AFTERWARDS

2011-11-20T20:12:00.002Z

Hello, dragon fans. There ought to be a sign in dragontongue for 'afterwards', just like there is for 'sometimes', but none of us know of one, probably because what comes after the completion of a big novel like THE FIRE ASCENDING is too predictable. After the writing, comes the edit...

Catherine, the author's UK editor, loved the book, particularly the opening sections, which we read again this afternoon. They are fab. You will be gripped, hrrr! But in the middle of the book was what we call in the business 'an information dump'. This was the author's fault, not mine. He thought that readers new to the series (at book seven!!) might want to know something about what had gone before, particularly DARK FIRE and FIRE WORLD. So he spent weeks putting together an interesting piece which explained what happened at Scuffenbury Hill and also went into considerable detail about the mirror world of Earth, Co:pern:ica. But when it came to the editorial read through, it was clear that this piece was slowing the pace too much. So the author, rather bravely, chopped out 6,000 words of the 10,000 he'd written, patched part four to part six with a new piece of writing, and now the book hums along evenly. But don't despair, dragon fans. The words that were edited out will be put on the notepad one day, possibly even before publication. Anyone keen to know why Co:pern:ica was created will get to read it here one day. Think of it as a 'bonus track'.

So of course we didn't post midweek because we were far too busy reading and tweaking. Sorry about that. (We're not answering much fan mail either for the same reasons.) But we can tell you that the book is shaping up to be really, really good. The author is particularly fond of the ending, which is very moving. Do David and Zanna get together? Of course they do - but not without a surprise or two. Is there a horrible cliffhanger? No. There's a little bit of intrigue, but no 'oh my goodness, now I'll have to wait another year to find out what happens...'. For us, the book ends on the perfect note. The whole series has been about two things: creativity, and the idea the dragons are real. The last few lines bring these concepts together beautifully. I can't tell you what they are, but we think you'll feel satisfied. And that's what matters.

So this week it's a bit more tweaking. Then there will probably be some edits for the US edition. Then...Christmas, and rest. After that...well, who knows. I will go on inspiring the author for as long as he wants to write. Will he write about dragons again...?

Possibly.

Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: FINISHED!

2011-11-13T22:26:00.002Z

Hello, dragon fans. Yes, you read that correctly. Barring editing, THE FIRE ASCENDING came to a close at 22:23 hours tonight (UK time). Unedited, it is 108,465 words long. The author, not surprisingly, needs to sleep. And so do I, zzzzz. But there will be a full report midweek, we promise. For now, know that the seventh book is done. April/May next year for its release. Happy zedding- I mean, reading. Hrrr!

Today's word is: MANFLU

2011-11-10T12:11:00.002Z

Hello, dragon fans. Forgive the lack of a blog post on Sunday. The author was suffering from 'man flu', commonly known as 'a cold'. As any woman out there will know, this is a serious condition, for which even Gretel does not have a cure. The only remedy is time and a truck load of tissues. However, despite him saying he felt like he had a basketball stuffed in his head all weekend, he still valiantly wrote over 10,000 words last week (amazing for him) and FINISHED the main part of THE FIRE ASCENDING. There is now just a series epilogue to go (about 2000 words)and that's it. More about this on Sunday, plus an exciting announcement of a new visit to America next April... Until then, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: DARNIT

2011-10-30T19:46:00.002Z

Hello, dragon fans. You probably guessed from the subject word that a certain someone HASN'T finished THE FIRE ASCENDING - but then again he still has a day to go. People always ask at this stage 'How much more do you think you'll write?'. The answer to that, of course, is, 'How long is the average novel?' Erm... Honestly, it's impossible to say. While I keep coming up with ideas and he's still keen to write them down, the word count just creeps up and up. The important thing is let the story flow at its natural pace. If that means being a few days over the delivery date, so be it, because what we all want is a decent read. The book is into the nineties now. 91,500 in fact. That's longer than DARK FIRE by nearly 2000 words; shorter than FIRE WORLD by about 7,000. So about right, really. Are we happy with it? Yes, very happy. Is it weird? Of course it is! Is there lots of adventure? Tons. Is it gory in places? You bet. Do David and Zanna get back together? Not telling. Does Gwilanna get her come uppance? Yes - and no. Does anyone die? Yes. Anyone important? Yes. Who???? Ah, you'll have to read the book. Agh! When's it out? Next April/May. When will it be finished? ................. Next weekend. Promise? Yes. With knobs on? YES!

YAY!!!

But that won't be the end, of course. There will be editing and proofing and a bit of chopping and changing to make sure the continuity is right. But the crucial thing for the fans, the publishers, Agent Ed and all is that it's NEARLY there. Seriously. This has been a long hard year for the author what with moving the den to the sea and everything, and though we rarely admit it we're all secretly proud of him. Looking back through the book there are moments of great tension, but it's impossible to compare this book to the others. It doesn't have the twists and turns of DARK FIRE, the emotional thrust of THE FIRE ETERNAL or the sheer weirdness of FIRE WORLD. Instead, it has a mix of those things and more. Up until the last two sections it's narrated by Agawin, the mysterious character from FIRE WORLD. Don't worry if you can't remember Agawin, you don't need to. You'll become very familiar with him as you read the long first section, which actually forms about one fifth of the book. Only towards the end do we break away from him. You'll see. Anyway, gotta go and keep the author awake- I mean, ticking over. Next week. The big celebration. Until then, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: COUNTDOWN

2011-10-23T20:36:00.002+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. Yes, can you sense the tension in the air? Just 8 DAYS to go before the author is officially supposed to hand in the manuscript of THE FIRE ASCENDING, the last of the Last Dragon Chronicles.

So, how's it going, I hear you ask? Well, he stayed very calm last week (despite trying to fiddle with the central heating boiler and spraying water all over the kitchen) and tapped away consistently, producing just over 1000 words every day. That's pretty good for him. Some of them he's chopped out again this weekend. But we're fairly happy and looking forward to finding out exactly who gets bumped off and who doesn't! The big conflict is about to happen. Everyone will be involved, of course, David, Zanna, Lucy, Tam, Alexa, Gawain, Gwilanna, the darklings, the ice bears (yep, they're back), the wonderful firebirds and erm, there has been a suggestion that a certain SQUIRREL might make an appearance. Oh, dear... He's complaining about his fingers, by the way (the author, not the squirrel!). His knuckles hurt when he types, he says. Mind you he types like he's playing the xylophone (badly - hah!) Bash, bash, bash. After TFA is done, he'll be taking a rest...

And did the listener get a name? Yes, he did! It was hidden in a box in the fridge all the time (no, it's not Electrolux). There's a very sweet (if weird) section at the end where he helps Alexa to help the bears to help her father. You'll see when you read it. Absolutely nothing else to report. It's just full steam ahead to the magic two words... THE END. Next Sunday, we'll know definitively where we're at. Until then, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: 81

2011-10-16T18:28:00.004+01:00

...as in 81,000 words.

Hello, dragon fans. It's me, Gadzooks. Don't believe a word he tells you about me having 'three weeks off'! This is my blog and I'm going to write it. So there.

The author didn't do any 'proper' work this morning, but instead concentrated on 'tweaking' his last 10,000 or so words - this after Mrs Author had cast her scowl- I mean, her critical eye over the manuscript. As always, he did a word count at the end of the session, which reported that he'd got 80,997 words of THE FIRE ASCENDING in total. Annoyed, he went back and added 6 more, which took him to 81,003. That made him feel so much better! Authors, eh? I blow a smoke ring in despair...

Mrs Author is very pleased with what she's reading of this final section. The narrative splits for the first time here and alternate sections follow David and Alexa. Would you believe the author STILL doesn't know exactly what's going to happen at the end? ('Cos I won't tell him!) This makes him fretful, which just makes Mrs Author come back with one of her favourite sayings, "The story is already written somewhere, you've just got to listen for it." Ooh err. That's a weird concept: the idea that stories and characters are floating around in some sort of creative cloud and all we have to do is catch them in a bucket when it rains... Or is that a metaphor too far? We liked the wry tweet after the author's notebook posting last week which asked, "Does this mean that TFA is going to be as confusing as the other six?" Absolutely! But weirdly, it's also much more together. And it explains a lot of things, of course. But maybe not everything... Erm...

And talking of listening... is the listening dragon in the Pennykettles' kitchen about to get a name...? I was thinking about it this morning. Could one of the biggest unanswered questions in the Chronicles be about to have a resolution? Hmmm. Watch this space...

While the author has been tapping away (just two weeks now to his deadline - agh!) Agent Ed has been at the Frankfurt book fair (in Germany) trying to sell the Chronicles overseas. The latest country to pick up on us is Brazil (school visit, anyone???) but we'd like to get a few more in Europe if we can. Maybe this poster of THE FIRE ASCENDING will help to do the trick. Note the size of it! That's Agent Ed standing underneath the display. Pretty big, huh?

Right, back to pondering on the windowsill for me. And kitchen duties for the author. It's cauliflower cheese for tea, I believe. Can't wait. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SURREAL

2011-10-09T20:33:00.003+01:00

Okay, dragon fans. Hands up (or even paws up) anyone who thought The Last Dragon Chronicles couldn't get any weirder? Wrong! This final section is probably stranger than ANYTHING that's gone before. And I do mean anything. This is Chris d'Lacey, the author, by the way, in case you're missing Zookie's laconic style. I'm taking over from him for the next few weeks while he sorts out what the heck is going on in my crazy head (erm...?) Take this morning, for instance. I embarked on my usual 750-1000 words, but I wasn't really looking forward to it. As I've said before, much of this book is historical in nature and takes place waaaay back in time and well away from Wayward Crescent. But you'd have hunted me down in giant packs if I hadn't brought the narrative back to the Pennykettle house at some stage. The problem was, what to do once I got there. This book eventually picks up from the incidents at the end of DARK FIRE. Forget Scuffenbury for a moment. If you remember, Liz had fallen ill at number 42 (after Gwilanna had meddled and released the dark fire by mistake from her body) and Arthur had ended up in the wardrobe! So I did have some strong loose ends to tie up and sent Alexa back to sort it out. But then Gwilanna changed the timeline and...well, as you can imagine, everything went a little strange. Don't even ask about David and Lucy. Their story is even more bizarre. Messing around with time makes me feel like I'm writing an episode of Doctor Who. If I gave David a sonic screwdriver I think he'd be on TV every Saturday night. So, loyal followers, I can't tell you what happens, I can only give you hints. Watch out for some real peculiarities in this book. And when it's all done, don't ask me to explain a WORD of it. Time is practically impossible to wrap your head around. You just have to read it, enjoy it and totally ABSORB it.

Have to go. Tons of stuff to do in the new house. Yesterday was all about buying bath mats. Today it was a leaking radiator. What fun. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SOMERSET

2011-10-03T14:51:00.007+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. Apologies for the lack of a message on the notepad last week. It was one of those strange days when there was so much going on in dragon world that we all ended up asleep on the sofa by 8pm on Sunday night, even Gwendolen, which is rare indeed. Anyway, we’re back this week to report on two of the author’s events. If you were out and about in the lovely English county of Somerset this weekend you might have seen our hero TWICE. On Friday he spoke to a large gathering of primary school teachers at a wonderful venue called Dillington House. See the picture above! He was there to open a literacy conference. Authors like nothing more than to talk about what they do and he managed it for an hour without boring anyone (we hope). We stayed the whole day for the rest of the lectures, which were all informative and entertaining. We particularly liked it when one lady put up a slide of the kind of non-fiction topics children like to read about (e.g. football, ‘Glee’, rockets) and asked, “Can anyone suggest any other topics?” There was a pause, and then a quiet voice said, “Tractors.” Somerset has a large farming community…

We were back in Somerset again yesterday, in the historic Roman city of Bath, to take part in the Bath Children’s Literature Festival. This time, the author did not have a solo slot, but shared a great event with eminent dragonologist Dr Ernest Drake (author of the exquisite ‘Dragonology’ books) and the witty Jasper Fforde. Jasper is best known for his adult novels, but his latest book ‘The Last Dragonslayer’ is really for children and young teens. It’s an amusing mix of magic and dragon lore. A great read. We recommend it. Each of the authors read from their latest books (ours read the section from FIRE WORLD when David is attacked outside the librarium by the red firebird) then answered questions from the audience. “Have you ever been bitten by a dragon?” one person asked. The author replied no, but he had been SPIKED by an isoscele on several occasions. Mmmm. I wonder why. Our favourite question was the last one: “Do dragons wear hats?” What?! I have never seen a dragon in headgear, ever, but it does beg the question what type of hat would we wear if we did…? Thank you, on the author’s behalf, to everyone who came to the event, both newcomers to the books and dedicated fans alike (hello Katie). Without you, we couldn’t go on. Next week, it’s back to THE FIRE ASCENDING and the thorny matter of the final section. Lots and lots of pondering to do. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: FLOORED

2011-09-18T20:17:00.003+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. Chris d'Lacey, the author, here. I've given Gadzooks the evening off after he put in a marathon session of thinking, pacing and smoke ring blowing today to give me the inspiration to finish part 6 of THE FIRE ASCENDING. Just one more part and an epilogue to go and that's it: the end of The Last Dragon Chronicles :( Boy, it's been tough in the past couple of months. A tip for any wannabe writers out there: don't ever try to write a novel while you're moving house. As you'll know from previous blogs, me and Mrs Author have been up to our ears in electricians, decorators and plumbers. This week it was the turn of the carpet men, which obviously means we are progressing with the new house if we're putting carpets down - and we were, until we reached the kitchen floor, which was rotten and had to be replaced. This meant the units had to come out, the sink, the lot. I was going to put up a picture of the work in progress. But who wants to see what was basically a pit? Anyway, we're getting there, slowly but surely.

Quick update on Burrito, the stone gryphon who broke his wings. We managed to glue them back with some kind of industrial-strength bonding gunko. He's a little bruised but he's doing fine. If I can find some appropriate masonry paint I'll touch up the chips he lost. He says hrrr!

So, nothing much to report on the books this week. Catherine, my lovely editor, did send me the full cover artwork for TFA. It looks GREAT. A bit more purply than the pic you can find on one of the previous blogs. When I've got time this week, I'll scan it and put it up here as a page.

Anyway, in the absence of having much else to say, I'll answer a couple of questions. These are things I'm asked EVERY week in fan mail. Forgive me if you've already had or know the answers; some of you haven't.

Is there going to be a movie of the books? No news on this at all yet. We have had interest in the past, and I'm sometimes asked to invent my dream cast, but there is no movie scheduled. What I am planning to do, however, is write a screenplay based on the series as a whole which I will then take to Hollywood.

Will there be another book after DARK FIRE? Honestly, I do get asked this all the time. Yes, guys, FIRE WORLD, the sixth book, is now out in paperback in the UK and is due out soon in the USA.

When will THE FIRE ASCENDING come out? TFA is scheduled for release in hardcover in April/May 2012. That's a definite for the UK. Not sure yet about the USA, but it shouldn't be far behind.

Why are there colons in some of the words in FIRE WORLD? This is just a style thing. FW is set in an alternate world that is like Earth but not quite the same. The people there have a slightly different vo:cabulary, that's all.

Will the 'real' David, Zanna etc. appear in THE FIRE ASCENDING? Yes - and no. David is in the book for sure, and the others make appearances. But TFA is mainly an historical book about how things came to be as they are. Don't be disappointed. It's a great book with some terrific storylines, particularly involving Gwilanna, but it's not overtly like the first five books. I had the opportunity at the end of DARK FIRE to finish the series and not leave a cliffhanger. But there were still things I wanted to explore (particularly alternate worlds and some of the early stuff about dragons) so I ran the series on. And I'm glad I did, because FIRE WORLD was just fantastic to write. And TFA has been very interesting too. If I'd had the choice, I would have taken as long as THREE YEARS to write TFA, because I think it deserved a sort of Lord of the Rings saga approach. What you've got instead is a potted history, told by Agawin. Maybe next year I'll sit down and start planning out a saga. I'd like to stick with dragons because I'm fascinated by them now (they're all looking at me). But I can't write about the Pennykettles, obviously. Their 'zeitgeist' is now. They will be done with after TFA - unless I ever write the extended Dragons of Wayward Crescent series. We'll see.

Well, that was a much longer blog post than I was expecting. Hope you enjoyed it! Till next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: BURRITO

2011-09-11T20:46:00.003+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. The author is in everybody's bad books this week. All because of the picture you can see. It's well known that there are lots of dragons in the Crescent, but Mrs Author likes to collect stone ornaments of all kinds. We have eagles, dragons, a badger and even an otter called Valentine in the garden. We also have Burrito, who is a Gryphon. Earlier this week, Burrito was perched on his stand (a stone plinth about three feet high) when the wind got up and the shed door blew open. SOMEONE hadn't shut it properly. Poor Burrito was knocked off his perch and his wings broke in two places (not his ears as the author tweeted earlier this week). Fortunately, the breaks were clean and we hope to be able to glue them back. If not, the author will be sleeping in the shed from now on...

As a result of this, he's kept himself to himself most of the day. He spent most of the afternoon painting the lounge and most of the morning murdering characters! Don't worry. None that you know. As we revealed a few weeks ago, there are several historical sections in THE FIRE ASCENDING and one of them, which is all to do with Gwilanna's upbringing, is pretty gruesome. If you thought it was bad when Gawaine sank her claws into a character in DARK FIRE, you ain't read nothing yet. The new book has a very strong hint of Brothers Grimm about it. We're really looking forward to seeing it on the market.

There have been some fantastic tweets about FIRE WORLD this week. Thank you, everyone, for reading it and taking the time to tell the world what you think. If TFA gets the same sort of positive feedback that FW is getting we're in for a spectacular end to the series. Time to go. He needs another paint brush. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SEVENTY

2011-09-04T17:48:00.003+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. Tempting as it is to suggest that the reason for the subject header is to do with the author's age, it's actually to do with the number of words reached in THE FIRE ASCENDING. (You have to multiply the seventy by a thousand (hang on, calculator...)) At 3:38 this afternoon our hero was still 309 words short of the 70K, which means he's actually written (don't put the calculator away) 69,691. He's so frustrated at not hitting the 70 that he's gone off to have a cup of tea and a bun. (It's a Sunday afternoon thing.)

Progress on the book has been so slow over the past two months that you'd be inclined to believe that a clever dragon had suspended time (ahem). The house move is the main reason that things have been patchy, but the middle section of the book has required a lot of thought. He is keen to make sure that TFA can be read by anyone new to the series, but we also want to avoid too much trawling over old ground for all of you who are familiar with the books. So what you get is a potted history of the first six novels, told by Alexa. The trick is to make it interesting and add in new information along with the historical stuff - and, of course, it must be seamless. The explanation of the origins of Co:pern:ica (the 'fire world' of the book title) is probably the best and, strangely, the funniest section. Not LOL funny, just faintly humorous. Without giving too much away, the Fain conceive Co:pern:ica but get it wrong. It turns out that the race of 'superior' thought beings are not quite as perfect as they thought (hah) they were. And now a new force is emerging to take control and put the novel through it's final paces. Again, no clues, but the hint was present in DARK FIRE...

Good news for American fans: Mrs Author has finished the US edition companion book to the series (RAIN & FIRE) which will be sent off to the publisher shortly. Bad news for American fans: we don't expect the companion book to come out until the series is finished (i.e. after TFA's release). But hey, at least you'll have had TFA by then.

Thanks again for all your great emails and tweets about FIRE WORLD. Don't forget the paperback is out right now in the UK. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: EDINBURGH

2011-08-29T10:21:00.003+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. You may have gathered from the subject header that this week's blog is something to do with Scotland. And you'd be right. The author has just returned from a visit to the fantastic Edinburgh Book Festival, where he did two talks - one to an audience of schoolchildren and another, sell-out talk, to a mix of children and adults. What is there to say about the Edinburgh festival that hasn't already been said? Well, this year, we got to stay in the wonderful Roxburghe Hotel, one of the oldest and grandest hotels in the city. The author was pleased to discover a healthy supply of shortbread biscuits to go with his tea. A big thumbs up there. The only downside was we had to leave for a flight to Exeter at stupid o'clock in the morning and so missed breakfast on the second day. And no matter how good room service might be, he can't bear to wake them up for a bowl of soggies at 4am. Well done the Edinburgh Airbus service for running buses that early in the morning, too! And believe it or not, in all the six times we've been to Edinburgh, that morning was the only time it has ever rained...

