Hi all!
Before I begin this week's blog post I want to highlight an article by Bryan Collings, who got in touch after reading my blog post on writer's block. Feel free to check it out below, it's very in depth and includes thirty six ways to get through writer's block:
https://becomeawritertoday.com/writers-block/
This week I'm going to talk about dragons. I've loved dragons since I was little, but it never occurred to me to write about them until I was seventeen. Before then I mostly wrote about cats, especially my own, Rocky.
One day I decided to go on Amazon and have a look at books that contained dragons. I wanted something different to read and always found dragons cool.
There wasn't much.
Most of the ones that popped up were picture books, and I was very disappointed. So I went online and had a look around. I came across several posts on forums from readers frustrated that dragons weren't written about that often. If they were, they were the villain or the mentor.
Because there wasn't anything that I could find, I thought I'd write my own.
I didn't want my dragons to be the huge treasure hoarders that are usually portrayed, so I decided to spice it up a bit. I loved the dragons in How To Train Your Dragon, as they each had their own personality. I wanted my dragons to act like overgrown pets, a mix between cats and dogs.
The dragons in Elemental Dragons are all different, but act like family pets. They play like kittens, stick their tongues out like dogs and silently judge you like a cat does. They are also able to communicate with feline and canine creatures as they share the same language, but each animal species has different mannerisms when speaking. They are only able to communicate with humans through growls and barks however, as I decided against having them speak. I thought it would be too weird.
The series also has several types of dragon, four species that show up in the universe. They are:
Primordial.
This species is extinct in the books, but they have had a large impact on the dragon raising culture and the characters do learn about them as time goes on. There are three sub-species in this category: Anthropomorphic, Draconic Hybrid and Hydra.
Avian.
The most common species of the Elemental Dragons universe. This type is also the only type where the teenagers can form a 'bond'. There are four sub-species: Amphiptere, Drake, Fairy and Western. The Western dragons are the ones that are usually bonded with, and most of the dragon characters in the books are Western.
Aqueous, a Western dragon - Artist
Reptilian.
This species is the rarest, as they are most likely to be hunted by the other species for food and hunted by humans for their horns. There are three sub-species in this category as well: Eastern, Ouroboros and Wyvern.
Serpentine.
These dragons are parasitic in nature, and tend to live off the Primordial dragons. Most of these species are also extinct in this universe, as they largely died off when the Primordial dragons went extinct. There are four sub-species: Great Serpent, Lindworm, Sea Serpent and Wyrm.
Most of these dragons are rarely shown in books and film, so I researched many dragon types and categorised them into species. All of them will be at least mentioned across the series, with some having major roles in the plot. I don't want to spoil anything, so I won't go into any more detail.
That's it for this week, I hope you enjoyed learning about the dragons in Elemental Dragons and why I write about them.
See you next week!