The Central Asian Republics have held a certain fascination for me since I was a little girl and my dad came back from what we joked was a “literal field trip.” He worked for the Foreign Agriculture Service, and we were posted to Moscow in 1978. Since he was trained as an agricultural economist, it … #AtoZChallenge – K is for Kazakhstan

Last year I had a problem with this letter, and stretched to make JAM fit. This year, Anne’s adventures took her into the Himalayan mountains. One of the first ways she tries to identify where she is is by taking a deep breath, whereupon she remarks at the scent of juniper. Once again, I’d let … #AtoZChallenge – J is for Juniper

I had originally been going to write about Igor for this installment of the A-Z challenge, but since he ends up being such a pivotal character, it would be hard to do so without risking spoilers. (And that’s spoiler enough, right there…) 😉 So I’m pulling back to the perspective of what Igor represents: The … #AtoZChallenge – I is for Intelligentsia

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I had faced writing book 2 of the Red Slaves series with some trepidation–after all, I’d only had peripheral contact with China, and had expected to have my characters spend some time there. As the story developed further, it became apparent that rather than a real location, Anne and … #AtoZChallenge – H is for Himmapan

Although I had lived in Taiwan for almost a year and a half and spent some time learning at least a beginning level of Mandarin Chinese I was intimidated by the thought of setting some piece of the second book of the Red Slaves series in China. As it turned out, that location wasn’t so … #AtoZChallenge – G is for Ghilen

In book one of the Red Slaves series, Natasha tells the group about her flight of dragons. In book two, protagonist Anne has to learn to deal with the reality of that grouping. And she gets to learn about flying. One of the fun bits of research I did for a particular scene in the … #AtoZChallenge – F is for Flight

It being the week after Easter, and the general spring obsession with new life, it seems appropriate to blog about the strangeness of creating dragon biology. I grew up reading about Anne McCaffrey-style dragons. Their biology developed on a different planet, around a different star, and then was bioengineered to become what they were. My … #AtoZChallenge – E is for Eggs

One of the most fun elements of writing a story is doing background research to ground your tale in some level of reality that allows the reader to trust you and willingly suspend their disbelief. When you stumble across an item that perfectly fits into the world you’ve created, it’s a strange intersection between an … #AtoZChallenge – D is for Dashka Stone

The central premise for the Red Slaves series is that Communists figured out how to trap the magical beasts of their countries to use that power for their own ends. The inciting incident that is never described is when Ivan and his brothers awaken, as if after a long sleep, missing true knowledge of themselves–or … #AtoZChallenge – C is for Communism

One of the clearest ways Red Slaves reflects my own preferences and inclinations is the obsession with the printed word. For Anne, if it has been published, it has a level of credibility it would be hard to otherwise trust. In fact, she spends the first few months after her initial transformation bent on pretending … #AtoZChallenge – B is for Books