I gave my dragons some feathers, like dinosaurs, because why not. I went very nerdy when creating my dragons, looking up various myths around the world and researching lizards, snakes, and dinosaurs for physiology inspiration. Now I had to build a world, flesh out the characters, and write it. I now had angry, sexy dragon gods, and my dragon character had elements of being a fallen angel. So what if a human character really needed to change the seal and forge a new identity? The big idea of Dragonfall is: “what if your gods hated you? And what if the ‘gods’ were dragons?” Then, just for fun: what if I made my dragons sexy? I love to read romance when I’m stressed out, and I wrote most of Dragonfall during the UK COVID lockdowns, so I was permanently stressed. For the rest of the museum visit I zoned out, daydreaming about a fantasy society where everyone wore seals and they were carved with symbols of indelible identity, and signing a contract with them was magically binding.Ī year or two later, everything clicked when I started thinking about how the seals could work in relation to dragons: humans use them because their ancestors stole magic from dragons, but in the intervening centuries, they forgot what they’d done and now worshipped them as gods. The placard mentioned they were sometimes considered magical amulets. Sometimes you get a big, clear Eureka moment for a book, and sometimes you get little details where you’re like “well that’s a cool for worldbuilding, but that’s not a story.” I was wandering around a museum in Berlin in 2011 and there was a collection of ancient Assyrian cylinder seals. So I kept writing other things, but a little corner of my mind held space for my eventual dragon book. How could I find my own unique spin on dragons? Or, if not unique, at least a little different than what we’d seen before.
But it felt like there were so many dragons, and so many approaches had already been taken. The Dragonriders of Pern even “tricked” me into reading my first science fiction (technically, since the dragons are aliens on an alien planet) when I was about ten. Like many fantasy fans, a dragon on a cover was my kryptonite as a teenager. Lam was determined to find a fresh spin on the familiar creatures, however, and in Dragonfall, they may just have found one.įor years, I’d really wanted to write myself a Big Ol’ Dragon Book. Dragons! Everybody loves them and they wing their way into all sorts of places in the fantasy genre.
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