One of the best things about the festival is the atmosphere. Charlotte Square, where the action takes place, is buzzing non-stop with people wanting to talk about books. Proper treebooks, not ebooks. Everywhere you look there's something happening. Every theatre or marquee has a programme of at least six events, to satisfy all tastes. There's a fantastic bookshop, coffee shop and ice cream stall. Photographs of authors hang all over the place. For the authors themselves there's a special 'backstage' area called a yurt, where they can sit around and chat to fellow writers, use the internet, drink tea and coffee (or wine) and nibble away at fruit or flapjacks and other tasty treats. For the first time ever the author took the plunge and had a bowl of haggis (a kind of sausage mix with attitude), neeps (boiled swede, we think, though they sound like they ought to be turnips/turneeps) and tatties (potatoes). Very enjoyable. What took us so long to latch onto this brilliant Scottish dish? Well, this is the man who was 28 before he had a Chinese takeaway. Not exactly adventurous, eh?

Our favourite experience at a big festival, of course, is meeting the audience, both during the talks and afterwards at the book signing. People often ask him 'what's the best bit about being an author?' and he always replies, without fail, talking to the fans. We'd like to extend a big thank you to everyone who bought a book or came up to chat or simply just listened to the talks. We hope you were entertained and inspired. And if you've sent a message through the website, we'll try and get back to you as soon as we possibly can. Things are a little bit busy right now. Mrs Author is reaching the final stages of the US edition of RAIN & FIRE, and he of course is rattling away at TFA. But he will reply.

One last thing. He promised on Twitter that he'd put up a picture of 'Gable' today, a dragon figure he bought to go on his roof! You know how you often see gargoyles on buildings? Well, if you're ever in the Torbay area of England look out for Gable. Very soon he'll be right on the apex of the author's house. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: EXTRA

2011-08-21T23:05:00.003+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Before we start, just a quick reminder that the author is appearing at the Edinburgh Literature Festival this coming Friday, August 26th. It might be difficult to get tickets now, but if you have and you're coming, don't forget to bring any books you want signed. Hrrr!

Believe it or not, the author has just appeared in a movie! Don't get excited. It's nothing to do with us. Still no news about the Chronicles yet. The film in question is a project of the author's good friend Rod Duncan, who, you may remember, has written a zombie flick called, 'How to Make a Movie for 43 Pounds' or just '43 Pounds' for short. Well, tonight they were shooting the final scenes, which all took place in and around a cinema cafe. Now, it's a well known fact that the author is about as good at acting as a polar bear is at threading a needle, but thankfully he didn't have a single line to say. In movie-speak he was what is known as an 'extra'. In other words, he was one of lots of people sitting in the cafe chatting aimlessly in the background - which he can do brilliantly. (You had to be there.) Things got a little more difficult when he was asked to do the same thing - in silence. You try having a conversation where you have to move your lips but no words come out. It's hard! But his real breakthrough came when the director singled him out, along with five other people, to be filmed walking down the street and entering the cinema. He said to the director, "What's my motivation for this?" The director said, "Erm, you're going to see a movie." The author said, "How do you want me to look? Thoughtful? Intelligent? Slightly mysterious?" The director said, "I want you to look like you're going to a movie." The author nodded. "Glasses on or off?" The director frowned. "I could choose someone else for this role if you like?" The author took the hint. He left his glasses on, but took them off and put them into his glasses case as he was filmed approaching the cinema. Genius. We foresee an Oscar. (Not.)

Book news. Well, he's been tinkering all week with Part 5 of THE FIRE ASCENDING which at present is titled 'Being Alexa'. It will probably surprise none of you to hear that Alexa is the character who explains everything. Not only does she tell us how and why Co:pern:ica came into being, she also reveals where Guinevere came from - along with a host of other things. How can a five year old know so much? Well, fans of the books will have guessed by now that there's a bit more to Alexa than meets the (dragon) eye (hah). All will be revealed next year. Plus, Mrs Author has been hard at work on the US version of the Rain & Fire companion book. This is an extended version of the UK edition which will take in ALL seven books of the series. We think it will come out in America after TFA.

This week, the number of people following us on Twitter overtook the number who follow the blog. We like tweeting. It's a good way to keep in touch with the world at a moment's notice. But all the BIG news will still be here. In case you missed it earlier in the week, here's a joke the author liked: What do you call a man who used to like tractors? An extractor fan! Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: COVER

2011-08-14T08:53:00.002+01:00

Hello dragon fans. This week's blog simply speaks for itself. Here is the image you've all been waiting for, the cover of THE FIRE ASCENDING. The little 'angel' you see in the dragon's eye is Alexa, of course. She's been kept a little 'misty' on purpose, just to add to the intrigue. The author's publisher was a little concerned that the book would not appeal to boys if the angel was too prominent, but we think it's a potent mix: angels and dragons. It made G'reth go hrrr! anyway. We'll keep you updated over the next few months with the progress of the story, but for now enjoy this. Show it to your friends. This is the last official cover of The Last Dragon Chronicles. And it's cool, don't you think? Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: ROALD

2011-08-07T20:35:00.003+01:00

That's Roald as in 'Dahl'. 'Why is he the subject of the blog?' you may ask. Well, no particular reason. He was one of the author's favourite writers and rumour has it he used to work in a shed with a tray across his lap. Are you getting the connection with the photograph now? This is the author working in his mother-in-law's summer house! He was sent to the bottom of the garden by Mrs Author when she went to her mum's to do some spring cleaning (erm, in the summer). You can just see a power supply cable running from the laptop across the WET grass back to the house!! Thankfully, he didn't explode while he was tapping away at the novel and I'm happy to report he's still on track with THE FIRE ASCENDING. This is a most unusual book because he's redrafting EVERYTHING he's written, ready for a big push to complete the story over the next six weeks. This doesn't mean you'll be able to read it at the end of September, sorry. Sadly, you'll have to wait until publication in April 2012. But it's shaping up nicely. And talking of favourite authors, we were clearing out an old wardrobe in our new house this week and found a copy of 'My Brother's Ghost' by Allan Ahlberg - the man who first persuaded the author to try his hand at children's books...

Unfortunately, this has to be a short post this week because we've been travelling a lot. However, any fans who are keen to hear the author speak (in the UK) might like to know that he's appearing at the Edinburgh Literary Festival on August 26th and he's also at the Bath Literary Festival on October 2nd. Bring your books along if you want them signed! Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: THREE

2011-07-31T19:57:00.002+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Any day now we expect to have the cover of THE FIRE ASCENDING ready to view. All the tweaks have been done and the blurb has been written. Alexa is in the eye! As for the book itself, progress has been slow over the past few weeks, largely because of moving house. So rather than hammer down lots of new text, the author has been going over the first half of the book, trying to get it spot on. The theory is that if you have a strong start (which he does, part one of TFA is GREAT) the rest will naturally follow. This is probably the hardest book he's had to write because he wants people new to the series to be able to read it as a standalone title, but he also needs to tie up all the loose ends. Tricky! He now has only THREE MONTHS to achieve that. We have 65,000 words written and will hope to reach 90-100,000 as before. But a story should only be as long as it needs to be. If it finishes at 75,000 so be it. (It won't.)

Someone else who'd like him to hurry up and finish is Mrs Author. She has been tweaking the RAIN AND FIRE companion book for the USA, but can't finish it until the author gives her a decent amount of TFA so that she can choose some passages to use. The pressure is definitely on. It's hard to believe that after ten years of scribbling inspirational notes on my pad, this will be my last few months working on the Chronicles. But all good things must come to an end eventually. Our minds are slowly beginning to turn to what comes next, but the most important thing right now is to get TFA wrapped up nicely. We know exactly how it's going to end. How to get there is the difficult bit. But we will - for our loyal fans. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: MOVED

2011-07-24T22:02:00.002+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. A major announcement this week. The Dragons' Den has moved! After 32 years of living in Leicester, which is right in the middle of England, the author and Mrs Author have decided to move to Devon, in the south west of England. They have bought a lovely house by the sea. The dragons approve! The whole process has taken nearly a year to complete, but it has been worth it. The house is quite old-fashioned, with lots of features from what British people would call 'the Edwardian period'. We went into it for the first time this afternoon and staked our places. Gruffen settled on the wood burning stove (very warm - and messy) and G'reth headed straight for the 'Aga' cooker. I, of course, went to the room the author will work in and settled on the windowsill. Once it was greenery and squirrels outside my window, now it's boats! The author wanted me to thank you all for buying his books over the years, because without those sales he would never have been able to move in the first place. He's thrilled. And so are we. It's a wonderful adventure. We hope great things will come from the new house, including whatever we decide to work on next... Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: GUFF

2011-07-17T19:57:00.002+01:00

Surprisingly, that's not the name of a dragon...

Hello dragon fans. You may recall me telling you that most authors don't like the word 'synopsis'. Our author is one. He hates trying to describe his latest book in a page. However, now and then he will be asked by his publisher to do it. He always refuses, but promises to provide some 'guff' - a bit of waffle about what's happened in the story so far. Now, I'd love to be able to send you his actual 'guff', but it's not allowed, of course, because you'd all know what the story is prior to publication. However, he did say that if one of us could ... disguise it a bit he'd let it go out. So me, Gretel, Gwendolen and Gruffen (because he's got a book) had a go. Here's the result. Erm, enjoy. As best you can. Happy reading. Hrrr!

The early part of the book is to do with the pre-history of Gawain (the eponymous last dragon…) and traces the development of the mysterious character, Agawin, who was mentioned in Fire World. Agawin gets himself embroiled in a clash with a Norse-type villain. This is set at the time when the last remaining dragons on Earth have decided to give up their fire tears and die in isolation. One of them, Gsomething, settles on A Mountain and is tracked by the Norse-type villain, who wants to get a bit too close to Gsomething’s fire tear. Agawin and Norse-type villain have a bit of a punch up. All a bit ugly. Lots of death. Agawin looks certain to lose (boo!). However, he is in possession of a thingy, which helps him escape! (hooray!) Strangely, this means he ends up milking goats with Guinevere (the woman who caught Gawain’s fire tear in the original legend). Guinevere introduces Agawin to a cave woman, who is a bit smelly and not at all nice. At this time, a big bird turns up with a special egg. I’ll give you a clue: it’s not made of chocolate. Out pops a baby dragon. Nasty cave woman sends Agawin and Guinevere to the sea side to find a place for dragon baby to live. Along the way, they bump into two mysterious travellers. Traveler 1 explains that they have travelled across a time nexus to prevent nasty cave people messing around with time. Things turn sour when nasty cave woman puts the clocks back – and it’s not even winter! She then joins forces with Norse villain and Agawin suffers a bit of an identity crisis (gosh, he’s unlucky). Meanwhile, in the pre-history, the mysterious Travelers are trying to decide what’s best to do. Traveler 1 is troubled because he can’t understand why his thingy prefers nasty cave woman to him. He’s getting some real grief from Traveler 2 as well. The answer, of course, comes when everyone examines the tapestry of Isenfier and they realise it’s a stitch up! Traveler 1 comes to the conclusion he’s been duped by a bunch of clay dragons. Tsk, wouldn’t you know it? By the time Traveler 1 has figured it out, everyone he knew has gone on holiday to Co:pern:ica (the dead lands are lovely in the summer, apparently). There’s a big dust-up and a lot of fire and some more, well, death. The true hero of the books is revealed! A-ha! The hero winds up the clocks till they’re running nicely, everyone comes back from holiday and they all live happily ever after … with NO CLIFFHANGERS. Just a bit more death…

This week's word is: BLURB

2011-07-10T17:28:00.003+01:00

Hello dragon fans. If there is one word that makes a writer crumble behind his desk it's 'SYNOPSIS'. This is basically a one page description of a novel. Publishers will often ask an author to provide a synopsis before they commission a book. It's a sort of 'try before you buy' option. Authors hate doing them, because as any good writing dragon knows, the story often changes as the book is being written. Sometimes, the finished story has no bearing on the synopsis at all. We have never had to do one for the Last Dragon Chronicles because the author's publisher has always taken it on trust that our hero (or his dragon) can produce a good tale. However, what they always want is a BLURB.

Blurbs are the second thing authors fret about. It's bad enough having to describe a book in one page. Writing a blurb-sized paragraph for the back cover can be very trying. To be fair, the author is quite reasonable at them, but even he had to gulp when his publisher asked if he could produce one for, erm, tomorrow. The problem is, how do you produce a good blurb when the book is only two-thirds complete? Thankfully, the publisher's request made the author focus his attention a bit. As a result he's finally worked out what The Fire Ascending, indeed the whole series, is actually about! You won't learn that from the blurb. That has to be kept a secret until you read the book. But we can at least share the blurb with you. It might get tweaked yet, but this is the gist of it. So here it is, exclusively for the notepad. The back cover copy for The Fire Ascending. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

A boy and his dragon are about to rise…

“But if Gwilanna’s somewhere else in time…” Zanna argued, “…will Guinevere even catch Gawain’s fire tear, let alone drop it into the ocean?”
“She has to,” David said. “Or Scuffenbury is lost. We’ll have no ice cap and we’ll have no bears. No Liz, no Lucy, no dragons…no me.”

On Earth, at the battle of Scuffenbury Hill, time has been suspended. Dragons and their natural enemies, darklings, are trapped in a bitter, unresolved conflict. But at the dawn of history, something is working to bring about an outcome. A mysterious force is rewriting the timelines, and turning legend into startling reality…

This week's word is: OUTTAKES

2011-07-03T17:19:00.002+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. The author is busy trying to write a blurb for The Fire Ascending. Not easy, as the book is still unfinished. While he's puzzling over that, I thought you might like to see a few outtakes from Fire World. Some of you may not have read the book yet, but you'll get the flavour of it from these three extracts that didn't make it into the finished manuscript.

The first one takes place in the librarium, where Mr Henry is lecturing David about the nature of the universe and the world they live in. Notice he calls it Ki:mera. The author was halfway through the book when we decided that the society described in FW should be called something different. At that point, I wrote the word Co:pern:ica on my pad.

He circled the word KI:MERA. He then proceeded to draw several arrowed lines curving away from the circle. Each arrowhead he labelled with a word from the lecture he now began to give. It went something like this:
In the beginning, the nature of REALITY was a mystery… blah blah blah… scientists puzzled by ATOMIC STRUCTURE… blah blah blah… so much apparent SPACE in the physical world… blah blah blah… interest in DARK ENERGY… blah blah blah… unknown FORCES binding universe together… blah blah blah… controlled experiments with PARTICLE ACCELERATORS… blah blah blah… TIME VARIANCES coupled with heightened spatial AWARENESS… blah blah blah… disruption of PERSONAL SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM… blah blah blah… fundamental nature of MATTER explained… blah blah blah… relationship between THOUGHT and LIGHT identified in spin of 2 197… blah blah blah… rapid evolution in PERCEPTION… blah blah blah… ability to IMAGINEER… blah blah blah… MULTIDIMENSIONAL probabilities understood … blah blah blah… LIFE IS CONSCIOUSNESS… blah blah blah… and CONSCIOUSNESS is KI:MERA (underlined twice).
“Did you get all that, boy?”
“Umm?” went David, who’d practically fallen asleep.
Mr Henry pointed to the chart, which was nothing now but a mass of circles, lines and poorly-scrawled words. “Our shared consciousness binds the world together. All that we see is created by thought, except that which was created by the Higher.”

And Counsellor Strømberg has some things to say about the firebirds, when he's showing Rosa The Book of Agawin:

"To understand what I’m talking about you have to know something of your past, Rosa.” He put the glossy book aside and opened the other, though not at any particular page. When Rosa cast her gaze across it, all she saw was a pattern of ink marks. They made no sense to her. She saw the awe in Mr Henry’s eyes however and knew she was on the cusp of great wisdom. So she placed her hands in her lap and waited. And this is what counsellor Strømberg said: “When our fain evolved, it was like an immense explosion, a sudden giant leap in the development of consciousness. The effect of it went three ways. First, within us. Those of us that kept our physical structure discovered the ability to imagineer, to create form from our thoughts and make all that we desired, even children, within a vast and virtually unlimited Design. Secondly, there was that part of us that no longer saw the need for physical form and became pure Fain. These beings are said to exist in a mode of elevated consciousness that we refer to as The Higher. Theirs is a deeply spiritual continuum which is said to be evolving even further and exploring the structural nature of the universe. Those with physical form can still reach this state. And then there is the third part of the equation, the puzzle that Mr Henry and I believe has its resolution in the librarium.” He ran his hand over the pattern of marks. “The smallest part of the then-shared consciousness of Ki:mera evolved into firebirds. No one knows why this is, but I’m convinced it has something to do with the imprint of dragons I’ve observed in children. This book, we believe, holds the truth."

And finally, the author wrote several passages of bickering between the twin Aunts, Primrose and Petunia. The piece of dialogue below very nearly made it into the book. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

So it came to pass that as early as the fifth day of life without David, Rosa began to notice a change.
It started mildly enough. One morning Aunt Petunia was fastening her hair when she paused and said, “My dear, you have my clip.” She was referring to the long, needle-like pin which the Aunts always used to hold their hair in a bun at their neck.
“I think not,” said Aunt Primrose, who had finished her bun barely half a minute earlier, entirely without fuss.
“Then what is this?” said Petunia. And in a remarkable show of spite, she reached over to her twin and pulled out a pin.
Aunt Primrose gasped. Her cheek turned a delicate shade of maroon. “How dare you?” she screeched, making her (very) carefully prepared bun wobble. She immediately put her hands to her neck to support it. And there, would you believe it, she found there was a pin.
Aunt Petunia smirked in triumph. “There, I was right you see. You had two in, my dear. A strange mistake. But I will accept your apology.”
Aunt Primrose narrowed her gaze. “Oh, so what is this?” she demanded. And she did no more than reach out and pull yet another pin from Aunt Petunia’s bun.
“But that makes…three pins,” Aunt Petunia said. “That can’t be right. How can that be right?”
“Does it matter that you’ve got a spare?” asked Rosa. She’d been watching this develop from across the room. And now what a sight to see: two Aunts with their hair as ragged as hers.
“You,” they said together, turning on her.
“What?” said Rosa, frightened by the anger rising in their eyes.
“You are playing a game,” Aunt Primrose said.
“A game of pins,” Petunia added.
“We can play pins,” said Primrose darkly.
“Wait. You’re forgetting something,” Rosa said boldly, before either could turn their thoughts to motion. “I can’t imagineer.”
The twins twitched.
“That’s right,” said Petunia.
“Then where has the extra one come from?” said Primrose.
There was a pause. Then they cried, “Our boxes!” And both of them dived towards the trinket boxes in which they kept earrings and other forms of jewellery.
“Hhh!” gasped Primrose. “Gone! Stolen!”
Petunia’s gasp was greater still. “Broken! My spare pin is broken!”
“What...” said Rosa. “...is going on?”

This week's word is: NESS

2011-06-26T17:20:00.002+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Once again I've given Zookie some time off because he's working on a particularly difficult part of The Fire Ascending i.e. the bit about two thirds of the way through where I always get stuck and start to think this is the worst thing I've ever written in my life! I got to this stage last week. Don't worry, it always happens and he always gets me out of it. Then it's usually plain sailing to the end of the book. We'll keep you posted.

I've chosen 'Ness' as this week's word for three reasons. They're all to do with authorship in a strange way and I'll take them in the chronological order they occurred. The first Ness is Eliot Ness, the famous FBI man who was around during the prohibition era in America in the 1920s and 30s. Prohibition was all to do with the strict regulations on the manufacture and distribution of alcohol. Ness led a team of men known as 'The Untouchables' who enforced these regulations. He was most famous for bringing down the gangster Al Capone. I was fascinated by gangsters when I was a boy and did a project about Ness and his team for a school English assignment. My English teacher was stunned. No one in his classes had ever done a study on illegal alcohol distilleries, let alone talked about it for ten minutes solid! I was given top marks, even though my presentation wasn't very good. I never thought I'd be able to credit Al Capone with getting me an A* rating.

