on Reading and Writing and All the Speculation In Between
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
As a brief (warning) introduction: I’m participating in the A-Z blog challenge again this year, and again on the topic of the series I’m in the midst of writing. One of the self-reflective things about writing Red Slaves is the opportunity to weave in a sub-plot about culture clash. In the first book, Anne notices…
OK. I know I’m cheating a little, taking out the “T” you normally see at the beginning of the Anglicized version of this word, but I really struggled with finding a word related to Dust to Blood that began with Z for this final installment of the A to Z blogging challenge. After all, this…
My penultimate A to Z blog challenge post. What a month! Doing 26 posts in a month seems like a mini NaNoWriMo–but I’m pleased with the background bits I’ve been able to share about Dust to Blood. So today’s post reverts to language study, and another one of the very early phrases any beginning student…
I won’t claim I’m not cheating a little with today’s X entry for the A to Z blog challenge, but the Cyrillic spelling and pronunciation for the word of the day could easily be represented by an X (update: Here it is in Cyrillic, so you know I’m not lying: Хорошо). So I’m running with…