How about this then?

I was lying in bed last night, not quite asleep, when I thought of Scordril. Sad, I know. Can’t even forget him at night!

But while Scordril was probably lying round the fire in the Great Hall at Musselburgh thinking about Njortin and his friends at Traprain Law, I invented an acrostic or two. That’s a poem where the main word goes down the side and each line starts with one letter of it.

Like this – with the word “dragon”:

Dangerous spells around the hill
Roaming cannot happen
Ask their kin what happened here – a
Grid that no one sees?
Only with ancient magic can
Njortin’s layr be free.

And then I thought of Morris and how scary it might be to meet up with a real dragon when you thought you were camping safely next to a nice climbable hill:

Might have seen a dragon
Or maybe imagined one? But
Roderick is Scordril – scary!
Resist the fear and lend the shard.
Instant friend of dragonkind and
Special talisman!

Anyone got one for Scordril himself? I’ll be having a think!

Very shortly we’re going to bring the main website over to this blog so you can have all the Scordril stuff in one place. Book 2, Farlkris, will be here too when that happens. We’ll let you know when.

How old is old?

At book signings, people often want to know how old the dragons are in Scordril, and how long they live for. So here are some answers.

• Scordril himself is 110
• Ygdrann is 204 (was 54 in the Chronicles – see chapter 2)
• Vanurl is 212
• Kvayn, the dragonmaster, is 240 (was 90 in the Chronicles and just showing signs of having mage power)
• Fenror, another mage, is 158 (he was only 8 in the Chronicles!)
• Threah, who does the healing herbs stuff, is 105, and her helper Ennasif is only 50.
• Brygnon, who carries the injured messenger dragon, Gylning, down to the Musselburgh layr, is 95.

Over at Traprain Law, dragonmaster Njortin is 304 and Thofirin, his wife, 306.

Since Njortin is described as very old, I guess we could say the Lothian dragons live to around 300 years. I leave you to work out which are smallones, youngones, or about to become growns!

It was great to meet so many people who love dragons at Fort Kinnaird Borders a few days ago. We hope you’re enjoying reading Scordril as much as we did writing it. At the moment, we are really busy preparing book 2, Farlkris, for press. Which is why this post didn’t get written straight after the book signing. Sorry! We don’t have mage power to help us.

New dates for the summer

We will be at Borders in Kinnaird Retail Park near Edinburgh on Saturday 20th June from 11am to 3pm signing copies of Scordril (yikes – just over a week away!).

We’d be really pleased to meet any of you again who have already bought and read Scordril. Feedback is always useful to us – we’re quite thick-skinned so it’s okay to tell us the bits you’d have liked to be different as well as the bits you enjoyed most.

One of us will be at East Linton library on Wednesday 29th July from 3-4pm so that’s another opportunity for us to meet some of our readers.

See you then!

Borders Kinnaird Retail Park, Edinburgh
Saturday June 20th
11am – 3pm

East Linton library, East Lothian
Wednesday July 29th
3–4pm

‘What if’ for book 2

I said last time that I would tell you about book 2: Farlkris.

There are all sorts of ways to dream up a story. Some writers start with the characters. The characters then interact with each other and that would tell you what to write about.

Other writers think up a theme. They would decide, say, that they wanted to write about courage, and then they would think, “What kind of story would show what courage is?” And then they would write that story.

For book 2 of the Lothian Dragons series, we did a third thing, which was think up a scenario. That’s a sort of scene that could possibly happen. In this case:

What if someone is poisoning the sewage system and the dragons living underneath Musselburgh are the first to notice, as it is threatening their layr? What if this poisonous waste is being washed down the rivers and killing things? What if there is a bad storm and the storm drains overflow and send all the toxic water into the overgrounder world?

Well, this is the basic “what if” idea for Farlkris, which is set about 60 years after Scordril. In other words, it’s set in the present time.

And instead of starting with a dragon chapter, we start with Hannah in the overground world where something very odd happens.

That’s all I’m going to tell you. You’ll have to wait till the book is published to find out more!

Scordril visits Borders bookshop

Scordril sent along two replica dragons to Borders at Team Valley today because he himself couldn’t come to meet Years 4 and 5 from St Joseph’s and Year 5 from Corpus Christi. The reason? Dragons can’t stay morphed into overgrounder form for more than a short time. Young ones can do it for longer but full-grown dragons have to change back pretty sharply after only a couple of hours.

Anyway, the two model dragons (of Threah and Scordril) were good substitutes and we had a great time together looking at how writers put stories together by asking the questions: who? what? where? why? which? when? and how?

“What if” popped up as well, and we thought of some bizarre ideas for what might happen that could be the idea for a story.