The second Ness is everybody's favourite Scottish monster. I've always wanted to go to Loch Ness because I have this faint hope that I might spot 'Nessie'. Not that I'd take a photo if I did. If she's there, I'd rather she stay there undisturbed. I like to think I'd just wave and smile and write about it in a fictional story. I did have to write about Nessie once. When I was a Biology undergraduate my supervisor set me a peculiar essay. I had to prove that the Loch Ness monster existed! Erm... He let me bluster and panic for about 10 minutes before telling me the way to go about it was to read up on the flora and fauna of the Loch and determine whether the ecosystem there could support a 'monster' of the size reported. I believe I came to the conclusion that it could. It was a long time ago now, but I never forgot that moment and used it, of course, as the basis for Icefire. Anyone remember Dr Bergstrom setting an essay for David about whether dragons existed or not...? That's where it came from.

And lastly, I'd like to offer my congratulations to the author Patrick Ness, who this week won the Carnegie Medal for his book 'Monsters of Men', the third part of his 'Chaos Walking' trilogy. I'm often asked by fans to recommend books and I usually point them in the direction of Philip Reeve's brilliant Mortal Engines series. Patrick Ness's is just as good, but more for young adults as it's quite violent in places. 'The Knife of Never Letting Go' was the first of the three, followed by 'The Ask and the Answer' and 'Monsters of Men'. Enjoy. Until next time, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: CORNWALL

2011-06-19T17:50:00.004+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. The author hasn't done a JOT of writing this week. Instead he was told to leave his laptop at home, dig out his flip flops, pack up Mrs Author's vast suitcase of clothes, stash Mrs Author's 86 year old MOTHER in the back of the car, and trot off on holiday round the most south-westerly county of England, Cornwall. For those of you who don't know, Cornwall is one of the most historic and picturesque places in the UK. It's very green in the middle (lots of farmland) and most of the interesting stuff lies around its jagged coastlines. Cornwall was famous for three things back in the day: smugglers, tin mines and fishing. Oh, and pasties. Okay that's four things (but what have the Romans ever done for us???) Anyone who's seen Mrs Author's favourite TV series 'Poldark' will know what I mean. We stuck mainly to the south coast and the little fishing towns of Fowey, Polperro and Mevagissey, all places beloved by tourists. When the sun is out there's hardly room for a dragon to swing his isoscele down the winding cobbled streets, but if you do manage to squeeze through the crush of people the harboursides are very charming. Like seagulls and fishing trawlers? Cornwall is the place for you. Legend has it that King Arthur was born in Tintagel Castle on the north coast, but sadly we didn't get to see it - mainly because our car tried to break down (twice; we fixed it, bless) and the mother-in-law fell ill. The old dear is on the sofa right now catching up on her postcards - or rather she's asleep, leaning sideways like the Tower of Pisa. HRRR! There, that's woken her up.

Not a lot of news on the book front. While we were away I took the opportunity to muse a while and decided we'd taken a wrong turn - not something you want to do in Cornwall or you end up in the sea. I told the author that we need to rethink Part 4 of The Fire Ascending. You know, the bit where xxx gets captured and her father kills xxx by mistake...? Oops, sorry, you're not allowed to know about that yet! Anyway, the author agreed. Sometimes he complains that his writing is like 'trudging through mud'. This usually means the narrative has strayed up a dead end and though it feels like the right way for the story to go, inevitably it isn't. It's really then just a question of how long you take to admit it to yourself. He's fortunate, of course. He's got me to hrrr in his ear. I don't let him bumble around for long. This does affect the word count, however. So we'll be dropping back to around 50,000 from 60,000. But who cares, if it makes the story fly?

Some development on the cover. Angelo Rinaldi drew a new version of Alexa for the dragon's eye, which we all liked - but not as much as the original one he drew. Sometimes you have to try something different just to realise that what you saw first is perfect! Discussions will be held about the images this week. If the old design is approved, then we should be able to put the cover up very soon. Watch this space.

Finally, a big HRRR! to the author's American editor, Lisa, who has just given birth to a lovely daughter, Lily Bess. Apparently, the baby arrived on time - which is more than can be said for the author's manuscripts! We're working on it. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: LEGENDS

2011-06-12T10:55:00.002+01:00

Hello dragon fans. The author here. It’s a wet and miserable day in the Crescent, the kind of dull grey weather that wouldn't encourage anyone to sit down and write, though it's always a pleasure to be a 'guest' on Zookie's blog! No real news this week. The Fire Ascending is coming along fine. Not motoring along as I’d like, but progressing. I’m still working on Gwilanna’s back story, but Gadzooks has wandered off somewhere to muse about the final part of the book. We know how we ultimately want it to end. How to get to that ending is the tricky part, but he’s working on it.

Lately, we’ve been discussing the future as well. A lot of people ask me what I’ll do when the dragon books are finished. The truth is, I don’t really know, though I can’t imagine leaving dragons aside entirely. Part of the fun of being a writer is putting these kinds of thoughts out to the universe and seeing what comes back. I was watching a new production of the King Arthur story on TV last night (Merlin, Excalibur, Camelot etc.) and it struck me that what I’d really like to do is invent a new legend. In effect, I’ve been experimenting with this in the early parts of The Fire Ascending. Agawin is not unlike a young King Arthur. He doesn’t pull swords from stones, but he does get to fight a horrible villain and he does rise to become one of the most important characters in the whole series. I love the old Norse legends, too. I grew up on stories of Thor and the Vikings. And let’s not forget the Greeks and the thrilling tales of Odysseus, Achilles etc. What makes these legends so memorable is the fact that they are all great, great stories. They stick in my head even though I can’t remember reading them in my boyhood. Whatever comes next for me, I will be looking to emulate stories like that. I would love to write a book that people will still be reading one hundred or maybe one thousand years from now. Something even more memorable than the Chronicles. I know from the letters we get that my books are already fixed in a lot of people’s consciousness. But it would be great to have something so compelling that just about EVERYONE has heard of it. Tough task, but I’m not in this business just to bash something out and take the money. I’m here to make a difference. Hand on heart, I don’t think I’ve got to the bottom of dragons yet. So I reckon they will definitely feature in future books, it's really just a question of how. I once heard a writer friend say that he wouldn’t want to write a vampire story unless he could come up with a decent twist on the genre. That’s what I’m looking for, I guess, a twist. When I find it (when Zookie writes it on his pad) you guys will be the first to know about it. In the meantime, happy reading. And once again thanks for all your fantastic tweets and emails about Fire World, which is really making a mark with some of you. Hrrr!

Today's word is: CONGRATULATIONS

2011-06-03T11:04:00.010+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Zookie here. You may remember some time ago that the author's publisher ran a competition to meet our hero and have lunch with him. We thought it was rather brave of ANYONE to enter, given what we know about his tendency to spill crumbs of food down his shirt. But enter you did, by the hundreds in fact, and yesterday the lucky winner got to meet him. Her name was Emma, and she and her best friend Rowan, plus Emma's parents, Mrs Author, and Jess from Orchard Books got together at a lovely restaurant in Bristol called The Glassboat.

It's sometimes a little daunting for fans to meet 'the great man himself' (hah! I do all the hard work!) but Emma & Rowan chatted quite happily for the best part of two hours over a delicious meal. It turns out they are both big readers and lovers of fantasy books. As well as receiving a clone of me from Val Chivers, Emma also won a complete set of the Chronicles, signed there and then. This made her particularly happy because she hadn't had a chance to read FIRE WORLD yet. Her parents were predicting she'd be halfway through by the time they'd got home. All in all, a grand day out was had by all. It's always a pleasure to meet fans like this. Let's hope there will be another competition next year when someone else will get the chance to hear the author slurp his soup :)

Congratulations also to the ten runners-up who received signed copies of the books. We hope you enjoy them. As you know, work is well under way on THE FIRE ASCENDING. Cover artwork coming soon... Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: FRUSTRATION

2011-05-29T20:31:00.000+01:00

Guys, things are going to be a bit sporadic until I can get my computer system sorted out. Once again, this week, Blogger has let us down. However, we WILL get it sorted, I promise. Look out for some spontaneous posts. Could be exciting! Almost at 55,000 words in The Fire Ascending. Steady progress, but good stuff. Thanks to all of you who've written in telling us how much you enjoyed Fire World. We're keeping all the messages to see if we can put a few quotes from fans into The Fire Ascending. Zookie will be back to you soon. Happy reading. Hrrr!

Today's word is: ALEXA

2011-05-26T10:27:00.000+01:00

Hi everyone. Chris d'Lacey here. Unusual to have a blog post from the den in midweek, but you'll recall we were having problems with the Blogger software again (I had to stop Gwendolen hurring all over the screen last Sunday). It works on some machines, but not on others. (We have a few machines, but if I'm travelling to an event I can't always switch between them quickly.) Anyway, we are here now so at last we can give you a little update on how things are going. As Zookie said previously, Angelo Rinaldi is creating something special for THE FIRE ASCENDING cover. We tried a couple of things that didn't work out. I was very keen, for instance, to show the eye closed on this cover (as it's the last one), possibly with the mark of Oomara on the lid. But it just didn't look right. So instead I suggested that we put an image of Alexa in the eye. Dragons and Angels? Wow. Alexa plays a critical role in TFA. You won't think so at first because the first third of the book is an historical account of how the character Agawin came about. If you haven't read FIRE WORLD you won't know about him (READ FIRE WORLD!!) but trust me - well, trust Zookie - Alexa is heavily involved. When the finished artwork comes in, all you followers will get an exclusive peek at it.

I hinted in a tweet the other day that you learn a lot about Gwilanna in this book, too. And you do. Can you imagine Gwilanna as a baby? What was her history, you wonder? Well, there is a great back story about her that I'm working on, told from the point of view of a mouse... A MOUSE?! I hear you exclaim (erm, not a squirrel, Chris???). Come on, when have these books EVER been straightforward? Like, never, is the answer. I'm hoping that TFA will stand alone (i.e. you could read it without reference to the others). It won't be an easy read if you're new to the series, but it will cover a lot of the saga in a very short time. And, hopefully, it will explain everything! (Hopefully.) Until next time, when Zookie will be back. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: APOLOGY

2011-05-22T19:20:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Once again, Blogger is giving us problems. For some reason it won't let Zookie in to use its 'recommended' editor. We thought we were over this issue. Clearly not. We will switch computers again and put up a proper message midweek. You might like to know that Angelo Rinaldi has been hard at work on the cover of The Fire Ascending. He's tried various approaches but we think we've come up with the right idea, which, interestingly, one or two of you suggested. No clues yet, but we're sure you'll like it. Bear with us. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: EYE

2011-05-15T17:27:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Mrs Author has just tapped me on the shoulder and shown me a passage of a book she's reading, which she suggests I might put on the notepad this week. The book is about an old shepherd who worked in a rural part of Oxfordshire. Apparently, there was a word in the Oxfordshire dialect that meant to make a noise or 'sing' deep in the throat. The word was 'grockle'. Hrrr, anyone?

The author has been busy this past week working on THE FIRE ASCENDING. He has nearly reached 50,000 words now. Believe it or not that was the exact length of THE FIRE WITHIN, but only half the size of the newest books. Right. Only another 50,000 to go then! On Thursday, however, he jumped on a train to London to attend a party celebrating the 25th anniversary of Orchard Books. A sit-down meal in a posh restaurant in Camden Town, North London, called Yorke & Albany. The restaurant is owned by the famous chef, Gordon Ramsay, who has appeared on TV on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, not a lot of people know this, but the author once appeared in a recipe book with Gordon Ramsay. I kid you not. A couple of years ago, our hero was approached by a fan asking if he could contribute a recipe to a charity cookbook she and some schoolfriends were putting together. The author isn't much of a cook, but he does do a very good vegetarian shepherd's pie. So he sent the girl the recipe for it. He called it 'Dragon Pie'. When the finished book came back, imagine his surprise to see that a) he wasn't the only children's author featured in its pages; Michael Morpurgo, among others, was in it and b) a whole host of celebs were in there too, including Gordon Ramsay, Bruce Forsyth, Davina McCall, comedienne Jo Brand and erm, David Cameron, who is now the prime minister of England! Disappointingly, Gordon Ramsay didn't show his face at Yorke & Albany and Dragon Pie was not on the menu. Even so, it was a very pleasant affair and gave the author a chance to catch up with his editor, Catherine, who said...

"...I've got some roughs for the cover of TFA." Now don't get too excited because we're not going to show them, not until they're right. We gave Angelo Rinaldi, the cover artist, three suggestions for the eye. The first was to have the eye closed. The author thought this would work very well and send out the perfect message for the conclusion of the series. But the image just doesn't look very appealing. So next we tried the mark of Oomara in the eye (ooh), which worked better but isn't dramatic enough. And then we tried an eye within an eye within an eye etc. But that just looked as if the dragon had got a fried egg in his pupil. So we're going to try something else this week. Something connected with Alexa, as she features heavily in the new book. As soon as we have a complete cover, we will show it exclusively here. On behalf of the author, thank you again for all the positive messages about FIRE WORLD. We'd love to get it onto the New York Times bestseller lists. So tell all your friends how good it is! Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: GENIUS

2011-05-08T14:29:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. This Sunday, you find us rolling about on the floor, laughing so much we're in danger of cracking a scale. A fan tweeted the author this week to tell him he was 'a god and a genius'. This was a very well meant comment from a reader who clearly appreciates the books. Hrrr! But everyone knows that the Pennykettle dragons are the REAL smart ones around here, especially me, who inspires the stories. To be fair, the author works very hard, and he is the public face of the books. For that reason, I think we can allow him to be called an 'enigma'. Yes. He'd like that.

Talking of work, he's just finished part 3 of THE FIRE ASCENDING, which has taken one of the weirdest twists in all the seven books. We've been watching the tumbleweed blowing around his head as he tries to work out how he's going to explain it. The twist involves everyone's favourite child, Alexa (another enigma) and explains her origins. Alexa was born to Zanna, of course, as far back as FIRE STAR. But there has always been some mystery surrounding her arrival. All explained - in the space of three paragraphs. Though don't expect any simple answers :)

So now it's onto part 4, which is tentatively titled 'GRELLA'. Erm, who is Grella? I hear you ask. Well, you have met Grella before actually - though you're not aware of it yet. Tsk. I'm such a tease! I'll give you a clue: she's not a dragon. As for David. Well, he's...thereabouts. He and Zanna have appeared in one crucial scene, but not got themselves properly involved yet. Don't worry, they will. The whole storyline floats around David as usual, though much of the early parts are devoted to Agawin, the mysterious presence in FIRE WORLD. Actually, the only prominent character who hasn't shown up yet is Bonnington. He's kipping in his basket somewhere. I'll get Gwillan to open a can of Truffgood and wake him up for a scene in part 4. A fan, Clarissa, sent us this lovely drawing of Bonners, which we had to include because it made us all smile.

We thought you might like the image below as well. It's the cover of a 'proof' edition of the paperback of FIRE WORLD. A proof is a copy of a book that is sent out to reviewers before the publication date. They are not for resale because they're not fully checked for errors etc. Proof covers are usually in black and white (or something very simple), but the author's publisher has done such a nice job with this one we thought we'd put it up on the notepad. Once again, thanks to everyone who's written in to tell us about the book. We're delighted by all the positive responses. The author makes no secret of the fact that FW is his favourite of the series, but TFA is coming up fast. In the end, it will be up to you lot to decide which is best... Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: BROADWAY

2011-05-02T17:23:00.000+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. Apologies for the non-appearance of a blog post yesterday. This was because the author was away on his annual writing retreat, with fifteen other friends from his writing group. Anyone familiar with previous posts on this subject will know that the group goes to an old farmhouse in an historic and picturesque part of England called the Cotswolds. Over the course of a weekend the group discussed everything from novel openings to eBook publishing - and there was a lot of eating and general merriment inbetween, including crowding round the TV on Saturday evening to watch the latest episode of Dr Who. The author is considered something of an industry expert and is usually called upon for advice about all aspects of writing - except that I went with him this time, so everyone naturally asked for my advice! The take home message from weekends like this is that writers are always happiest in the company of other writers. Writing stories is a solitary business, which is why we encourage young aspiring authors to get together with like-minded friends, so they can swap ideas and generally be inspired by one another. No one understands writing like another writer.

I'm going to keep the post fairly short this week because there isn't an awful lot to say. Reaction to FIRE WORLD, from America, has been pretty good. The most common question asked so far it this: "Is the David in Fire World the same David as the David in the other books?" Well yes, and no. FIRE WORLD as we've said on the blog before explores the idea that there might be alternative versions of ourselves in alternative universes, leading similar but not identical lives. The 'Davids' are linked, but you might have to wait until THE FIRE ASCENDING is published before you really know how. The author was very pleased that he reached the 45,000 word mark on TFA during his stay in the farmhouse. As a reward, I let him go out to the place you can see in the photograph below. He's sitting in front of a 'folly' called Broadway Tower. A folly is an architectural monument, usually built on the whim of a rich individual. They tend to serve no commercial purpose, but they often house exhibitions or are used as small museums. Broadway Tower stands on one of the highest hills in the Cotswolds and the views from it are stunning. This is usually the sort of place that ends up in one of the dragon books. Watch this space! Until next week. Happy reading. Hrrr!

Today's word is: HURRAH

2011-04-28T13:33:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Finally we tracked down what's been wrong with our posts to Blogger. It's something to do with the author's dongle! Typical. Gwendolen has temporarily switched us to a machine with some proper dragon auma in it (hrrr!) so that I can bring you this special bulletin about FIRE WORLD. Rejoice, the book has reached North America. It came out two days ago and seems to be doing very well, if the various online rankings are to be believed. Find it, read it, scratch your head over it, but enjoy it for what it is - and tell the author what you think of it (via his website). By the way, no confirmation as yet, but he was muttering to me the other day that he might like to revisit the world of Co:pern:ica and its firebirds when the Chronicles are done. I've made a note on my pad...

Also, BIG breaking news this week. We have heard that Mrs Author's lovely RAIN & FIRE guidebook is ALSO set to be published in America. We don't know when yet, but we're delighted that it's happening, especially for all of you who've written in asking why you can't get it outside of the UK. This will be a slightly updated version of the UK edition and will include some extracts from FIRE WORLD and almost certainly an exclusive look at THE FIRE ASCENDING (which reached 44,000 words yesterday). More news on that when we have it.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in Japan, Gruffen and Gauge are making an appearance again in THE DRAGONS OF WAYWARD CRESCENT series. Here's a little illustration we particularly like. Hope to be with you again on Sunday. Happy reading! Hrrr!

This week's word is: APOLOGY

2011-04-24T11:33:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans,

Anyone who read Zookie's blog last week will have seen that we are experiencing real trouble adding new posts. For some reason, the Blogger software will simply not let us in, or rather it won't let us use its 'updated' or 'new' editor. What I'm using here is the old editor, which is nowhere near as good because we can't manage images easily or format text. This is a very serious problem. We've looked for a solution via Google's help forums, and no one has an answer to it, although other people have suffered from it. If any of you out there are experienced bloggers and know of a fix, please email me at dragonmail1@btinternet.com or tweet me @chrisdlacey

We do have some news to report and some nice images to show you from a Japanese edition of The Dragons of Wayward Crescent books, but I'd rather not put them up until we can fix this issue. We're going to try swapping to a different computer to see if that helps, so you may see some interim posts. In desperate circumstances, we'll close down Zookie's Notepad and start up a new blog and see if we can't import all our followers. Once again, really sorry that this has happened, but it appears to be outside our control. The dragons, as you can imagine, are pretty upset about it.

One last thing: FIRE WORLD is out this coming TUESDAY in America and Canada. Enjoy. Let us know (via the email address above) what you think of it. Until next time, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: PROGRESS

2011-04-17T22:19:00.000+01:00

HAVING REAL TROUBLE POSTING - SORRY.

