Dragonsbane
After writing so recently about the Ladies of Mandrigyn, it was very strange to get the news that one of the original Broad Squad - the women I trained with in Riverside in the '70s - Dr. Sharon Tyler, for 20 years a Lecturer at UC Riverside - passed away just before Thanksgiving.
DRAGONSBANE
It’s a little difficult to talk about Dragonsbane.
It was a VERY difficult book to write - I think Lester made me re-write it about three times - and it was written under stressful conditions.
Back in the ‘70s, not a lot had been studied about the physiology of karate with regards to the different pelvic- and leg-structure of men and women. At the time there was a great deal of macho emphasis on, “No pain, no gain.” Training through pain was part of the deal - I remember breaking fingers in class and having Sensei pull them straight for me and tell me to go on training. I did. My friend Anne said that she thought she’d cracked her sternum at one point in a tournament, but never got it looked at. For one thing, none of us had medical insurance of any kind.
But the result was that a lot of the women in karate in those days went out with bad knees. I recall very clearly feeling something pull loose behind my kneecap during class one night. I finished the class, but limped into the office afterwards and said, “Sensei, I’m taking a month off.” I never went back.
Shortly after that I reached the decision to leave Riverside and move back to the Ontario area, where my family and the core of my lifelong friends lived. I moved into a condo that was clearly designed for someone who wasn’t home during the daytime (it had only one small window in the downstairs). I don’t do well living in dark places. My friend Laurie later remarked that it was no accident that the book I wrote while living there took place ¾ underground.
Still, Dragonsbane is one of my best books. It's one that I'm very proud of having written.
I originally wanted to call it Dragonslayer, but the movie of that title came out while I was working on the book, and Dragonsbane worked better anyway. Because of course the book isn’t about slaying dragons.
The book is about love. And love, as Morkeleb the dragon says at one point, is “not a thing of dragons.” Love turns out to be the dragon’s bane - the thing that wounds him where weapons can’t. It’s why Jenny chooses mortality and humanity: because she understands that she wants human love more than she wants power.
And since the book was also about power - about wanting to have more talent than you’re born with - I knew up front that I had to come up with a hero who would be emotional competition for a dragon.
John Aversin is a fun character to write. He has the heart of an medieval scholar who’s been forced into being the only law enforcement in a bleak sub-arctic area the size of France. As a medievalist, I’d read all sorts of weird things that scholars in the Middle Ages thought were cool: lists of words, beastiaries, long discussions of etymological roots, fragments of histories and legends. They'd argue about these things for years. Because civilization has collapsed in the Winterlands, John only has the fragments of this learning. He’s a little like Leonardo da Vinci if he’d been born in the Dark Ages instead of the Renaissance. Like several of my heroes, he’ll go anywhere and do anything to get hold of a book, and will sit up all night talking you to death about cabbages and kings if you’ll let him.
And Jenny, much as she loves him, feels that same love towards magic. And magic needs solitude, and silence, and study, all the more so because Jenny’s inborn talent is pretty mediocre, and she was not well taught.
It’s a complicated relationship - and a difficult book.
I pictured Morkeleb as a thinner, snakier version of a Chinese dragon, with wings. The wings are sheerly for steering. Dragons fly by means of levitation. (I studied a lot of stuff about pteranodons and wasn’t going to try to figure out the physics of dragon-flight). That’s why they have that very sudden take-off, straight up into the air. I saw dragons as being extra-terrestrial, perhaps from a different dimension. They’re semi-material (hence their shape-shifting and size-changing abilities, which I got into in the later books), and snotty as a tribe of Renaissance Spanish aristocrats. Like carp, they can be gaudily patterned, and the patterns change over time as their minds mature.
And one of the things I loved most about that book was coming up with why dragons crave gold. All legends say that dragons horde gold. I don’t think I ever had read a good version of WHY. I’m pretty proud of that element, if I do say so myself.
Most of the time I was writing that book, I was depressed and unhappy. One night I bought some paint and painted the upstairs bathroom as a tromp d’oeil of the observation deck of the Starship Enterprise, with a window and starry blackness and an immense spiral galaxy.
During the time I lived there, I got involved in writing Saturday morning cartoons. My friend Laurie had started a relationship with science fiction writer Mel Gilden; it was through Mel that I met writer Michael Reaves, who at the time was working on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. This was at the beginning of the era of what we called “Toaster Shows”: toy company makes a line of vehicles that turn into robots to fight evil vehicles that also turn into robots => toy company hires production company to make forty-eight half-hour episodes which are essentially commercials for these toys => production company (in this case, DIC) sends out a casting-call for all the bush-league science-fiction writers in LA, and offers them very small coinage for scripts. Bush-league science-fiction writers all pay their rent.
And party together a LOT.
More about this next time.
I started spending a lot of time driving from Ontario - where the condo was - out to DIC in the San Fernando Valley. My car had no radio. I loved the sound of the road noise, the tires on the asphalt.
I lived in that condo for exactly two years. My brother lives there now, though a tenant between myself and him painted over the observation deck of the Enterprise. Laurie moved out to Venice (“Where the debris meets the sea”) and not long thereafter, I got an apartment in the same complex as she did. I turned in Dragonsbane shortly before I made the move. It wasn't the only book I wrote there.
