I admit that this page is mostly a notebook at this point where I write ideas I can revisit at a later date. I’m okay with that. 2019 was a year of illness for me. I developed agoraphobia that kept me inside for over three months and I’m chalking most of the year up as a loss. I’m healthy (and able to go outside again), but the pandemic has made writing more than a challenge. I’m currently getting through my days learning how to mod Skyrim.
That said, when I have an idea that doesn’t pertain to my current WIP, I still want to write it down so that I can revisit it at a later time. Today’s light bulb came as I was scrolling through Twitter and someone posted a line from their new book about a girl hovering on top of her dragon. My immediate thought was, how does a dragon hover? It’s size and weight would require its wings to move at a speed that would likely prevent anyone riding it. Or, depending on how its fire was generated, maybe it was full of lighter-than-air gas like a zepplin.
From there I bounced to the girl. I rarely use dragons as anything more than a figure of power of an age long past. Having a dragon at your command is like having a battalion of tanks. It radically changes the power dynamic of the world in a way that I don’t think everyone plays out fully in their heads. Not to mention, it implies that either dragons have been domesticated to be ridden, controlled somehow to be enslaved into being ridden, or have agreed to be ridden as a sentient relationship.
Now isn’t that interesting, a sentient partner, a girl and her Other. I’ve seen that in a number of books, but rarely the other as a dragon. But what if the dragon isn’t with her, walking around like a living nuclear bomb but a voice in her head. I have a bad habit of writing solo characters who have no one to speak with. What if the dragon was a magical symbiote that lives inside her. Oooo, what if her people are shapeshifters and everyone has a dragon—or maybe some other animal kind of like the Dark Materials daemons. Oooo, and what if no one knows how to shapeshift anymore, so these totems or whatever they’re called are inside them almost as spiritual advisors, but if that talent were rediscovered, you’d have the dragon take shape and the girl would be the voice inside its head.
Hmmmmmm…this definitely bears exploration!