Hello dragon fans. Picture a hideous scene. Could it be Gruffen picking his nose with his isoscele? No, it’s the author dancing. All week he’s been trying to do something called the samba. Why? Because we have learned that The Last Dragon Chronicles are going to be published in Brazil. (Welcome Brazilian fans. Hrrr.) This begs the question of course: what does he do for other foreign additions? He didn’t have fahn fahn fahn on the autobahn in Germany for instance (listen to one of his favourite bands, Kraftwerk, and you’ll get that reference), or sweep around in a vampire’s cape when the books came out in Romania (nearest we could get to Transylvania), or go around saying, Have a nice day! to everyone who bought the books in America. But at least he’s happy. That’s something. He’s rather pleased with himself today because he’s over the 40,000 word mark in THE FIRE ASCENDING. Only another…50,000 ish to go. Tons going on, though. That Gwilanna. She’s making her presence felt, as usual. But David’s on her trail. Trust me, the showdown is coming. But there are still plenty of surprises in store. What’s more, he’s just written a long passage which explains EXACTLY what happened at the end of DARK FIRE (and on into FIRE WORLD), even though the characters are thousands of years back in time. Come on, when did I ever make it easy for you? Anyone following the author’s tweets would have noticed that he’s used the word ‘timeline’ a lot in TFA. Yes, we’re dealing with a time slip novel (this is what happens when you let a houseful of dragons crowd around the TV on a Saturday night to watch Doctor Who). Of course ‘time’ is something that dragons understand perfectly well – but humans don’t. As usual, the concepts in TFA aren’t easy to grasp, but the time slip element does mean we can put characters where we want them to be – on Earth or Co:pern:ica. Hmmm. Ah, but I can’t tell you any more than that. I can only blow you a sympathetic smoke ring and say the magic words…2012. That’s when TFA will be published and you can all sit back and say, “Oh, THAT’S what it was all about!” Meanwhile, don’t forget, America, that the wonderful FIRE WORLD is on its way to your book stores NOW and will be available in NINE DAYS time. When you get it, happy reading. Until next time. Hrrr!

This week's word is: NOTHING

2011-04-10T18:36:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. You might be tempted to think that with a header like that there would be no blog post at all this week, but clearly you are wrong (hrrr!). The header refers to the fact that for the last week or so, the author has been wandering around thinking about nothing. I don’t mean that no thoughts have entered his head. If you were to put a small telescope to his ear and peer inside you would still see tiny lights blinking on every time he mused about soccer or breakfast or whether to scratch his nose or not. The tumbleweed is still moving. No, what he’s been thinking about is the concept of nothing. That’s very different. And slightly baffling. Let me explain.

The other night we were watching an interesting TV programme on precisely this subject. The presenter, a very clever professor, held a plastic box in his hands and said, “Imagine you could take everything out of this box, all the air, all the dust, all the light etc. What would you be left with?” The author raised his hand and muttered, “Erm, a vacuum.” The professor nodded and said, “Yes, but even in the vacuum tiny particles of matter and anti-matter spontaneously appear and almost instantaneously disappear again.” This bizarre idea sent the author’s tumbleweed into a real spin. “How can that happen?” he asked. But he didn’t address the question to the professor, he addressed it to me.

It’s all to do, of course, with what humans call ‘physics’ or that fascinating branch of physics that Arthur Merriman is intrigued by, ‘quantum mechanics’. Without going into mind-boggling detail (even a dragon as smart as me can’t truly explain the wonders of spontaneous creation) it appears that at the tiniest, tiniest levels of existence (i.e. within atoms) particles don’t obey the normal laws of movement. They tend to dash about randomly. Famous scientists like Einstein have studied this for decades and no-one has a real explanation for it. One scientist in particular, a rather brilliant man called Paul Dirac, went as far as to say that quantum mechanics could not properly be described in words but only in physical or visual concepts. Put another way, we may not be able to explain the entire mechanics of creation, but we can certainly recognise or experience its effects.

So how does this apply to The Last Dragon Chronicles? Well, it will come as no surprise to you to know that dragons are in tune with the auma of the universe. We understand time and energy and matter – and their relationship to consciousness. We can’t explain the laws that govern it (even in dragontongue), we can only be one with its different states of being. And sometimes, in extreme circumstances, we can interact with it... Notice the use of the word ‘sometimes’ there? Every week, the author receives several messages from fans asking, “What happened at the end of Dark Fire? Where did everyone go? Why did Zookie write ‘sometimes’? What does ‘sometimes’ mean?” (Haven’t they realised yet that the author knows nothing???) If you split ‘sometimes’ into two words ‘some times’ maybe the concept gets a little easier. In the battle of Scuffenbury Hill, time is suspended and everything focuses on that one point. At first it appears that nothing is happening. But as we’ve already discovered ‘something’ is always spontaneously happening out of nothing, and that something, in this instance, is a miniscule leap into another possible timeline, the parallel universe described in FIRE WORLD (only 16 days before it’s published in America, btw). Don’t worry, we will be coming back to Earth and Scuffenbury, but doing it via another jump in time. For as David becomes more attuned to the dragon auma within him, and Zanna learns how to control the energy of tornaqs (particularly through her increasing compatibility with unicorns) they find they are able to move into the ‘future’ or the ‘past’ with ease, and that takes them all the way back to Gawain. The only problem, of course, is that their old adversary Gwilanna is there as well, and a slight step ahead of them… Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: PLASTERED

2011-04-03T18:22:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. This week's blog post is dedicated to the author's head - or rather, a small part of his head that is now in a pot in a laboratory somewhere (cue maniacal laughter). He's been tweeting rather proudly about his 'operation' and a lot of you seem confused about what exactly he's had done. Regular followers of the Notepad will remember that a few months ago, what he thought was a normal 'spot' on the right side of his temple changed colour. His doctor advised him to have it removed. So on Tuesday this week he toddled off to a clinic at the local hospital (with me in his bag, taking notes, as always) to have 'the procedure'. The surgeon drew a circle round the offending 'spot' and showed it to the author in a hand-held mirror. "That's what needs to come out," he said. "We also need to take a little of the area around the outside of the spot, just to be sure we've got it all. Very straightforward. You won't feel a thing - not until about three hours afterwards when the anaesthetic's worn off." At that point, he produced a needle and injected a fluid into the author's head to, erm, numb it (which was a bit of a waste of a good anaesthetic if you want my opinion). Nine minutes later, it was all over. The spot was chopped out and four neat stitches had been put into the cut to hold it together. (The author had had a facelift.) He said, "Are there likely to be any complications?" The surgeon said, "You're lucky the spot wasn't further along or it might have affected a motor nerve above your eye. Can you still do a shocked expression?" The author said he wasn't sure. "Well, imagine Kylie Minogue has just walked in to nurse you." The author made an expression. The surgeon said, "That's more like delight than shock. Can you raise both eyebrows?" At which point, I jabbed the author's neck with my isoscele. That raised his eyebrows all right.

So he came home with a big white plaster stuck to his temple. Some ladies have commented that he looked a little 'macho'. To us, he just looked like a man with a white post-it note on his head. We thought you'd like to see what it looked like before the shower washed it away.

He's expected to have a scar, which he's convinced will make him appear more 'manly'. (I blow a smoke ring in despair.) When the stitches are out, we'll show it. Thankfully, none of this has stopped him writing and he's pressing on with THE FIRE ASCENDING. A big decision was made about the book this week. It will NOT be in two volumes. Everything will wind up in this book. TFA will be the seventh and last. And for all you fans in America and Canada who've been desperate to read FIRE WORLD, you are now only 23 days from publication. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SILHOUETTE

2011-03-27T13:45:00.003+01:00

Hello dragon fans. It's me, Gadzooks. I'm back. Did you miss me? I was indeed having a ponder during the supermoon last week, mainly about the villainess, Gwilanna, who is featuring heavily in THE FIRE ASCENDING at the moment and making a nuisance of herself as usual. Wow, what a background SHE has. We can't wait to unleash that one on the world of dragon lore. Hrrr! As you may have seen from the author's tweets, it's not just Gwilanna who's made an appearance. Gawain popped out of his egg a few thousand words ago. And this week it was the turn of Thoran, the brown bear who becomes the first polar bear, to enter the story. When you add an eagle called Gideon to this, who was the first ever firebird (you meet them in FIRE WORLD) you can see how important this story is and why so much thought is going into it. There has been a lot of scribbling on the pad these last weeks.

But for now, I want to leave the book and show you some pictures, beginning with this week's header word. Not long ago, the author was invited to attend a dinner at a conference in Basingstoke. During courses, a charming young lady called Alison Russell came round the tables, cutting silhouettes of the guests directly onto black card. This is the one she did of the author. As you can see, she has been very kind and not made his nose too big or his hairline too receded and only given him one chin! Mmm. Normally, he HATES being photographed in profile. (It's the nose.) But he loves this. 'Pure genius,' he called it. And we agree. Go and have a look at Alison's lovely website. www.alison-russell.co.uk

And finally this week, we thought we'd finish by showing you a few dragon pics. These were sent to the author by some children at a school near Swindon, the last one he visited on his recent tour. Glade thinks her picture is wonderful. And we'd like to thank the boy who wrote a note saying the author was, "...so funny. Absolutely historical." I think we'd all agree with that!! He was practically around at the dawn of dragons. Till next week. Happy reading. Hrrr! PS. 300 followers now. Fantastic!

This week's word is: SUPERMOON

2011-03-20T18:28:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans. I've given Gadzooks the day off as he's still a little 'moonstruck' this afternoon. For those of you who don't know, roughly every eighteen years or so the moon's elliptical orbit brings it on its closest path to the Earth. If you're lucky enough to see it, you might notice that it's bigger and brighter as it passes through the night sky. Astronomers will tell you that it has no effect on the planet whatsoever. But dragons, of course, revere the moon as much as they love snow (read ICEFIRE if you want to know why). Traditionally, the moon is associated with a dragon's birth or a dragon's death. It's well known that a dying dragon will wait until the moon is at its fullest before shedding its fire tear. And queen dragons have been known to time their eggs so that their wearlings pop out on a new moon. (It's thought to give the young ones wisdom.) Well, I'm happy to report that none of our dragons died last night (though Gruffen fell over on the sofa, asleep, at one point), but there was a lot of muttering about a new 'something' being born. People keep asking me if THE FIRE ASCENDING really will be the last of the dragon books and I keep saying, "Definitely. YES!" But the way Gadzooks was pondering this morning makes me wonder if there isn't too much story still left to tell in one book. Maybe he's thinking of an eighth? Or maybe he's just making up poetry? Who knows?

One thing I can tell you is that THE FIRE ASCENDING is coming along fine. A little slower than we'd like, but the story is good. A lot of you write in asking can I give a summary of it or post a few chapters up on the website. Sorry, guys, I can't do that. My publisher won't allow it - not until the book is completed at least. I can talk about the book and my hopes and aspirations for it, but I can't give too much away. And really, honestly, you wouldn't thank me if I did. The true fans want the book in their hands. They want to read the conclusion in their favourite armchair, not in scraps printed off from the Internet. Let me say this: TFA has a very historical feel to it. It goes right the way back to the beginning, to the end of the last dragon colony on Earth. In the early parts it tells the story of the mysterious character, Agawin, who appeared in FIRE WORLD and his relationship to Guinevere and Gawain and everyone's favourite villainess, Gwilanna (boo!). It's great stuff. Puts it all into perspective. But what about David, Zanna and Zookie? Oh, don't worry, they will be in it too. Ultimately, the story will be theirs and theirs alone. But as the series is called 'The Last Dragon Chronicles' it's only right that we should chronicle something of Gawain's life...yes?

Last week Zookie reported that Val Chivers, the lady who makes the dragons shown on my website, was having problems with her email. I'm glad to say that's all resolved and you can contact Val again now. She'd be pleased to hear from you.

One last thing: Facebook. Lots of you track me down on Facebook and send messages telling me you like the books. While I'm always happy to hear from fans, I'd prefer it if you wrote to me via my website email, dragonmail1@btinternet.com I'm not a big user of Facebook so I don't enter into dialogues there. I will respond to messages on Twitter, but again don't send me too many because regular tweeters will know there's nothing worse than seeing someone flooding the timeline with their own personal messages.

That's it from me. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Zookie will be back next week. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: CENTURY

2011-03-13T18:05:00.001Z

Hello dragon fans. Believe it or not, this is my one hundreth blog post! I've been scribbling on the notepad every Sunday for two years now. And great fun it's been, too, keeping you up to date with all the goings on in Wayward Crescent. It's a pity we don't have something hugely exciting to celebrate our century of messages with, but I guess regular readers will just be pleased to know that the author is about to return to THE FIRE ASCENDING after two weeks away from the keyboard doing school events. As you know he was in Wales ten days ago. This week he found himself in Scotland and the city of Glasgow, where he was appearing at the 'Aye Write' book festival. Here's a picture of the Mitchell Library where the festival was held. Impressive, isn't it? Love the green dome. A few dragons I know would probably like to stroke that! The author spoke in the Robert Burns room. Burns is Scotland's most famous poet so the author had a lot to live up to. But the sessions went well and he really enjoyed it. Now he has no more events until mid-June. Lots of lovely time to write in.

One thing we would have liked to show you this week are some illustrations from the Japanese edition of GRUFFEN, one of the Dragons of Wayward Crescent series. The author's Japanese publisher kindly sent over a whole bundle of wonderful drawings. As soon as we receive clearance to show them, we'll put a few up. On the subject of Japan, all the dragons were devastated by the news of the terrible earthquake and resulting tsunami in that part of the world. Our thoughts are with the people of Japan at this dreadful time. G'reth is leading us in a special meditation. Please take the time to send them a hrrr.

The author's brother, Marshall, who looks after the icefire website, has told us that some of you are having trouble getting through to Val Chivers, the lady who makes dragons based on us. We're not quite sure why your emails to Val are bouncing, but Gwendolen is looking into it. Have patience. Order will be restored very soon. On the subject of emails, the author has asked me to thank all of you who've written so encouragingly to him about FIRE WORLD lately. He is extremely pleased by your responses. He's collecting them in the hope that we might quote some in a future paperback edition of the book. A reader described FW as 'mind-blowing' the other day. Well, we're certainly very proud of it. Recently, someone in publishing muttered to us that 'dystopian' novels will be this year's 'thing'. Hello, we've already done one! A dystopian society is one in which things have gone horribly wrong or are as bad as they can be. In Fire World, the people of Co:pern:ica appear to have a very cosy existence, but they have paid a huge price for it. They have lost all their animals and abandoned nature. Their society, ruled by a few corrupt 'Aunts', is starting to crumble. Who can save them? David, of course. Check the book out. It's fab. Not long now until it appears in the USA (May). It should come out in Australia at the same time. Let us know what you think when you're read it. Till next time. Hrrr!

This week's word is: RHYL

2011-03-06T12:02:00.005Z

The way a library should be...

Hello dragon fans. Most of you will know that this has been a very special week in the literary calendar. It was World Book Day last Thursday and many authors, our hero included, were out and about celebrating the wonder of books. The author has visited many different places on this day in the past. This year he found himself on the North Wales coast, in the seaside town of Rhyl. (A place he used to visit on holiday as a boy.) Now Rhyl is not generally regarded as a centre of literary excellence in the same way that the city of Oxford might be, for instance, but it has children, and it has readers and it also has a brilliant, newly-refurbished library. Check out the pictures. This is the way a library should be. Comfortable and well-designed, with the books attractively presented. It was a joy for us to be there. And we spotted two Welsh dragons at the seafront! Hrrr!

Annoyingly NOT open!

It's been a busy week, what with visits to a sales conference in Basingstoke, Shaftesbury School in Dorset and Cheltenham College in, erm, Cheltenham. All of which were great fun. But it is very tiring, touring round the country, and the author was glad to be able to put his feet up at home this weekend. Last night, we watched the coverage of World Book Night on the telly (well done, the BBC). For those of you who don't know, the idea of World Book Night was that people would give away free copies of a number of pre-selected books to anyone they thought might like to read them. The idea, of course, was to stimulate reading. Many of the recipients that we saw filmed were readers already. But the interesting thing was they were sometimes given books they would not normally have chosen to read. And this reminded us of a personal and rather appropriate story. It might surprise you to know that the author wasn't a great reader when he was young. But at age 14 his head was turned by an influential teacher. The author had been sent to his school library to serve a detention (yes, he sometimes got into trouble at school!). The teacher in charge of detention that day made our hero read for an hour. But, crucially, he wasn't allowed to read the book of his choice; he had to read the book his teacher chose for him. That book was PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, by the famous English author Jane Austen. It was a period romance. Hardly the sort of thing a young boy would go for. The author not only read it, but liked it. From that moment on he read lots of books. Not a huge amount, but enough. So if you were the lucky recipient of a free book on World Book Night make sure you read it. It might change your life. Until next time, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: STASIS

2011-02-27T13:19:00.001Z

Hello dragon fans. It's like the hour after that heavy Sunday lunch here at the moment. Everyone just wants to fall asleep. Hrrrzzzz. There's very little going on. So all the dragons have shut down for a while - except Gwillan, of course. Someone's got to water the plants. To be fair, the author has been very active as he tries to reach the 30,000 word marker on THE FIRE ASCENDING (he's at about 29,000). He wrote the first 20,000 reasonably quickly and rather foolishly imagined it was going to continue like that. However, he's been grappling with a bit of "pre-history" over the last couple of weeks. In the second part of TFA we find ourselves back in time, to when Gawain was a baby dragon and Guinevere was around to catch his fire tear. Those of you who can cast your minds back to THE FIRE WITHIN and ICEFIRE will remember that Gwilanna, the sibyl, was also around in those days. So what the author's been wrangling with is the back story, which must marry up with what you know already. For instance, we know that Gwilanna gets her longevity from possessing one of Gawain's scales. But there is a bit more to it than that. And there's a lot more to her, in fact. In this book, you'll discover how Gwilanna came into existence - and Guinevere too. It's all good stuff, but it's all a bit tricky. I keep offering to write some words of inspiration on my pad for him, but he keeps flapping his hands and insisting he can work things out for himself. Clever author. Don't worry, if he gets really stuck I'll zap him.

As it's another quiet week, I thought I might use the notepad today to offer you some advice about stories. The author did a very nice event a couple of weeks ago and many of the children wrote to him afterwards to ask if he could give them some tips about writing. It turned out that they wanted to enter a National Short Story competition being advertised on the radio here in England by the famous DJ Chris Evans. They had to write a story in 500 words. Now, followers of the blog from overseas probably won't be able to enter the competition (we're not entirely sure of the conditions of entry), but you may still find the following info useful. This is what the author wrote back to the kids (with my help, naturally):

Hi guys. Here’s my advice. Write a STORY, not a novel. You can’t get Harry Potter into 500 words. Concentrate on the setup and resolution of ONE incident and try to write well and descriptively about it. Think simple, not complex. For that reason I would avoid fantasy and stick to something more human, but keep it fictional. Keep your characters to a minimum. No more than three. Make sure you have some dialogue in there. Nothing describes a character better than the words that come out of their mouths. Dialogue will also move your story along quicker. You need a really strong opening line. This is one of the hardest things to do in a short story. Try to think of something that will give the reader an inkling of what the whole story is about. The best opening line I ever wrote was for an adult short story about a bomb hoax. It went: “I was standing at a urinal when the sniffer dog walked in.” DON’T steal that. You’ll get into trouble! But you see what I mean? The title also needs to tell the reader something about the story. Finally the ending must be satisfying. It doesn’t necessarily have to be believable, but it has to work within the context of the story. Good luck.

Not bad, eh? For him. Anyway, I feel my eye ridges growing heavy and I can hear him snoring somewhere in the background. So I'll leave you with this thought: don't forget it's World Book Day this coming Thursday. Your local library NEEDS your support. Get in there and get something borrowed. Till next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SWEETS

2011-02-20T13:35:00.000Z

Hello, dragon fans. First a quick update: all of you with eBook readers will be pleased to hear that the chronicles are available for download at last. We seem to have been waiting ages for them, but you can now get the first five novels from a variety of places online, such as Waterstones, WH Smith and Amazon. Fire World will be available later in the year.