Up until the final pass through the final draft, I hadn’t made up my mind whether Jenny would go with Morkeleb, or go back to John.
DRAGONSBANE
It’s a little difficult to talk about Dragonsbane.
It was a VERY difficult book to write - I think Lester made me re-write it about three times - and it was written under stressful conditions.
Back in the ‘70s, not a lot had been studied about the physiology of karate with regards to the different pelvic- and leg-structure of men and women. At the time there was a great deal of macho emphasis on, “No pain, no gain.” Training through pain was part of the deal - I remember breaking fingers in class and having Sensei pull them straight for me and tell me to go on training. I did. My friend Anne said that she thought she’d cracked her sternum at one point in a tournament, but never got it looked at. For one thing, none of us had medical insurance of any kind.
But the result was that a lot of the women in karate in those days went out with bad knees. I recall very clearly feeling something pull loose behind my kneecap during class one night. I finished the class, but limped into the office afterwards and said, “Sensei, I’m taking a month off.” I never went back.
Shortly after that I reached the decision to leave Riverside and move back to the Ontario area, where my family and the core of my lifelong friends lived. I moved into a condo that was clearly designed for someone who wasn’t home during the daytime (it had only one small window in the downstairs). I don’t do well living in dark places. My friend Laurie later remarked that it was no accident that the book I wrote while living there took place ¾ underground.
Still, Dragonsbane is one of my best books. It's one that I'm very proud of having written.
I originally wanted to call it Dragonslayer, but the movie of that title came out while I was working on the book, and Dragonsbane worked better anyway. Because of course the book isn’t about slaying dragons.
The book is about love. And love, as Morkeleb the dragon says at one point, is “not a thing of dragons.” Love turns out to be the dragon’s bane - the thing that wounds him where weapons can’t. It’s why Jenny chooses mortality and humanity: because she understands that she wants human love more than she wants power.
And since the book was also about power - about wanting to have more talent than you’re born with - I knew up front that I had to come up with a hero who would be emotional competition for a dragon.
John Aversin is a fun character to write. He has the heart of an medieval scholar who’s been forced into being the only law enforcement in a bleak sub-arctic area the size of France. As a medievalist, I’d read all sorts of weird things that scholars in the Middle Ages thought were cool: lists of words, beastiaries, long discussions of etymological roots, fragments of histories and legends. They'd argue about these things for years. Because civilization has collapsed in the Winterlands, John only has the fragments of this learning. He’s a little like Leonardo da Vinci if he’d been born in the Dark Ages instead of the Renaissance. Like several of my heroes, he’ll go anywhere and do anything to get hold of a book, and will sit up all night talking you to death about cabbages and kings if you’ll let him.
And Jenny, much as she loves him, feels that same love towards magic. And magic needs solitude, and silence, and study, all the more so because Jenny’s inborn talent is pretty mediocre, and she was not well taught.
It’s a complicated relationship - and a difficult book.
I pictured Morkeleb as a thinner, snakier version of a Chinese dragon, with wings. The wings are sheerly for steering. Dragons fly by means of levitation. (I studied a lot of stuff about pteranodons and wasn’t going to try to figure out the physics of dragon-flight). That’s why they have that very sudden take-off, straight up into the air. I saw dragons as being extra-terrestrial, perhaps from a different dimension. They’re semi-material (hence their shape-shifting and size-changing abilities, which I got into in the later books), and snotty as a tribe of Renaissance Spanish aristocrats. Like carp, they can be gaudily patterned, and the patterns change over time as their minds mature.
And one of the things I loved most about that book was coming up with why dragons crave gold. All legends say that dragons horde gold. I don’t think I ever had read a good version of WHY. I’m pretty proud of that element, if I do say so myself.
Most of the time I was writing that book, I was depressed and unhappy. One night I bought some paint and painted the upstairs bathroom as a tromp d’oeil of the observation deck of the Starship Enterprise, with a window and starry blackness and an immense spiral galaxy.
During the time I lived there, I got involved in writing Saturday morning cartoons. My friend Laurie had started a relationship with science fiction writer Mel Gilden; it was through Mel that I met writer Michael Reaves, who at the time was working on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. This was at the beginning of the era of what we called “Toaster Shows”: toy company makes a line of vehicles that turn into robots to fight evil vehicles that also turn into robots => toy company hires production company to make forty-eight half-hour episodes which are essentially commercials for these toys => production company (in this case, DIC) sends out a casting-call for all the bush-league science-fiction writers in LA, and offers them very small coinage for scripts. Bush-league science-fiction writers all pay their rent.
And party together a LOT.
More about this next time.
I started spending a lot of time driving from Ontario - where the condo was - out to DIC in the San Fernando Valley. My car had no radio. I loved the sound of the road noise, the tires on the asphalt.
I lived in that condo for exactly two years. My brother lives there now, though a tenant between myself and him painted over the observation deck of the Enterprise. Laurie moved out to Venice (“Where the debris meets the sea”) and not long thereafter, I got an apartment in the same complex as she did. I turned in Dragonsbane shortly before I made the move. It wasn't the only book I wrote there.
Up until the final pass through the final draft, I hadn’t made up my mind whether Jenny would go with Morkeleb, or go back to John.