Quinn is just beginning to get tired of this sort of thing happening. Apparently, the Milliways woods do not like him very much. "All right," he says, stepping onto the gravel-and-weedy-grass mixture that used to be a country road. "Who's with me now?"

Purely on a whim I ran Quinn's birthday through my favourite Chinese horoscope website. I don't usually bother with Western astrology for my characters, but Chinese astrology generally gives me good material to work from. Reign of Fire starts in the year 2000, when Quinn is twelve; this leaves him with a birth year of 1988. I arbitrarily said his ( Read more... )

( In the form of dialogue between me and John Preston's mun. )

No spoilers, just deductions:

1. There is no magic in Quinn's world. This is critically important. The movie presented the dragons as a species subject to scientific inquiry, with glimpses of various magazines and journals investigating the subject. It did not mention magic in any way, shape, or form. The dragons of Quinn's world are big flying ( Read more... )

Quinn freezes in his tracks the instant the ground beneath his foot goes crunch.

Here it is cold, the early weeks of March in the north of England. Here the greenhouse gases ceased to spill from human works into the atmosphere years and years ago. This is the beginning of spring as it used to be, when the almanac's date for the last frost meant ( Read more... )

How long the boy would sleep or not, Quinn didn't know. He had duties to attend to, though, so once he saw Robbie off to slumber he got out a piece of paper and left a note where he was sure Robbie would see it.

Robbie ( Read more... )

Quinn stepped back into the castle, the sounds of Milliways fading behind him as the door closed. "Ajay?" he called ( Read more... )

Alnwick Castle
Northumberland, England
Year 20 of the Burning Times
Early Spring

It was the pizza that had done it. Not that it hadn't been excellent pizza, but it had brought up too many memories to be entirely real. He'd finished it, sure, and he'd thanked Eddie and all- why be impolite to the inhabitants of your own dreamscape?- but there had ( Read more... )

Northumberland, England
2020 A.D.
Year 20 of the Burning TimesIt's spring in England, if you can call it that. Spring is supposed to be a time for green poking its head back into the world, the return of colour. At least, that's what the older adults remember. For Quinn, green doesn't really enter into the season. It hasn't in ages. Spring is just ( Read more... )