A bit of eastern joy for the author this week when a letter dropped through the door informing us that the chronicles, all six of them (so far), are going to be published in Turkey. Hrrr! It’s commonplace for humans to use the phrase ‘Turkish Delight’ when referring to good news about this country, but the other dragons in the den are concerned that the publisher might start sending us lots of the sweets which go by that name if we do (ahem) – in much the same way that fans of The Beatles sent them truck loads of jelly babies when they confessed to liking those sweets back in the sixties. Mrs Author has just said that she’s been trying for years to track down a violet-flavoured variety that someone allegedly brought back from a holiday in Turkey. She thinks she must have been imagining it and the violet flavour doesn’t really exist, unless our Turkish publisher knows otherwise…

As it's been a quiet week in Wayward Crescent, let me tell you a little story about sweets. Once, during a question and answer session, someone asked the author if he thought he had anything in common with the much-loved writer Roald Dahl. He initially replied, “We’re both tall, suffer from a bad back and are occasionally bad-tempered” which was not really in the spirit of the question. So I poked him with my isoscele and wrote ‘SWEETS’ on my pad. “Oh, yes,” the author said, “and we both liked sweets.” This began a long talk about ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, the sweet names Roald Dahl had invented and what the author’s favourite sweets were. Needless to say, we couldn’t shut him up after that. It transpired that he liked LOTS of sweets, including fruit gums, liquorice torpedos and fruit & nut chocolate, but his favourites were something called Sports Mixtures. Anyone who doesn’t live in England will probably be wondering what these things are. I will explain. Sports Mixtures are like wine gums (chewy, gelatinous things – very bad for your teeth) but made in sporting shapes, e.g. Tennis rackets, soccer boots or cricket bats. I know. Bizarre, isn’t it? Our hero ate hundreds of them when he was a boy and still eats them now. (Mrs Author is shaking her head in despair.) Anyway, he told the audience a nice anecdote about a sweet shop he used to visit on his way to school in the mornings. Every day he would go into this shop and buy four Sports Mixtures for the price of one old British penny. You have to think back to the days before the internet and mobile phones for this. It was a looong time ago. This practice went on for many months: visit the shop, hand over a penny, obtain four sweets. Then one day a sign went up on the shop to say it was being sold. The author was devastated. His beloved sweet supply. Cut off. On the day the shop shut down, he was terribly deflated but went in to buy his four Sports Mixtures as usual. He said, "Would it be all right if I had four black ones today?" (The black ones were liquorice-flavoured and his favourites.) The shop owner shook his head. He said, “I’m not going to sell you four Sports Mixtures today.” The author’s face dropped. No Sports Mixtures? Today, of all days? Then the shopkeeper did something very kind. He reached under the counter, brought out the box in which he kept the Sports Mixtures and handed what was left in the box to the author (about 70 sweets in total). You can imagine how goggle-eyed the author was. As he turned to the door with his haul the shopkeeper said, “Oi, aren’t you forgetting something?” He held out his hand. “I still want your penny.” The author gratefully handed it over. The shopkeeper put it into a charity box. “We’ll let the dogs’ home have that one,” he said. And that was that. The author went on his way. But the important thing for all you writers to note is this: he said to the audience listening to the story, “That will end up in a book one day...” Or on a dragon’s blog! Till next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: ETHEREAL

2011-02-13T11:16:00.000Z

There was a slightly subdued atmosphere at Wayward Crescent earlier this week when the author received news that his eldest sister had been taken seriously ill. We won’t rattle any scales with the details, but she is okay now and out of hospital. We sent flowers to her bedside, of course - well, one of Gretel's potions, via the time-travelling, shape-shifting dragon, Groyne (plus a special healing crystal from Gollygosh’s toolbox). Both were well-received. Needless to say, we are keeping a good watch over her and making the author write plenty to take his mind off it. He’s well into part two of THE FIRE ASCENDING now, which is subtitled The Flight of Gideon. Hrrr!

What really lifted the author’s spirits this week (apart from me jabbing him with my isoscele if he got too melancholy) was a brilliant review of FIRE WORLD. Here’s the link to it:

http://bit.ly/fd0Blg

The piece was written by a young man called Rhys who is a huge reader of YA fiction and writes many reviews on his Thirst for Fiction website (the link will take you to it). It’s probably safe to say that Rhys is a bit of a fan of the Chronicles, but that has never stopped him giving his honest opinion of a book, and nor should it. I don’t want to tell you too much about the review; we’d rather you read it. But he did use one exceptionally good word to describe the whole book, which had the author muttering ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’. The word, of course, is our header this week: ETHEREAL. Translated literally, ‘ethereal’ would mean ‘heavenly’ or ‘spirit-like’. Now we dragons would hardly describe ourselves as ‘heavenly’ – except Gretel, of course, if she’s reading this! But the word seems entirely appropriate for the nature of the book. Someone else described it as ‘out there’. And it is. If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a Lucy Pennykettle number of times: FIRE WORLD is different. The author also liked Rhys’ neat description of imagineering as ‘mental engineering’. For those of you who haven’t read the book yet, in Co:pern:ica, where the story is set, the characters are able to ‘imagineer’. What this means is they can materialise objects just by thinking about them. Think how much fun you could have with that? A lot, yes. But it comes with a price. First of all, it takes a lot of ‘auma’ to imagineer powerfully and that ‘auma’ has to come from somewhere else in the universe. We won’t say where it comes from in Co:pern:ica because that would spoil the story for you. Also, the more you imagineer, the less capable of it you become. So wise people only imagineer what they really need. Also, the people of Co:pern:ica are only allowed to imagineer within the limits of something called ‘The Grand Design’. But what if you could imagineer beyond The Grand Design? That would make you pretty powerful, wouldn't it. But would it also make you dangerous? Say your name was Gwilanna, for instance, and you had that ability. Or David… Mmmm.

Anyway, a big HRRR to Rhys and his lovely website. Apart from the feedback we receive in fan mail, that is the first review we’ve seen of the book. If they are all like that, this is going to be a very special year. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: ACTION!

2011-02-06T12:38:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans. First, I need to put your minds at rest. You may have seen some tweets from the author last week bemoaning the fact that he has to have head surgery… Some fans have speculated that this might be because his planet-sized imagination has grown too big for his skull. Mmm. Nice theory, but totally wrong. It made us all laugh at any rate. What it’s all about is a mole. Not the furry little creatures that dig underground, the little brown spots humans get on their skin. It all began like this. One morning, about three weeks ago, the author was trying to examine (in the mirror) what he’d always assumed was a spot on his temple. “Do you think this has changed colour?” he asked. (As if I’d know!) I flew over and prodded it with my isoscele. “Ow!” he went, which drew Mrs Author’s attention. Yes, it had changed colour, she claimed. And so he was sent to the hospital for a check up.

The doctor, a woman, who seemed a little unsettled with three dragons in her office, examined the mole with a lens and a proddy thing. Mmm, she went. We all raised our eye ridges. “It’s very small,” said the doctor, “about 3mm across.” Gretel said, “That’ll be his brain, then.” The doctor scowled and said, “It needs removing.” At which point Gruffen offered to burn the thing off. The doctor scowled at that as well. “It needs to be cut out, with a scalpel,” she said. “A scalpel?” gulped the author. “Don’t worry,” she said, “we’ll anaesthetise your head, first.” “No need to,” I said, “it’s been numb for years!” Anyway, the upshot is that in a few weeks’ time our hero will be whatever 3mm of mole weighs lighter. Maybe it will kick-start his diet again? Hrrr!

Anyone in the UK reading the blog is probably aware that the British Government is trying to make cuts in spending, and one of its targets is libraries. Over the past week or so there has been a great deal of protest – and rightly so. We’ve written on the blog before that it’s nonsensical not to have free access to literature. Reading is the essence of a developing education. Rest assured, the author will be doing whatever he can to support the campaign to keep libraries open. What’s particularly interesting for us is that FIRE WORLD, rather spookily, deals with the topic to some extent. FW wasn’t planned as an intentional protest about the future of book lending, but parts of it did come out like that. We won’t be giving anything away if we say that David is sent to a ‘librarium’ in the early part of the story. The librarium is a museum for books, a great collection of literature preserved because … well, you decide. There’s a chilling section where we see two characters trying to draw the auma out of the building and put it into a small electronic pad. Digital publishing, anyone…? Is that the future of libraries? Millions of words condensed onto microchips? Where would be the joy in that?

Finally, this week, the dragons were very excited to meet the actress Jessica Hynes. You may remember that the author’s good friend, Rod Duncan, is making a zombie movie! Well, Jessica Hynes is starring in it. Now, you might not be familiar with this talented lady, but she has been in a lot of films and TV productions, including the dragons’ favourite, Dr Who (she played a nurse, and the doctor’s ‘love’ interest). The reason we all queued up to see her (well, most of us were too star struck to come out, actually) is because the author has often thought that Ms Hynes would make a very good Elizabeth Pennykettle if a movie of the books is EVER made (wake up, Hollywood!) Why Jessica? Well, because she’s quirky, like Liz, and the author rather boldly told her so when he met her on Friday. Better still, he signed a copy of THE FIRE WITHIN for her. So a little movie seed has been gently planted. Let’s hope it grows. Until next time, happy reading. SAVE OUR LIBRARIES. Hrrr!

This week's word is: VOSS

2011-01-30T16:24:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans. A fairly short post this week, but an interesting one, we hope. Keen followers of the author's tweets will have picked up on the fact that he was pleased with himself a few days ago, because he'd finished part one of THE FIRE ASCENDING. Faithful blog followers may remember that I mentioned how the word 'Voss' had appeared on my notepad, out of the blue, not long ago. Well, Voss turned out to be a villain. A nasty one at that. And the first part of the new book has been titled after him. Of course, I'm not allowed to tell you what happens or what part Voss has to play in the saga, but I can say this: What we're doing with the seventh and last book of the series is examining, in depth, the entire history of the Chronicles. That means going back to the time when the last twelve dragons were on the Earth. It's pretty gripping stuff. You have Mrs Author's word on that. Normally, she reads a new book chapter by chapter as the author produces them. This time, he shut himself away and wrote the whole section without chapter breaks and would only show it to her once it was done. She read it in an hour this afternoon. 21,549 words. She only had one comment, "Fantastic". And you might think she's biased. But take it from us, she's as fierce as a sibyl when it comes to criticising his work. So everyone in Wayward Crescent is blowing smoke rings right now. Oh, and for those of you who write in and ask why we don't make movies of the books, write no more. This is the one. Not signed up yet. But stunningly filmable. Dragons. Unicorns. Seers and sibyls. Darklings. The Fain. Skogkatts! Remember where you heard it first. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: FEEDBACK

2011-01-23T13:15:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans. Before we get into the main topic of the blog this week, which is to look at some of your feedback on FIRE WORLD, I should tell you that the author is feeling rather grumpy. Nothing unusual in that, of course. If he finds a spot of pigeon poo on his car he immediately morphs into Henry Bacon. And it’s nothing to do with the books either. He’s really rather happy with the letters you’ve been writing about FW. More of that in a moment. No, what got him tutting and clucking this morning was when Mrs Author tore a piece out of the newspaper about concert tickets. Apparently, people often keep the ticket stubs of concerts they have been to and some of them can be quite collectable. For instance, a stub from a 1963 Beatles concert was recently sold at auction for over £1000. Now many of you will know that The Beatles were the author’s favourite band, and in 1963 when he was just … a boy he was given a ticket, by a neighbour, to see The Beatles at his home town in Leicester, England. Naturally, the author was incredibly excited. But his father wasn’t. His father whipped the ticket out of his son's hand and said, “You’re not going to that you’ll get crushed.” And that was that. Some 40+ years on, it’s hard to know what rankles him the most – the fact that he didn’t get to see the best band of all time, or that the unused ticket would probably have fetched considerably more at auction than the stub would have done. We think it’s quite funny, really. Hrrr!

Anyway, to FIRE WORLD. He wants me to say a huge thanks to all of you who’ve already managed to read the book and taken the time to write to us about it. Please keep your messages coming in, because your reactions have been really interesting. By the way, it’s better to send questions via the website (http://www.icefire.co.uk/) rather than Twitter because he can write more in an email if he needs to, he says. Generally, you’ve been enjoying the book. 'Intriguing', 'fantastic', 'phenomenal' are all words that have been used to describe the story so far (from different people). One poor reader in Australia almost walked into his door post, he was that keen to read it (hello James). One or two of you have written in to say you really like the story but you don’t understand how it relates to the other books. You will when THE FIRE ASCENDING comes out in 2012. And a couple of readers have been disappointed not to find the David, Zanna, Lucy etc. that you know and love by now. Well, we would say that they are in FIRE WORLD, just in a different form. One of the most interesting and thoughtful letters we had suggested that FW was really just a filler, but that’s definitely not the case. For every book in the series, I have let the universe guide my pencil over the notepad and used my scribblings to influence the author while he's tapping at the keyboard. This time, it took us into the alternate world of Co:pern:ica instead of Earth. Have faith, dragon fans. The pencil knows what it is doing! To cheer you up, here’s a picture of our hero with the book. Until next week, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: MEGAN

2011-01-16T14:54:00.001Z

Hello dragon fans. One week on from the publication of FIRE WORLD and the reaction so far has been very positive. No one has written to the author yet to say they've read the entire book, but lots of you have read the opening chapter (click on 'Sample Chapter' above if you haven't already) and you seem to like that. It has made one or two of you scratch your heads and ask, "Erm, is this the same David who was in DARK FIRE or is he in another universe at the same time...?" Well, read the whole book. I hesitate to say, 'all will become clear'. We wouldn't be the dragons of Wayward Crescent if we made it TOO easy for you. But the book will put it more into context. What we're wrangling with, as usual, are the concepts of time and reality. Albert Einstein would have been proud of us. Hrrr.

At the end of last year, the dragons were excited to hear that a certain lady, whom we shall simply refer to by her first name, Megan, was rejoining the author's publisher, Orchard Books. Ten years ago (eleven, actually, Gwendolen's just said) Megan was the author's editor. She 'discovered' his first novel - the pigeon story Fly, Cherokee, Fly. At the time, Megan was working for another publisher but left them to join Orchard, shortly before Cherokee was published. However, clearly recognising the author's potential, she encouraged him to send her something, which he did - a squirrel story no-one else was interested in. It was, of course, Snigger and the Nutbeast. To be fair, Megan herself didn't think it was right to publish. Talking squirrels, as cute as they were, were not what the publishing world was looking for. But the author persisted. He decided to tell the story through human eyes and set up a situation with a landlady and a lodger and squirrels in the garden. Megan liked that a whole lot better. But there was still some key ingredient missing. The story needed a magical spark. Now, what might provide that...? Erm, HELLO! It was around this time that the author discovered me at the 'real' Mrs Pennykettle's craft fair. He realised it was a good idea to put us into the squirrel story, but it was Megan who suggested he let us do things. In other words, we have Megan to thank for getting the series started. Without her, we'd still just be lumps of attractive clay. Megan left Orchard just before FIRE STAR was published. But tomorrow, she's back. (Lots of happy scales rattling here.) Megan, has a LOT of story to catch up on, including the lovely Dragons of Wayward Crescent books, but we are all very excited to have her involved again. Watch this space! Happy reading. Hrrr!

Today's word is: CHAPTER

2011-01-10T19:09:00.001Z

Hello, dragon fans. It's unusual to see anything on the Notepad on a Monday, but as the author promised you yesterday, here is a sample of FIRE WORLD. Chapter One, in fact. (Just click on 'Sample Chapter' above.) We hope you find it suitably intriguing. As we've said all along, it's very different from the first five books in the series (time for you all to go character spotting, hrrr!). This book is set on the world of Co:pern:ica, which is much like Earth but with several important differences. On Co:pern:ica, people are able to 'imagineer' or materialise objects with their thoughts. They use their 'fain' to do this. No one is allowed to imagineer outside the limits of the 'Grand Design', which will give you a little bit of a clue to what might be happening at the end of the chapter. If you really want to know what's going on, of course, and how it all relates to the other books then you'll have to read the entire story. We are assured that the book has been printed and distributed. There are 10,000 of them out there somewhere. So you should be able to find it in the shops, and certainly online. When you're ready, let the author know what you think. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: APOLOGY

2011-01-09T10:44:00.000Z

Hi guys. Gadzooks was supposed to be back with you this week to announce, among other things, a sample chapter from FIRE WORLD. Sadly, we've had to delay that slightly because of a problem with publication. Some sort of gremlin (darkling?) got into the system, which meant that the book did not appear in the shops on January 6th. I can only apologise to the people who've written to ask me why they can't find it. As soon as we have news, we'll put up a special bulletin. Zookie, as you can imagine, is pretty gloomy about this, but he is doing his best to keep coming up with inspiration for THE FIRE ASCENDING. Stay glued. You should hear something during the week.

Posted by the author.

This week's word is: EXPOSITION

2011-01-02T15:38:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans. Happy New Year, from me, the author! I hope you enjoyed my ‘David Rain’ photo last week. Strange to think I had that much hair once. If you’re wondering where Zookie is, I’ve given him the weekend off. He was very keen to write a blog entry this week which pointed you to a sample chapter from FIRE WORLD. I’m sure you would have loved that, but we’ll keep it till next week when the book will be just four days old. Meanwhile, I thought I’d talk to you about the series in general. I told Zookie that a lot of you had been writing in asking about the ending of DARK FIRE and how it links up to FIRE WORLD, given that we’ve often said how ‘different’ FIRE WORLD is. He doesn’t like doing explanations because he follows his intuition faithfully and trusts that whatever we write together WILL make sense ultimately. But as ‘ultimately’ is going to come in 2012 with the publication of THE FIRE ASCENDING, I offered to set you off on the right path now. So he’s blown a smoke ring and fluttered away to peel a Satsuma and challenge Gruffen to a game of Peggle. He’ll be back next Sunday.

The dictionary definition of an ‘exposition’ is to give an explanation of something. In our case, this would be the plot lines of the books. At this stage, however, six books into the series, I would encourage all our readers to put aside the exposition of the individual stories and think of the saga as a whole. Basically, what Zookie and I have been trying to do over the past ten years is to examine where dragons might fit into the universe. We think of them as rather special creatures (Gretel assures me there’s no argument about this!) who are somehow linked not just to the possible creation of the universe, but the mechanisms of it as well. This, by definition, has to include time and the rather strange ‘stuff’ of space that scientists call ‘dark matter’. And then there is human consciousness, of course (Arthur, Liz’s partner, is fascinated by this). The fact that we are able to question our existence just drives our need to understand ourselves and where exactly we came from. Many of you will say the world was created by God, and you have every right to believe that, though clearly some people dispute it. Physicists (like Arthur) do a splendid job of trying to unravel the nuts and bolts of life, but there are still a great many answers that elude them. This is where we, the writers, step in. It’s our job to look at the biggest questions and tackle them from our unique point of view. We use our creative intuition to speculate about the mysteries of life and we often come up with some rather wild and entertaining fantasies. For instance, if the world was created from a 'big bang', then we, the animals, the plants and the stars that inhabit our world all came out of a huge explosion. A ball of fire. Now, what's the one creature you've heard of that breathes fire? Mmmm. What writers do is take these ideas and juggle them around and say, "Hey, could this be right?" Chances are, no. But it's interesting all the same to create a story from our intuitions. Humans have done this since the time they learned to draw on the walls of caves. Eventually, some of it will prove to be correct.

So, how does this relate to the books? Well, at the end of DARK FIRE, when the characters are under threat from the Shadow of Ix, David sees Gadzooks write ‘SOMETIMES’ on his pad and suggests to Zanna that they are about to be moved to another world. Well, that’s not strictly true. This was done to help you, the fans, make the transition into FIRE WORLD, which is set in the alternative world of Co:pern:ica. David and Zanna and Liz and Lucy and all the rest of them are there, but not quite as you’ve met them before. The common links between the worlds are David and Gadzooks. I won’t say any more than that because it would just spoil it for you. But what you have to try to do is expand your minds a little and wrap your heads around the idea that there might be other versions of us, living slightly different lives, at the same time – but elsewhere in the universe. This is one of those big mysteries some scientists like to think about. It's a pretty hard concept for a Sunday afternoon in January, but don’t worry if you can’t get a hold of it. I promise you, ALL WILL BE EXPLAINED in the last book. Just enjoy FIRE WORLD for what it is – a great story. You’re going to come across a new character called Agawin. Take note of him. He’s very, very important. In fact, don’t tell anyone, but he narrates THE FIRE ASCENDING…

Oops. I think I’ve given you far too much information there. Gadzooks will probably scowl like fury when he reads it, but tough. If you're lucky enough to get FIRE WORLD on January 6th, write and tell us what you think of it. Happy reading as always. And, erm, hrrr!

This week's word is: DAVID

2010-12-26T09:51:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans. As it's Christmas, I thought I'd bring you a little treat. You've often heard it said that David Rain, the hero of The Last Dragon Chronicles, is based on the author as a young man. Well, here, for the first time on the notepad, is the evidence of it. Yes, this is the author, aged about...12 Sorry! 23. Note the 'mop' of dark brown hair, the greatcoat(!) and the, erm, flared denims. The VERY flared denims. The less said about them, the better. Believe it or not, that building behind him is a library. Not the library that features in the books, with the gardens and the squirrels etc. That was a few miles away. But a library nonetheless. He wants me to comment on how handsome he was as a young man ("What, when he had hair?" Gretel has just said.) but I think we'll let you lot be the judge of that. This image, by the way, is just one of several interesting photos you can find in Mrs Author's wonderful RAIN and FIRE guidebook. Dash out and buy it right away! It's a very good read. This shot was taken about a year before he met Mrs Author. This is what she fell in lurve with, aah. It's still one of her favourite photos of him.

Now then, I know you're all busy with presents, but don't forget that the fantastic FIRE WORLD is out on January 6th in the UK and - oh, hang on. What's this? Yes, very funny. Gwendolen has just hacked into the pad and posted the picture below. I'll give you one guess who it is? Yes, it's me when I was a baby dragon. Look at the cutesy eyes. (The pad and pencil are tucked away under my wing.) This was taken when I was still on Mrs Pennykettle's workbench in the Dragons' Den, a few days before she gave me to David. We mature very fast! Anyway, Gruffen has been working on a song for you. It goes like this: "We wish you a hrrr-y Christmas. We wish you a hrrr-y Christmas. We wish you a hrrr-y Christmas and (wait for it) a hrrr-y New Year." Brilliant. They don't write them like that any more. Have a fantastic holiday, everyone. We're going out sledging! Only 11 more days till FIRE WORLD. Exciting! Thank you for reading all my posts this year. We're all looking forward to 2011, even if it will be the final year for the dragon books. Gulp. I'll keep you updated with all the info as it comes in about THE FIRE ASCENDING. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SCUFFENBURY

2010-12-19T10:04:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans. 'Tis the Sunday before Christmas and we have a nice surprise for you today. Have a look at the picture below. It may look a little odd at first, but if you cast your minds back to the end of DARK FIRE it will begin to make sense.

Yes, this is an image of the final scene at Scuffenbury Hill. See Alexa holding me? David and Zanna? Tam and Lucy? The Shadow of Ix? This illustration appears as a frontispiece to FIRE WORLD. The reason it's there is because this scene is pictured on a tapestry guarded by firebirds. Now I'm not allowed to say any more than that. But the tapestry is what links FIRE WORLD and DARK FIRE together. We have to thank the author's publisher for granting us permission to use it. So thank you Orchard Books.

We also want to say a big thanks to the author's American publisher for sending us what are known as 'proofs' or 'advanced reading copies' (ARCs) of the US edition of FIRE WORLD, which comes out there in May next year. ARCs are sent out to major retailers and reviewers etc. to encourage them to buy in the book or post reviews of it in bookselling magazines and so forth. DON'T ask the author to send you one. He can't. He's not allowed to. These are strictly for the book trade. And they are not for sale. As you can just about see from the scan of the back cover, there will be a video book trailer, plus all sorts of advertising and promotional stuff. Exciting. We'll keep you posted with developments on the notepad as always.

Nothing much else to report. He is hard at work on the rather dramatic beginning of THE FIRE ASCENDING and we're all off to help Mrs Author put the Christmas decorations up. We will save our proper Christmas greetings until next week. In the meantime, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: MILESTONES

2010-12-12T12:29:00.000Z

Hello, dragon fans. We open this week with a big thank you to the author’s friend, Rod Duncan. Sometime last year, I forget exactly when it was, Rod came over to Wayward Crescent to make a short promotional film of our hero talking about DARK FIRE. The whole thing was scripted and shot within the space of 24 hours and was put up on YouTube shortly afterwards. Rod mailed us a couple of days ago to say the film has now had over 10,000 viewings. Hrrr! Most of you who follow the blog will have seen it, but if you're new to the notepad and the books, here’s the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ_i9Png4CA

The dragons like Rod. He’s a man with vision, and one of the most underrated talents we know. He’s in the middle of making a ZOMBIE movie right now (yes!) which we will flag up on the notepad as soon as it’s available to be seen. Rod and the author have talked briefly about making another promotional film for FIRE WORLD. This time, rather than have the author talking straight to camera, they are keen to do something a little more…dramatic. Any dragon who has ever seen the author trying to act would probably be tightening their eye ridges hearing that. But Rod is a gifted director and if anyone can make the author watchable, it’s him. It probably won’t happen while Rod is still immersed in zombies (messy business), but I shall be jotting some ideas onto my pad and we might aim to film something in the second half of 2011, to coincide with the marketing campaign the author’s publisher is planning for the release of the paperback edition of FIRE WORLD. Don’t forget by the way it’s now only TWENTY-FIVE DAYS or thereabouts before the UK hardback of FW comes out. We received some advanced copies this week and the book is STUNNING to look at. All the dragons have been pawing the copy on the kitchen table. Regular followers might be wondering why we haven't illustrated the title in red, orange and yellow as normal. It's because the cover of the book is predominantly orange. Originally we were thinking of having lots of 'flame' colours on the cover artwork. But when it came in, it was clear that the orange should dominate. From now on, that's how you'll see it on the blog.

Another milestone we’re close to reaching is 250 followers on my notepad. The number stands, as I write this, on 249. Come on, dragonworld. One more would be FAB. I am really delighted that so many of you follow my weekly ramblings. I have considered becoming more ‘philosophical’ and blogging about things other than the author’s books. But I know that he regards the notepad as a little treasure trove of info for all those readers dedicated to the Chronicles. Here, after all, is where you get all the best and most important news FIRST. Where else would you come to learn that he’s planning to make the opening of THE FIRE ASCENDING one HUGE chapter that might be as much as 20,000 words long. And that it will be more in the style of a regular fantasy story – at least at the beginning – telling the remarkable history of Gawain, the last true dragon on Earth. And what if I told you that at the beginning of FW is a drawing of the final scene from DARK FIRE, after the battle at Scuffenbury Hill. Hmm. There’s something for you to think about. There is a very good reason for having this image, as you’ll come to learn when you read FIRE WORLD. And for all those of you who’ve been writing to the author asking what exactly happened at the end of DARK FIRE … well, you don’t have long to wait for an answer. It might not be the answer you hoped or expected (or predicted) but the link between the books is definitely there. No more clues. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: ED

2010-12-05T11:20:00.000Z

Hello, dragon fans. As promised in last week’s blog, here is a picture of the author’s literary agent, fondly known as Agent Ed!! This is not a disguise. This is how he always looks. No wonder unruly publishers fear him! Ed took some time out from his busy schedule to come and speak at the author’s writing group in Leicester a couple of nights ago. I can reveal that he did take off his hat and glasses, which produced an audible gasp around the room. For Ed is really no other than… no, sorry, I’m not allowed to reveal that. He also arrived at the venue in a splendid pair of green wellingtons, which sadly he changed out of before his talk began. He seemed to think shoes would give a better impression of London literary life, though we think the wellies just added to his charisma.

So what did Ed talk about? Well, all you wannabe writers would have been glued to his every word. First up, he gave a lot of sensible advice about the publishing industry and reassured us all that the book is ‘not dead’. This may have been prompted by the sight of an elderly lady on the front row who was taking notes on an Apple iPad. More about her in a moment. The work of an agent is to be a kind of buffer between an author and their publisher. An agent will not only read and suggest changes to an author’s manuscript (hopefully to make it more saleable) but will then make sure it is seen by all the right editors. But the work doesn’t end there. Once a book is accepted for publication there is a hefty contract to be sorted out. Plus there may be overseas sales or even film rights to negotiate. An agent often handles all of that. So they are indispensable really. But getting one can be as tricky as trying to fish a coin out from the depths of the sofa with a knife blade (as I watched the author trying to do the other day – why didn’t he just ask me? A dragon’s tail is very versatile…) Here again there is no mystery. Many children (and adults) write in asking us how to get a book into print. And we always say, “Write the best story you possibly can and send it to a publisher – if they like it, they will buy it.” In truth, a prospective author would probably be best to seek out an agent first i.e. send your story to them. If an agent likes your work, your chances of publication are far, far greater. And here is our favourite piece of advice from Agent Ed: when you’ve sent in your story, don’t sit around waiting for the agent to respond, get on and write something new. I had to do this many times with the author at the start of his career. He all but erected a tent beside the letterbox at home while he anxiously awaited news of his early story submissions. Don’t. Go back to the computer (or in my case the notepad) and WRITE.

Finally, at the end of Agent Ed’s talk, there was the inevitable debate about how much of the market eBooks were going to gobble up. Enter the lady with the iPad – the oldest person in the room with the youngest piece of technology. She was quick to tell Ed how much she liked reading books on her pad. “Ah, but have you tried it in direct sunlight?” Ed said, thinking he might have highlighted a disadvantage of the electronic format. “No,” said the lady, “but I can read it in the dark!” A fair point.

Happy reading (in whatever format you prefer) – and don’t forget, there may only be nineteen shopping days to go before Christmas, but more importantly there are now only THIRTY-THREE days until FIRE WORLD makes its UK appearance. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SNOW

2010-11-28T10:47:00.000Z

As in, hooray! We’ve got some. Dragons LIKE snow. Fans of the Chronicles will know why, of course. When Gawain, the last dragon in the world cried his fire tear, it fell into a northern ocean and formed what you know as the Arctic ice cap. The ice from that region therefore contains small traces of dragon auma, which has gradually spread into the atmosphere and sometimes falls in flakes… So when we heard that the recent cold ‘snap’ over the UK had blown in from Siberia, we were all very happy and putting our paws out of the windows, hoping to catch a flake or two so we could commingle with the memory of the great dragon. All the author wished to do, however, was try to break the record for the most T-shirts, sweaters and coats a man can wear at one time. The last I saw of him he was muttering about something called anti-freeze for his car. I shake my scales in despair. He’s been in a funny mood lately. He really wants to get started on THE FIRE ASCENDING, but ‘life’ as he puts it, keeps getting in the way. This is the eternal conundrum for a writer. They will do anything to put off sitting at the keyboard and opening themselves up to the creative universe, but they also get very twitchy if they don’t write for a while. Fear not dragon fans. I’m not like that. Little does the author know that during this period of what he calls ‘inactivity’ I have been gently commingling with his consciousness, dropping a few ideas into his brain. Almost as if I’ve been snowing in there J. Mind you, there’s plenty of room. If you look through his ears (G’reth and I can do this, of course) all you’ll see is tumbleweed and windmills (and a shredder – honest, you can hear it going when he’s asleep). Rumour is there’s a tiny kitten in there as well that likes to poot a small ball around his skull now and then, but it seems to sleep in one of the windmills and doesn’t come out very much. Anyway, my ideas haven’t quite crystallised yet, but when they do, he will find himself writing about the history of Gawain and a rather important character called Agawin, whom you will meet – or learn of – in the next book. I have also found myself doodling the name ‘Voss’ on my pad just recently, and it chills me to look at it. I think there could be a connection to Gwilanna there. Hmm. Time will tell. Next week, a report on Agent Ed, who is coming to speak at the author’s writing group. Ed is rather upset that no photograph of him has appeared on the blog yet. We plan to put that right. Until then, happy reading – and don’t forget, it’s only FORTY days now until FIRE WORLD comes out in the UK. Hrrr!

This week's word is: HORACE

2010-11-21T14:17:00.001Z

Hello dragon fans. We don't usually talk about anything other than the Dragon Chronicles on the blog these days, but we had to put in a mention this week for one of the author's older books, 'Horace', which has just come out in a Japanese edition. Horace is one of those stories that he affectionately calls a 'domestic drama'. In other words, a story about general home life that might happen to any ordinary boy or girl. In the book, a young boy finds an old teddy bear (called Horace) in a charity shop. He wants to buy it but the shop won't sell it to him because it doesn't have a safety label on it. So the boy and his mate nick it from the charity shop trash after the shop has closed. This gets them into all sorts of trouble - especially when they find out that the bear is worth a cool £30,000. We love Japanese covers (remember the brilliant ones we showed of the dragon books?) because they always pick up on the various aspects of the story. So we have a drawing of a girl with a broken leg, a confused policeman and an ice cream millionaire. If you're wondering how it all fits together, get the English version of Horace from the library. It's a good read. One of the author's favourites.

Nothing significant to report from Wayward Crescent this week, though on the theme of foreign editions it appears that the dragon books are going to be translated into Turkish. As soon as we have a cover image to show you, we will. Now that FIRE WORLD is all done and dusted it's really just a question of blowing a few smoke rings while we wait for it to appear. Scales are rattling in feverish excitement all through the house because we think this is the book of the series - so far. The author's publishers clearly think so too. In the UK, 1,000 advance copies of the book will be going to reviewers and librarians, while in America that figure is something like 2,000. Don't forget, the book comes out in the UK during the first week of January. That's about SIX WEEKS from now, and the US release won't be far behind that, in May. We are all looking forward to seeing what you make of it because it's so, so different from the rest of the series - and yet so familiar too. No clues. You have to just wait and see. Love those firebirds! Till next time, hrrr!

This week's word is: SCBWI

2010-11-14T23:12:00.000Z

Ssssh, we've just come back from the old cathedral city of Winchester (which used to be the capital of England at one time, ooh err) and Gadzooks is napping - listen... zzzzhrrr, zzzhrrr - so I'm doing the blog this week. (Mrs Author has just lain him down on a cushion. Aah.) He's had a very busy two days observing writers and illustrators doing what they do best - hanging out with other writers and illustrators at a conference. The acronym SCBWI means Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators - but no one calls it that of course. They shorten it to 'Squibby' or 'Scooby' (I never did quite work it out, and it felt impolite to ask). Anyway, what does an author like me do at a conference like 'Squibby'? Well, one thing all you budding scribblers will quickly discover is that writers like to be with like-minded people. Writing is a solitary business. So it's fun to breakaway from the 'typeface' sometimes and just go and share your experiences with people you know will understand them. And the sweet thing is, you never get bored, because although we all know the basic stuff, the building blocks of how to put a story together, we are endlessly fascinated by how other people go about it. Remember this next time you lift a pen: there are as many different ways of writing as there are people out there doing it. Okay, that sounds a bit Yoda-ish. (Well, no, this sounds a bit Yoda-ish: different ways of writing there are, doing it many people.) But this is the appeal - for me - of a conference. It's just interesting to mingle with fellow authors and see how much planning they do, for instance, or how much research, or how they deal with writers' block, or how much time they spend on their blogs or their facebook pages or on twitter (41 followers now. Keep them coming!) And you can sometimes mingle with influential people, like editors or agents. OR you can simply make friends with pleasant folk who happen to share your passion for drawing or telling a story. And that's the point I really want to make. All you youngsters reading this will be thinking: Yeah, but, I'm only twelve. How would I get to anything like a Scooby conference? Well, you won't, sorry. But there's nothing to stop you getting together and swapping stories with friends. It can be very rewarding. If you want to be a little bit nerdy, try creating a powerpoint presentation about how you came to write your latest story - then show it to your mates. Have your own Squibby, and you too can experience, in miniature, that particular aspect of being an author. Until next time, when Gadzooks will be back, happy reading. Oh, and thank you to everyone at Squ- SCBWI for a fabulous weekend. Hi to all the lovely people I met - and thanks for all the unexpected name checks! (You had to be there.) Hrrr!

This week's word is: TWITTER

2010-11-07T13:57:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans - wait! Was that a bird? Was it a plane? Was it G'reth doing figures of eight around Bonnington's ears? No, it was the author TWEETING. Yes, fans of our hero can now follow his daily routines on Twitter (he is @chrisdlacey, whatever that means). We wait with bated snorts to see what pearls of wisdom will come off his phone. "Itch on my knee, just scratched it." "Run out of milk, popping to the shop." He's just seen me writing that and has assured me that he won't tweet anything banal. He will only use the service to say something interesting (what, we really have run out of milk???) or to keep fans (sorry FOLLOWERS) up to date with current book developments. He thinks I've got the hump because my blog might become redundant. No chance! Where else can you see pics of the covers or photos of events etc. By the way, we've just had the proper cover run outs for FIRE WORLD and they look AMAZING. Even though I say it myself, this is just the most fantastic book. Dare I say it, the best in the series. Hrrr! The author is currently reading through the American proofs, which means that will be in production soon. Very exciting. Then, of course, it's full puffle ahead for THE FIRE ASCENDING. More on that in the posts leading up to Christmas (47 shopping days to go).

Last week, the author had a fantastic time up in Scotland. It was a delight to visit George Watson's school in Edinburgh again (hello Alison!) and the primary in Cumbernauld whose name annoyingly escapes me. Lovely children. Great audiences. For the first two days, the author was the guest of the wonderful Scotia Books (thank you Linzi, Anna & Jim) and got to stay in the fantastic Boathouse Hotel in Kilsyth. Scotland, like Wales, is a country with stunning scenery. We particularly enjoyed the train ride from a little station called Croy to the city of Dundee on the east coast. Wish we could have got a photograph of the Wallace Monument in Stirling to show you, but it was too dark (google it up). In Kilsyth, the author went out to dinner at a superb Chinese restaurant where one of the waiters gave him a dragon! There's a picture of the dragon below. He looks a bit regal, but he's very friendly when you get to know him. On the third day, we visited The High School of Dundee. Very spectacular. What a place to go to school! Great kids and two brilliant librarians in Catherine and Julie.

Anyway, for now, back to the proofs. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: ABOOKANDAHUG

2010-10-31T14:37:00.000Z

Hello dragon fans. No doubt there are those among you who think that ABOOKANDAHUG is not technically a word. That it's really five words contracted into one. Well, hrrr, to that. It's my blog and I decide what's a word and what isn't! Actually, it's the name of a fantastic website run by a lovely lady called Barb Langridge, who interviewed the author during his tour of the United States in May. We feature it on the blog today because the interview was filmed and has just gone live on the site. This one is a little different from the last one we posted, because Barb grills our hero about altermative universes and creative techniques. If you want to see it - and we thoroughly recommend you do - go to www.abookandahug.com and click on the Books Alive tab at the top of the screen. You'll see the author's interview listed alongside a whole list of others (including Christopher Paolini, author of 'Eragon'). ABookandaHug is a wonderful site, dedicated to reading and the promotion of books. We were terribly impressed by Barb, because not only did she ask some searching questions, but she'd read all five books in some detail. We wish her well with the site. Hrrr!

This week, the author travelled to London for a meeting with his UK publisher, Orchard Books. There he ate several chocolate mini-rolls, ahem, and chatted about promotional plans for FIRE WORLD, which are likely to include a competition of some sort and something called a 'blog tour', which I am particularly excited about. More on that in future posts. The publisher is very keen for him to have a greater online 'presence'. The subject of Twitter was raised. Gwendolen, everybody's favourite IT dragon, is looking at the possibility of getting the author 'tweeting'. All we will say for now is 'watch this space'. There may be an announcement about this soon...

It is, of course, Halloween today. Normally, we don't 'celebrate' this as such in case Gwilanna comes round trick or treating, but we all got a shock yesterday when the author opened his mouth to reveal a fang. We thought at first that he was genuinely morphing into a dragon, but it turned out that all he'd done was broken one of his incisors on a ginger biscuit! We told him, as he rushed off for an emergency appointment at the dentists, that he should have stuck to mini rolls - they're a lot softer (and he didn't even bring one home for us). Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: COVER!!

2010-10-24T19:47:00.006+01:00

Hello dragon fans,

At long last it's here! The fantastic cover for FIRE WORLD. Some of you may have already spotted it online at the Amazon website, but that one has the wrong typography. This is the official version, which will soon replace all others.

The creature shown in the dragon's eye is a firebird, not a phoenix as many people first think. I can't tell you too much about the firebirds yet, except to say they are related to dragons via eagles ... mmm. Once again, Angelo Rinaldi has painted the cover, and this book is dedicated to him in grateful thanks for his hard work (and genius) over the years. The full cover, laid out, looks like this (though it's still being edited):

You probably won't be able to read the blurb from that, so here it is too:

Aurielle looked at the woven picture and sighed. So beautiful, with its wide green hills and its dragons flying gracefully around the valley. And yet so menacing, too. It seemed to tell the story of a great battle… But what did it mean?

In the great librarium on the world of Co:pern:ica, an ancient tapestry, guarded by firebirds, is about to have its secrets unravelled – a process which will bring together the ec:centric boy, David, the evil Aunt, Gwyneth, and a dangerous force from the other side of time… Isenfier is about to begin, and the worlds around it may never be the same again...

Aurielle is the firebird in the dragon's eye, and Isenfier is the name given to the battle that David and the dragons had with darklings over the Vale of Scuffenbury. The rest you will just have to wait for, sorry... Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: INTERVIEW

2010-10-10T21:32:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Here's a little treat for you - a rare interview with Mrs Author! The very first, in fact.

The author has been away for two weeks doing events, did you miss him?

Not half as much as the dragons did! It was all I could do to stop fire tears being cried left, right and centre. Chris forgot to tell them he’d be back soon…

Will you ever do any events yourself?

It’s unlikely that I’d do any, solo, but I often go with Chris to sell books. So it’s not beyond the bounds of reason that I might add my two-pennyworth to his talks at some point.

How much of Rain & Fire did you actually write?

It’s easier to say what I didn’t write. Chris wrote the preface (the story of how David first arrived at Wayward Crescent) and obviously all of the pieces quoted from the novels. He had also already done some of the major character profiles for his Australian publisher’s website. I pinched these and elaborated on them, as well as adding in some more minor ones. All of the rest was Mrs Author’s own work!

Do you have a favourite part of R&F?

Chapter 9. It’s called ‘Whistlers, Wastrels and Woebegones’ and contains the only known photograph of David Rain!

Was it easy, writing about someone you know?

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy! I’ve got 32 years’ worth of our shared history to draw upon.

Did he try to interfere with the book?

Yes! But I’m more than a match for him and warned him off in no uncertain terms. I can be a bigger dragon than all the Pennykettle ones put together.

Talking of which, who is your favourite dragon?

Well, of course, it has to be you, Zookie. How could you ever think otherwise?

Which is your favourite Chronicles book and why?

TFE. The Fire Eternal is brilliant because its hero doesn’t even appear in it. Weird or what? I love the strength of the female leads. Liz and Zanna’s journey through loss and grief to their ultimate triumph over adversity is tremendously inspiring. (Instead of using stars as review symbols, I use tissue boxes. TFE was a five-box classic.)

Who’s your favourite non-dragon character?

Can I pick two or three? David, of course, has to come top of the list because he’s based so heavily on Chris, my ever-loving. I also have a soft spot for Russ the helicopter pilot in Fire Star, as well as Tam (cor!) Farrell – love his fashion sense! Oh, and Winston the teddy bear. Superb bit of casting.

Will you be writing any more books about dragons in the future?

Assuming that this book is well-received, I trust I shall in due course be writing a couple of update chapters for a revised version of it, once books six and seven have been published and the series is complete. Other than that, watch this space.

You’ve read Fire World. Can you tell the readers anything about it?

I’ve read it many times as I do the first-line editing and proofing for all of Chris’s books before they go to his publisher. It gets better and better after each reading. It’s really unusual in that, six books into the series, it can be read entirely as a stand-alone story as well as part of the Chronicles as a whole. I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I let you into the secret that this part of the story takes place in a parallel dimension to Earth. That may sound peculiar, but it will all make perfect sense by the time you get to the end of book seven.

Have you any last comment to make to the author’s fans?

Just hope you enjoy the guide book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Hrrr!

This week's word is: OCTOBER

2010-10-05T20:00:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. You may think that’s an unusual word to put on the pad this week: October. Is it Zookie’s birthday? you might be wondering. Is it because squirrels are very active in October? Does he just like the sound of the word? Well, it’s none of these things, actually. October is very significant for myself and the author because traditionally, on the first day of this month, we start a new book…

This all began waaaaay back in 1986, before most of you reading this were even born, I suspect. On October 1 of that year, our hero sat down in what was then his dining room, opened an A4 notepad on his glass-topped dining table, clicked on a pen and began to write a novel – about polar bears. At that time, it had no title. In fact, it was well into the following year before he thought to call it White Fire. Ring any bells? He sat at that table every weekend, and many week nights too (he was working during the day, looking down microscopes at Leicester University) and after two years and two months he had a story - a saga, no less - of some 250,000 words. It was a ramshackle epic that got better as it went along – but he didn’t have me to help him then. I came into his life shortly after White Fire was written.

The October 1st just gone is highly significant, of course, because he was beginning the final book of the Chronicles. It was quite an emotional moment when he sat down and wrote the first line. How will it feel when he writes the last? His publisher once told him to go away and write as many of these books as he liked – ten, perhaps twelve, they said. But he and I both know that the Chronicles have probably run their course, though there is still a great deal to tell about David, the Pennykettles, and the last great dragon on Earth, Gawain. My pencil will not be idle this year. As always, we have a working title. As always, you, the followers of the blog get to hear of it first. We tinkered with the idea of calling it White Fire, but have settled for the moment on

The Fire Ascending

That may change. But for now, remember where you saw it first. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: CHAMPERS!

2010-09-26T13:05:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. At last, it's here! Mrs Author's guide book to the Chronicles is published! It was due out on October 7th, but the publishers in their wisdom have seen fit to release it early. In case you can't remember it (as if you wouldn't) here's the stunning cover.

Brilliant, isn't it? We really like it. Gretel says she posed for it (which is not true, but we're not going to argue with her). The guide book is packed full of interesting things about the author and how 'he' came to write the Chronicles. Plus there's a character list, which many of you ask him for, and a glossary of all those strange words like 'auma', which get you confused from time to time. There are also three or four lovely illustrations of scenes from the books. I can't show you one here because it wouldn't be fair to publicise them on the blog before the public have had a chance to see them within the pages of the book. But give it a couple of months and I'm sure we'll get permission to put one up. Sadly, you can't get the book in the USA at the moment. That situation may change, but for now all you ardent fans across the Atlantic would have to import it. As far as we're aware, the book will appear in Australia, though.

If you buy Rain and Fire, look for the sneak preview of Fire World. It is only a small extract, granted, but enough to give you a flavour of what the next book is like. AND you get a reminder of the fab competition that the author's publisher is running, which will allow one lucky fan to have DINNER with our hero. You don't have to buy the book to enter the competition, you can simply visit the Chronicles website at www.thelastdragonchronicles.com. However, you DO have to be a resident of the UK or Ireland to enter. This is because we live in England and it would be quite a feat of organisation to fly in a fan from overseas. Sorry. At least the competition itself is easy. You just have to visit the website and answer what the title of the first book in the series is. I can't tell you, but I can give you a clue: it's got FIRE in the name!!

So, Mrs Author, having worked quietly in the background for years, reading manuscripts, proofing texts, talking through plots and generally supporting me while I try to inspire the great d'Lacey has finally got the chance to have her name in lights too. She's not the type for the red carpet. And champers (that's short for champagne by the way) is hardly likely to pass her lips either (though she might be sent some from the publisher). No, what Mrs Author would want is whether or not you enjoyed the book. So if you buy it online anywhere and want to put up a review of it, please do so. She'd be glad to see your comments. Until next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: SUBBUTEO

2010-09-19T22:00:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. I've given Zookie the day off this week as things are pretty quiet right now. So he is being a dragon of leisure and I'm doing the blog entry. He has asked me to remind you that Mrs Author's guidebook, RAIN AND FIRE, is due out in the UK on October 7th, but we'll be flagging that up specially around the first week in October.

A couple of weeks ago, someone wrote to me asking what my favourite game was when I was a boy. Well, that was easy to answer. I've always been a soccer fan. I grew up watching legends like...well, most of you would never have heard of them. So let me tell you about a table top soccer game instead. It was called Subbuteo, and it involved flicking plastic figures around a green baize soccer pitch, after a ball that in some cases was almost as big as the players themselves. People were seriously passionate about this game. I used to play in a league with my schoolfriends. I never won the league, but I really enjoyed travelling to my friends' houses for away games. One friend, Karl, had a lava lamp in his lounge. That was always a special fixture! When I grew up and started writing, I began to write about the things I loved. And shortly before the dragon books came along I wrote a story about Subbuteo called 'The Table Football League'. Sadly, you can't get the book any more. And the game itself has gone out of production thanks to the advent of video games. But all around the world, aged enthusiasts (who play World Cups, would you believe?) keep the game alive. If you've never tried it, I totally recommend it. It's quite amazing. I would love to see it make a comeback. Interestingly, 'The Table Football League' was illustrated by Philip Reeve, before he became famous for his wonderful 'Mortal Engines' series of books. Maybe I should challenge him to a game one day?

So, what's happening in dragon world? Well, I am waiting for what we call 'proof'' copies of Fire World from both my UK and my US editors. A 'proof' is simply a copy I have to read through, to check for errors. And any day now, I will begin work on the seventh and final book of the series. I have a title in mind, but I'm not going to put it out until I'm completely sure. But, as always, this is where you'll see it first. Till next time. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: DRAGONTONGUE

2010-09-12T11:34:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Several of you have written to the author lately expressing a desire to see what dragontongone, the language of dragons, looks like - hrrr! I should say, by the way, that the 'hrrrs' you see in the books are a very simplified general version of the noises we make. It would be impossible to write it out properly for you because the language is just too difficult for humans to grasp. We, of course, being desperately clever, can speak (or understand) English to some extent. So the grunts and snorts and huffs that the author records in the stories are always translated for you. Occasionally, if we're being very expressive, we will ask him to write hrrr-rr-rrr! or something. But this is rare.

Anyway, it surprised us to read your queries because there is an illustration of dragontongue at the beginning of Dark Fire - or at least there is in the UK edition. We've now discovered that the confusion has arisen because the illustration does not appear in the US edition (we're not sure about Australia; perhaps one of you would like to write and tell the author whether you guys have it or not). To be honest, we're not sure why it didn't appear in the US book, but at least we can show you what you missed, right here, on the blog. Those of you who have read Dark Fire will know that evidence of dragontongue was first discovered by Anders Bergstrom in a cave on the Hella Glacier, in the High Arctic. Bergstrom took photographs of it and was on his way back to his polar camp when he was stopped by a bear called Thoran. Now Thoran was no ordinary bear. He had been around for centuries and was the first white bear ever to walk the ice. His fur had been turned from brown to white by the power of Gawain's fire tear, which, as you all now know, was how the polar ice cap came to be formed. (Stop me if I'm getting ahead of you here!) Because of the importance of Bergstrom's discovery, Thoran decided to give Bergstrom a little 'dragon power' of his own. In effect, their auma commingled and Thoran was able to walk among men in Bergstrom's form (and vice versa) and hence spread the word about environmental problems in the Arctic - to among others David Rain. Good innit? Eventually, when natural dragons began to return to the Earth, it was decided that in order to ease understanding of their presence and lessen the shock of their appearance, it would be a good idea if I passed evidence of Bergstrom's cave discovery onto an academic called Rupert Steiner. Steiner would then publish snippets of the writings, including Bergstrom's photographs, and world awareness of dragons (and their harmless intent) would begin to rise. Phew!

Anyway, here's a slightly fuller version of the illustration you missed. Don't ask me to translate it, it would take too long (readers of Dark Fire will know that it's a pointer to a place called Scuffenbury Hill). There is no real alphabet because again it's far too complex to produce. Can humans learn to speak dragontongue? Yes. People often say to us that it looks like musical notation. This is because dragons have a very harmonic resonance to their voice. The closest human language would probably be Welsh, which probably explains why Wales has adopted the red dragon as its national symbol.

So there you are. A nice bit of history this week. Happy reading (even though you can't understand it!) Hrrr!

This week's word is: INTERVIEW

2010-09-05T17:13:00.000+01:00

A nice treat for fans of the author this week - a link to a filmed interview. This is one of the two that he did in Washington on the last day of his American tour. It was filmed at WETA, the Washington TV network and was primarily intended for a brilliant website called Reading Rockets. We have the lovely Rachael Walker and her team to thank for this, hrrr! The dragons have watched it, and we all agree that the author comes across very well, though Gretel is annoyed that she wasn't there to sit on his shoulder and generally steal the show. Have a look. You'll hear him talking about all sorts of things to do with writing, reading - and dragons, of course.

Here are the links. Right now, he is featured on the Reading Rockets homepage (www.readingrockets.org) and the direct link to the interview is here: www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/dlacey. It's also on a website that focuses on adolescent literacy: www.adlit.org/authors/d%27Lacey

Surprisingly, we still don't have the finished artwork for the FW cover, but then the whole publishing industry tends to go on holiday in August. The author, likewise, is having a couple of weeks off. He's not actually going anywhere, he just wants to chill out and strum his guitar, he says. Meanwhile, I am turning my thoughts towards the final book of the Chronicles, particularly its title. More on that in the coming weeks. For now, happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: EDINBURGH

2010-08-29T21:10:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. First, we have to apologise for the non-appearance of the blog over the last two weeks. The first week it was due to the weather. The rain was so appalling that Gwendolen couldn't get an Internet signal and after trying for several hours I gave up and the author fell asleep! Last week, he was working flat out on FIRE WORLD. Yes, I know we reported that he'd finished the book a couple of blog entries back, which he had. We'll, he'd reached the end, anyway. Then his editor, Catherine, asked him to reconsider rewriting the end of the book. He had done it in 'epilogue' form. In other words, he was tying up loose ends in a 'reported' fashion. Catherine thought it might be done better as normal text. But turning it round proved to be a lot trickier than he'd expected. So I had to sit with him and be my usual inspirational self, rather than blogging the week's events.

As it was, not an awful lot was happening anyway. He was practically glued to the laptop but he did complete the rewrite and send it off, phew. (In soccer playing terms, in time added on by the fourth official!) So FW is DEFINITELY done and work will begin on the final book soon (gulp). Hopefully, FW is still on track for January publication in the UK and Australia. As soon as we have some American dates, we'll let you know. Still no sign of a full cover run-out, which is a bit frustrating for you excited fans, sorry. But rest assured, the moment the author is given the go-ahead to show it, I will post it here.

One interesting bit of news is that the Chronicles are going to be available as eBooks in October this year. Yes, the digital age has come to Scrubbley. They should appear on all the usual platforms. Now the author wants to get an iPad (I've had one for years, of course) so he can have a little electronic library of his own books, as well as many others. Mrs Author simply thinks this is just an excuse for him to own a new piece of 'kit', but we do like them. He was playing with an iPad at Edinburgh airport this morning. "Look, Zookie," he said, "I can turn a page just by flicking a finger!" Erm, yeah... eReaders are a rather interesting development because all authors are passionate about books and many regard the digital media with some suspicion. But there's no denying the beauty of some of the devices and the manufacturers have gone to great trouble to at least give them a 'bookish' feel. So is it wrong for an author to want to own an iPad or similar? Is he betraying good old-fashioned print? No. Not at all. We in the Crescent don't believe that 'paper' books will die out, certainly not in the immediate future anyway, but iPads and Kindles etc. are not going to go away and might even help some children on the road to reading. It would be distressing if eBooks were being sold at such ludicrous prices that publishers felt they couldn't afford to print books anymore, but surely, in time, the two will sit happily aside one another in the market place. Personally, I can't see me downloading any apps onto my pad, but you never know!

We were in Scotland for the day by the way because he was appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Edinburgh is one of our favourite places to be. The buildings are mostly constructed of wonderfully dark, smoke-ingrained stone, which gives the whole city a real 'gothic' feel. It's a very vibrant place when the festival is on and there's a lovely atmosphere on the streets. If you've never been, we recommend it. The author stayed at the Bonham Hotel, which is tucked away in the impossible to pronounce (but rather lovely for it) Drumsheugh Gardens. He was checking in when the comedian, Alan Davies, appeared beside him. He smiled at Mr Davies, but didn't speak. It's impolite if you're moderately famous to recognise someone who clearly is. A few years ago, the same thing happened when he was at a posh party in London. He was handing in his coat at the cloakroom when the well-known author Terry Pratchett stepped up beside him. Mr Pratchett didn't have a coat, he just handed in his hat. That's what you call doing it in style. The author didn't 'recognise' him, either. In Edinburgh, our hero spoke for the first time about the four Dragons of Wayward Crescent books. It was probably not the best talk he's ever done, but then he was feeling his way with it a bit. And judging by the number of children who queued up afterwards to have their dragon novels signed he would probably have been better off talking about them. Still, it was a great pleasure to be part of the festival. It always is. Hopefully we'll be back next year as FW will be coming out in paperback in the UK at just about the right time. See you next week. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: MOTHS

2010-08-08T22:15:00.001+01:00

Hello, dragon fans. As I write this the author is inside a wardrobe (that's an armoire or a closet, if you live in the USA). I would love to be able to tell you that he's found a secret door in the back of it, which leads to a land of lions and witches. Sadly, this is not the case. He's installing some kind of moth deterrent, which seems to consist of him getting amongst the clothing and sticking a piece of paper onto the wardrobe back. I asked if I should write 'MOTHS GO HOME' on it for him, but he didn't think that was very funny. Then he banged his head and that just put him in a bad mood. This all started when Mrs Author found that some fur had been chewed off one of her favourite teddy bears. Now, there are a lot of things Mrs A will put up with, but foul play with the teds is not one. So began a rigorous vaccuuming of all those areas one wouldn't normally go with a hoover, just to persuade the little chaps to think again about laying their eggs near a cuddly toy. Gretel found some red cedarwood essence amongst her potions which we think will do the trick. She also offered to hurr on any she saw flying about, but we thought that would be a bit cruel.

No cover image. Not yet. Puh. We have it, but we're not allowed to show it until its foiling and lettering and blurb is done. Won't be long now. We did unveil it briefly in some libraries in the lovely county of Dorset this week. The children who saw it all seemed to like it and many of them said, "What's that in the dragon's eye...?" A-ha. It's become quite a thing now, deciding what we do with the eye and how subtle to make it. This one isn't subtle (not like The Fire Eternal, for instance) but it is beautifully done. We think you'll love it. AND, big news. For the first time ever in one of the novels we're going to have a proper illustrated frontispiece. Remember the dragontongue at the front of Dark Fire? Well, FW will have its own drawing, which will be a proper scene from the book AND (here's a bit of a teaser) that scene will also have been in Dark Fire too. Work that one out!

If you've emailed the author recently and he hasn't got back to you, don't worry, he will. He's been working very hard on the FW manuscript, picking up on some suggestions from his editor, Catherine, and a few other queries from Mrs A. He also took time out, as you just read, for a day of talks. We'd like to thank all the staff of the libraries in Weymouth, Dorchester and Ferndown for their help, particularly Nicola, who took us out to lunch. (Hrrr!) We still don't understand the significance of 'Space Hop' their reading initiative, but the posters look good! Sadly, we didn't have time for photographs. This is very remiss in a lovely place like Dorset. I was urging the author to stop the car and take a snap of a carving I spotted in one of the many chalk hills. Sometimes you get giants. Sometimes you get white horses (or even unicorns!). I'm telling you, I saw an old boot! LOL. You had to be there to appreciate it.

Anyway, assuming our hero comes out of the wardrobe in time, we'll be back next week, hopefully with that brilliant cover. If anyone has any natural moth remedies, don't hesitate to let us know. Happy reading. Hrrr!

PS. Here's a nice pic from a fan called Natasha. Bit small, but you get the idea.

This week's word is: MIXED

2010-08-02T00:21:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. What a strange week it's been. A mixed one as people say. We're a little bit late with the blog first of all because we've all been out to the cinema tonight. This was Mrs Author's belated wedding anniversary treat. She and the author have now been married for THIRTY ONE years. That's over twice the average age of his readership! He was supposed to take her out a week ago on the actual date, but he was too busy, he said. This did not go down well with Mrs A who insisted he take her to the movies tonight or do the washing up for a month. The movies won. So what do you think we saw? The new Twilight film? How To Train Your Dragon? (excuse me?!) Avatar? No. It was Toy Story 3. And very good it was too. Mrs Author cried when the toys went safely to a new home (aah). We liked the little aliens and 'the claw'. Can't say too much or we'll spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it.

On the writing front, the author is still editing away at FIRE WORLD, sharpening up the dialogue and making general improvements etc. He's on part three, which happens in a place called 'The Dead Lands'. Sorry, no clues. You just have to use your imagination for now. He was fretting like mad this week when his laptop suffered a problem with a hinge, meaning it couldn't be closed. Gollygosh was there with his toolbox right away to fix it. It's useful having a healing dragon close at hand. So that held the editing up for a couple of days, but he's caught up now and is still very happy with it all. He's calling it 'the best' and that's saying something after Dark Fire. Tomorrow we're expecting the finished artwork for the cover. So if all goes well and everything is approved, it might appear on the blog next week. Excitement! FW will be dedicated to Angelo Rinaldi, the wonderful artist who created the covers. It's the least we can do for a man who has done so much to create the 'brand' image of the series.

Elsewhere this week the house was full, thanks to a visit from the author's brother's family. Marshall (the brother) is the creator of the Icefire website. So it was good to see him, and fun to have some family around. Marhall is a keen photographer. He was clicking away all week. So some of his shots might appear on the notepad soon as well. In the midst of all this, the author received a message from his best friend, Terri, saying that her mother had died. That was very sad. All the dragons sent a great big hrrr! Terri is an artist who helped develop the dragontongue you see at the front of Dark Fire.

Anyway, it's officially Monday in England so we really ought to post this and go to bed - not that dragons ever really sleep, of course, we just go into different types of stasis. Fingers crossed next week we'll have the cover. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: OUTTAKE

2010-07-25T11:33:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. With the author busily editing away and everyone in publishing seemingly going on holiday right now, things are pretty quiet in the Crescent. So I thought I'd take this opportunity to show you a small outtake from Dark Fire. It's very interesting when you look back at these things to think why they were rejected (usually because they're not good enough or they seem contrived) and how raw or unpolished they are. If I showed this extract to the author he'd want to work on it for two days, knocking it into shape, which rather defeats the object. So what you have below is the original piece he wrote when Gollygosh was trying to deal with the dark fire trapped inside the obsidian. Note in this version the obsidian doesn't get smashed. The version that finally went into the book was much more exciting. An author has to do this sometimes: ask themselves if a particular piece of writing is a little dull, and if the answer is 'yes', to then improve on it. Anyway, see what you think.

By the way, the result of the best jacket photo poll was the one of him fiddling with his ear! Everyone seemed to think this looked the most natural. No one voted for the one of him staring into the distance. And though people liked the one of him sitting down, it was nowhere near as popular as the 'ear' shot.

Very soon now we hope to be able to show you the cover of FW, which has just gone into full production after a couple of weeks of debate. It's looking very good. I'll say more about it when we have the OK to show it.

Okay. Here's the outtake. Happy reading. Hrrr!

With the gentlest of clinks, the head of the hammer stopped dead against a flat face of the obsidian. Gollygosh and the other special dragons in the Den, with the single exception of G’reth, were frozen where they stood. Grace’s fire tear slowed its vibration and turned into a snowflake nestling, stationary, on Groyne’s paws. Even Liz and David were held in the stasis of Zanna’s spell. Not so Alexa. Suddenly, the door burst open and the little girl streamed in with hair ribbons flying. Before Zanna could stop her she had run to her father and thumped her palm against his heart. With a gasp, he spluttered back to free movement. His eyes returned quickly from scalene to human and took in the scene around him. He swept Alexa into his arms and held her. Only then did Zanna lift her fingers from her scars.

What happened? hurred G’reth, dibbling his claws and finding that everything worked perfectly with him.

“Gwilanna?” asked David.

Zanna nodded. “Something exterior was taking a tug. So I chanced it and put out a blocking spell on the old witch. I saw her briefly in my mind. She was using Gawain’s isoscele, reaching out to manipulate anything touched by his auma.” She stepped forward and drew Gollygosh away from the obsidian.

Suddenly, there was a crash downstairs, sounding like a door had been forced open.

Zanna’s hand went immediately to her arm again, but David raised a hand and whispered, “Wait!”

“Polar bear,” Alexa said, and turned to the door.

None other than Tam Farrell burst in.

“What? Oh, now I’ve seen it all,” said Zanna.

Tam acknowledged her briefly, looked around the room and settled his gaze on David. “I felt something. Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” David said. “We are now.”

“Lucy’s in there,” said Alexa, pointing towards the girl’s room.

Tam nodded and backed away. He slipped next door to check.

Alexa quickly turned to Liz and revived her the same way she had with David.

“Welcome back,” Zanna said. “We seem to have been attacked by our favourite aunty. But don’t worry, the cavalry’s here.”

This week's word is: MUGSHOTS

2010-07-18T14:24:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. We haven't seen much of the author this week. He's had his head in the folds of his laptop, doing 'tweaks' as he puts it to the narrative of FIRE WORLD. He's gone back to the beginning, which is like 'another country' he says as it's months, of course, since he started the book. The official 'tweaking' won't begin until his editor, Catherine, has read the whole story and come back with any comments. But I'm pleased to say he was walking around with a big smile on his face after he'd read the first ten chapters or so. That means he's pretty happy with it. Phew.

Talking of his face, Mrs Author has been doing one of her most important jobs and taking photographs of him for the hardback cover. She has asked me to show you her favourite three to let you guys decide which we should pick. Personally, we think they are all capable of cracking a dragon's glaze, but one must be chosen all the same. Let us know. Pics below.

Not much else to report, really. Oh yes, remember the competition to win the chance to have your name in the book? Sadly, that's not going to happen. The publication schedule won't allow it. But we might try to do it for the last book, cos it's a good idea. Maybe we'll have two winners: a boy and a girl. I'm told there will be a FIRE WORLD competition still, but to win a chance to have DINNER with the author. Crikey, as David would say. You'll have to be brave to enter THAT! I've seen the way he spills stuff on his T-shirts. I'd come in goggles and a bib if you win. I imagine this will be limited to fans in the UK. More info when we know.

Okay, that's it for this week. Agent Ed is arriving tonight to spend a day with us. So the hoover's coming out. Ear plugs in everyone. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: DUNNIT!

2010-07-11T19:51:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. You'll have guessed from the header that the author is jumping for joy because he finished FIRE WORLD this morning. It's been a loooong journey, but it's been well worth it. Four parts and a 7,000 word epilogue. A proper book! We can't say with any certainty when it will appear, but there has been talk about January 2011 in the UK. Exciting. We thought it would be May.

Next up comes the miracle of editing. One of the interesting things about writing a book is the way things develop as you go along. It can be good fun going back through the story and 'seeding' little bits of plot, but it's much more important to sit down and actually read the text with a view to sharpening it up. Taking out all the extraneous bits. Rewriting all the clunky sentences. Rethinking those parts of the narrative that seemed great at the time but then appear contrived on second reading. In an ideal world an author would spend several months doing this. Our hero sort of does it as he goes along. A friend once told him he writes like the famous author Ernest Hemingway. He was quite flattered for a while, until the friend explained that this had nothing to do with the quality of the writing, just the editing process. Oh well. At least he has me to help him out when he's stuck.

The first roughs of the cover came in this week. Due to the 'alternate' nature of this book we're exploring different approaches. I'm not allowed to say what, exactly, but I can tell you that we're still undecided at the moment. When you're six books into a series you have to consider whether it would be wise to change the tried and trusted look. After all, when you walk into a book store and you see that iconic dragon eye, you know exactly what it means. But authors, by their nature, are always keen to 'push the envelope' as they say. In other words they're keen to explore the boundaries of their creativity. This is partly what fuelled the style of the story, some of which will continue into the last book. The last book. Agh. Doesn't THAT sound scary? Anyway, the likelihood is that the cover will not deviate in style from the others. Colours? Again, we're not sure yet. The author favours orange sorbet! But he's weird like that.

As I write this, the World Cup final has just started. Our last week's team Germany has gone out, so this week we're supporting Holland, but only because we have two Dutch friends staying with us! They are looking very anxious at the moment as Spain seem to have the ball glued to their feet and have already tested the Dutch goalkeeper twice. We wish them well. More news next week (less football!). Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: WILLOW

2010-07-04T17:45:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. Hurrah! He's back. The author has finally emerged from under his tea towel. After three weeks' inhaling Gretel's eucalyptus-based potions, I am at last able to leave him making a nuisance of himself in Mrs Author's garden (he just got told off for cutting down a clematis he thought was dead!) and get back to the blog. The reason the word is 'willow' by the way, is because the dragons have been trying to come up with a suitable description of the colour of the gunk our hero has been blowing out of his sinuses all this time. It's like inventing a new paint chart. We tried 'Fern Splendour' and 'Wistful Leaf' and Gruffen came up with 'Dragon Splodge', which we all agreed was best - until Gretel frowned at us. Then Gwendolen suggested 'Willow Memories' (< this is the actual colour of the stuff from his nose!!). And Gretel liked it. And that was that.

He has been properly poorly, though. The worst of it is, he's not been bad enough to stay in bed for a week, though he probably should have done - in fact he had several school visits planned (from way back) and he made them all, just. But he has found it hard to write. The concentration required to work out the messages I normally leave for him on my pad has been tiring him out. So we had to take it steady while he was ill. As a result, the manuscript of FIRE WORLD is still in progress. But we are now at the epilogue and we're very, very happy with it. The first draft will be finished by the end of next week. I said a couple of weeks ago I might tease you with some of the character names. So, without giving anything away, we have David (no surprises there), Eliza (mmm, remind you of anyone?), Penny (that's surely new - or is it?), Rosa (my favourite character), Harlan (who plays a major role) and Mathew (who prefers to be called Mat). Let me give you a clue that will drive you nuts. ALL these characters have appeared in the other books. Now, work that one out! And while you're about it, who - or what - are Aurielle, Aleron and Azkiar? And the biggest teaser of all: where does the mysterious character Agawin fit in...? By the way, the wonderful Angelo Rinaldi is working on roughs of the front cover. This is very exciting. As soon as I have permission from the author to show you something, I will.

One or two of you have been asking about the competition to see your name in print in the book. We still don't know any details yet, but I've made a note on my pad for the author to speak to his editor about it this week. I have worked out in which part of the book the winner's name will go. But no clues yet.

News on RAIN & FIRE, Mrs Author's guidebook to the series. She has applied the finishing touches to the manuscript and it is on its way to the printer. The very last thing we saw this week were some black and white line drawings to accompany the text. Remember we asked some time ago which scenes you'd like to see illustrated? Well, the biggest request by far was for the nine ice bears sitting on their pillars of ice (from Icefire). So you've got that and it's brilliant. There is also one of Grockle chained up in the stable block (from Fire Star) and one of Lucy being challenged by Gawaine (from Dark Fire). If the author can get permission to show an example we might put it up on the blog next week.

And finally, the World Cup. Groan! We all sat around the TV while the author was ill expecting to see great things from England. Watching their performances only made him worse! We were disappointed that the USA, Japan and Australia went out too because we have lots of fans there. So we are now supporting Germany! Not because we don't like the other teams, we do. But yesterday, the author took pity on his long time neighbour Alexander, who is from Germany and is a football fan, but who does not have a TV. Generously, he invited Alexander in to watch his national team play (and beat) Argentina. This is the true spirit of football, even though the argument about whether the ball crossed the line in 1966 was raised twice! We thought the Germans were brilliant. We had to work really hard at staying solid while we watched the match. So good luck Germany - and Holland, Spain and Uruguay. May the best team - on the day - win. Happy reading everyone. Hrrr!

This week's word is: APOLOGIES

2010-06-27T19:40:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. I'm sorry to report that the author is still not very well and once again the dragons are keeping watch on him. Please be patient. He will be back soon with a full report on Fire World and Rain & Fire. Hrrr.

This week's word is: POORLY

2010-06-13T11:28:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. I'm sorry to say the author is not very well. The neckache he reported last week has turned into something more akin to dragonpox (he says!) Personally, I think it may be stress due to the anxiety of watching England perform in the World Cup. So I need to stick by his bedside for now. But we are hoping to put up a proper blog on Wednesday, instead, though I might make him do it as I have some serious pondering to do. Hang on, he's just muttered something about his 'England World Cup Song'. He says to keep you amused until Wednesday, any England soccer fans might like to click on this YouTube link to hear his latest bit of warbling- sorry, singing. Till Wednesday. Happy reading. Hrrr!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJeTHscm3Dg

This week's word is: NECKACHE!

2010-06-06T20:09:00.000+01:00

Hello dragon fans. A strange word to put on the pad this week but a very appropriate one. The author has been wandering around for the last three days rubbing his neck and going 'ow'. He's done something to the muscles, but he's not sure how. (Probably spotted a penny on the ground and moved too quickly to pick it up.) He's very annoyed, because just before he left for America he bought a new car. A cabriolet he could drive around during the summer with the top down. One of the first things he did when he returned to England was to get the car (a Mercedes!) out of the garage and zoom off (with me on the passenger seat, in my shades). But within two minutes he realised that looking over his shoulder to reverse was quite painful. So he can still drive - as long as he just goes forwards...

Thankfully, he only needs to look one way to write: forwards (and a bit down). So at least he's been working hard on FW this week, though he's a little bit gloomy because he's missed his delivery deadline - not for the UK, for the USA. Now before you all start to groan and write letters, don't panic too much. Agent Ed is on the case. Ed is the author's literary agent. He is a smart, young, bald-headed chap who used to play rugby. You don't mess with Agent Ed! Ed is on a mission to America right now to ask the author's US publisher why they need to have Fire World ELEVEN months ahead of its planned publication date (May 2011). What are they going to do with the manuscript for eleven months? Use it to stand on to reach high shelves? We can't understand it. And neither can Ed. He will be pushing for a new delivery deadline. We'll let you know how he gets on. Worst case scenario, Fire World will come out in October 2011 rather than May. But we'll be pushing them to keep things on course for May.

In fairness, it would be a little silly to rush our hero through the final stages of Fire World. We're all very excited about this book because it's so unusual. I haven't forgotten how upset he was when he was forced to finish Fire Star very quickly. He wrote the last 8,000 words of that book in two days. Considering that he normally writes about 1000 words per day and then spends the next day editing those words and adding some more, you can appreciate how difficult (and ultimately disappointing) it was for him. He has always believed that Fire Star would have been a much better book if he'd been allowed to think the ending through properly. So if the new book does take a little longer to deliver, it's only because he wants you to have the best possible read you can have. By the way, we are beginning to think about the cover now. It shouldn't be too long before you see the prototype, maybe another 5 or 6 posts. But remember, there is only one place you will see it initially: here.

Meantime, Mrs Author is very excited because the guidebook, Rain and Fire is going through its final stages of preparation, ready for an October release in the UK. We still don't know whether the book will come to the US or not, but it should definitely be available in Australia and other places around the world. We're very hopeful that the author's US publisher will see the benefit of having this lovely book. Just this week, Mrs Author had some nice feedback from the chap who's been copy-editing the text (checking for errors in spelling and continuity etc.). He is new to the dragon stories, but really enjoyed reading the guidebook. So that bodes very well.

Next week, I will give you a full update on FW and its expected finish date. Might even tease you a bit with some character names. We'll see. We don't have Gwendolen's barometer any more because at 82,000 words we're off the scale. But the author is nearing the end and he seems very happy with what he's done. Have a great week. Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: HOME

2010-05-30T20:31:00.001+01:00

Dear dragon fans, I'm sorry to report that I have made it safely back to Scrubbley but the author has not. As you can see, he is in the captivity of a Lake Jesup alligator ... we wish! Seriously, just in case you're all concerned that he won't make it to his computer to finish Fire World, let me reassure you that we landed safely at Birmingham International Airport on Thursday (though his bag somehow ended up in Manchester. Hah!). He has been asleep ever since. He says he is suffering from something called 'jet lag', which as far as we can tell is simply an excuse to stay in bed.

The author's last day in America was taken up giving media interviews. He thought it was great fun sitting in a TV studio answering questions about the books, though he was concerned that the camera would get his 'right side' (not that he has one). The first interviewer he talked to was the wonderful Barb Langridge, who you can see a picture of here. Barb was a true professional, who gave a fantastic summary of the books at the start of her presentation and had really done her homework on them. She asked our hero all sorts of questions about the origins of the fain, the beginnings of the universe and the truth about dark matter. It was a good job I was there in his lap (just out of shot - drat) to give him the answers to the hard ones! Barb's interview will be aired on the Books Alive section of her brilliant website www.ABookandAHug.com. We're not sure when it will happen, but when it does, I will put the link onto the blog and Gwendolen will add it to the website. In the meantime, go and surf the site - and meet Barb!

We barely had time to catch our breath before our media escort, Edie, whisked us to Washington to be interviewed by the lovely Rachel at WETA, Washington's local TV station. This session was a little less formal than Barb's and the camera here focused on the author alone. Make up would have been wasted on him, but at one point his unruly hair had to be 'patted down' by an attractive young lady. He seemed to enjoy that (tsk!). Rachel's questions were a little more general than Barb's and she allowed him to talk for as long as he liked. And boy, can he talk! He got to tell the story of Gregory Peck, the injured pigeon he once found and read a little from Dark Fire. This interview was taped for a reading scheme called Reading Rockets. As soon as we get the link you'll be able to see this one too.

And that was it. Time for a little more sight-seeing in Washington, before the journey home. Overall, we really enjoyed our trip across 'the pond'. We met a lot of lovely people and one of us ate a LOT of food. Several fans have already asked why we couldn't visit places like Michigan or Chicago or Arkansas. Well, guys, we'd love to, but the schedules are decided by the author's publisher. It's been suggested that we might go to the west coast next time. San Francisco, Los Angeles... look out! Happy reading. Hrrr!

This week's word is: ETERNAL

2010-05-24T03:04:00.026+01:00

So, at last, my secret is out. The author discovered it while he was visiting a farmer's market (or food hall) in Philadelphia: I have an ice cream flavour named after me! I don't honestly know which was worse, him discovering it or him ordering a cone and sitting there trying to lick up the trails of melted cream before they ran down his wrist (so embarrassing). You'd think a green dragon like me would be ice cool and minty. In fact I'm a rich dark chocolate with chips of chocolate thrown in for good measure. Well done Bassetts of Philly. You have no idea how extra famous you've just become.

After our jaunt in New York City, we moved to Pennslyvania where everything seemed very lush and verdant after the 'Big Apple' and made us feel like we could have been back in England. The author was particularly impressed by the beautiful timber houses, painted in their delicate pastel shades. He wants to buy one, he says. A snip at $300,000. We were driven around Philadelphia by our second media escort, Ann, who gave us an excellent tour and showed us many historic places - including ... the Museum of Art where Sylvester 'Rocky' Stallone ran up the steps while training for his big fight! Isn't it strange how you always remember the silly things when you go sightseeing, instead of the magnificent City Hall, for instance, or the awesome Benjamin Franklin Bridge? I can forgive him, though, because on our last night in this historic city we sat on the 'Rocky' steps at 10pm and gazed, awestruck, at the glittering skyscrapers - the perfect backdrop to the silhouetted statue of George Washington astride his horse.

And talking of Washington, guess where we moved onto next? Yes, DC itself, just a couple of days ago, where we had another fantastic tour with our third escort, Edie. In just under two hours we visited Capitol Hill, the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Monument and Arlington Cemetery where many American servicemen are buried. More on Arlington in a moment. Just this afternoon the author almost got to live out one of his big ambitions - to go aboard a space shuttle. Some of us dragons wish he WOULD get onto one and stay in permanent orbit round the earth. But then you'd never get your books written, I suppose. And we can't have that. You can see from the photograph how proud he was just to be in the proximity of such a feat of engineering. I have to admit it was very impressive. I liked the tiles on the nose cone. They reminded me of Gruffen's scales.

The author has just asked me if I would thank all the book sellers who've been so supportive of us over the last few days. We have visited a host of wonderful stores, both independents and big chains, and met some fantastic people. In no particular order we would like to give a huge rattle of scales to: Shelly from Harleysville Books, Mike from Barnes and Noble in Newtown(?), Richard from Borders in Newark DE, Heather from Children's Book World in Haverford, Ramunda from Barnes and Noble in Virginia, Emma from The Children's Bookstore in Baltimore and the lovely, lovely lady, whose name escapes even me, from the same bookstore in Baltimore who gifted the author a dragon! HRRR! And, of course, where would we be without the children he's talked to and the fans he's met, some of whom travelled many miles to see him? If I tried to name them all I would only go and leave someone out. Just know we love and appreciate you all - and the hardworking moms and dads that brought you (and paid for the books!).

Lastly, I want to end on a poignant note. Way back in the year 1963, when I was just a blob of clay in Mrs Pennykettle's den, a terrible tragedy struck the world when the then President of the United States was shot and killed. His name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The author was just a boy in '63, but so charismatic was President Kennedy that the author remembers him clearly. In Arlington Cemetery, we went to pay our respects to this great statesman. I laid one of Gretel's flowers on his grave. The memorial to President Kennedy lies flat upon the ground, but at its centre is a flame that is never allowed to go out. "Look, Zookie," said the author, "the fire eternal." Rest in peace, Mr President. Happy reading. Hrrr.