Kelsey Drake (both of us!) got the idea for the Lothian Dragons stories when some workmen dug up the pavement outside and there was such a clonking and banging and sloshing and slap-slapping from the deeeeep hole below ground that we looked at each other and said: “What if there were dragons living down there?” And then we found out there were. Amazing!

I’ll tell you about the “What if” question that was the idea for Book 2 next time.

But in the meantime, we hope you will all write up some of the great ideas you came up with today – you were really imaginative and fun to be with!

More dragon fans

You’re everywhere! And it was great to speak with so many of you at Borders Team Valley today (that’s Gateshead if you don’t know). Mind you, it was hard having to miss the footie and the Grand National but hey that’s life! 

Special hellos to Jamie-Leigh, Eleanor, James, Kate, Scott and Sam who told me about their favourite books and their bedrooms filled with shelves of reading matter. (Sam – I’ve bought Skulduggery Pleasant on your recommendation and will start it tonight. Thanks.)

When you read Scordril, you will find a feral cat named A.T. There’s a whole story to be told about how A.T. came to be involved with the dragons, and we mean to tell that story one day in a shorter book. It’s already hinted at in Scordril. There are other interesting places where readers will want to know “what happened” about another dragon, so Kelsey Drake will be spending time this summer working on those ideas while getting Lothian Dragons book 2: Farlkris ready for press.

That’s it for now as my tummy is rumbling like a dragon after the book signing today. But I can tell you the date for our visit to East Linton library’s Summer Quest is July 29th – that’s a Wednesday up in East Lothian. Hope to see some of you there.

Team Valley

Kelsey Drake will be at Team Valley Borders in Gateshead on the first Saturday of the Easter holidays. That’s Saturday 4 April from 1-3pm.

I’m hoping to meet again some of you who were at their book group earlier this month. 

That evening, we brainstormed some fabulous ideas for other stories that would focus on a group of animals with a problem. We even persuaded the children’s specialist to put on her thinking cap and come up with an idea as well. Any one of the suggestions would make a great story and I hope some of you will write them up. You can send them to Young Writer, which I mentioned in the last post. 

But I think it’s about time we arranged to have a big dragon with us when we do events. I’ll see about enlarging Scordril so he can stand beside us at the “signing” table. Adult dragons can’t morph for long, which is why it wouldn’t be Scordril himself!

I’m not too sure a large cut-out will be acceptable to the ladies of the Royal British Legion when we do a talk for them a couple of days later, but we’ll see. It would certainly come in handy at East Linton library in the summer holidays. And we’ll flag up a date for that one when it’s confirmed.

If you want to buy a copy of Scordril, head over to the Lothian Dragons website and follow the links. You can read the first page there as well, and see some pictures of Traprain Law. That’s the hill in East Lothian where the dragons are trapped when the ancient magic grows in strength. When the weather improves you may see Kelsey Drake up there too, following the paths that Flick and Morris took on the day they met Scordril (in his overgrounder form as Roderick, of course).

Hello to Silverlink readers

A big welcome to everyone we met and talked to when signing books at Borders, Silverlink over half term. We enjoyed it!

A few of you have asked where you can get your writing published, so this is just to remind you that there’s a brilliant magazine for young writers and it’s called (surprise surprise) Young Writer. You can find their web page here and order a subscription. 

We wish we’d had this around when we started writing. As it is, we have notebooks full of stories and plays that we wrote in junior school and did nothing with. 

There’s also a new young people’s mini home study writing course. It’s run by The Writers Advice Centre and you can ask them about it by using the email address on their website.

If your school would like us to come on an author visit, do please let your teacher know about us. We’d love to meet you in class. And that way, we could all talk about writing and have some fun!

Anyway, if you just bought Scordril, thank you so much and have fun with him and his friends. I hope you meet him one day in the real world, like Morris and Flick did.

 

NEW DATE

One of us will be at Borders, Team Valley, Gateshead on Tuesday 3 March at 6pm for the young people’s book club. See you there!

Added ingredients 5

Camping 1950s style

Morris and Flick are camping beside Traprain Law in East Lothian in two single ridge tents. These were common in the 1950s. I think I saw some larger versions up in the area near Jedburgh a few years ago when some Scouts were camping in a football field. But you wouldn’t be likely to see many of these tents now, so here’s the low-down:

1 They were made of canvas, just less than a metre in height, so you couldn’t stand up in them, and most children would have to stay in the centre or their heads would touch the canvas where it slopes down – and that makes it leak when it rains! They were less than 2m long and just wide enough for one person to sleep.

2 The tents had something called a ridge pole along the top of the roof. Guy ropes were joined to what you might call the gutters, and if you pulled these out sideways and pegged them into the ground, your tent made a house shape.

3 Then you had to lay a groundsheet inside. In those days, the groundsheet was not sewn in, so spiders could (and did) crawl in. A loose groundsheet was quite good in some ways because you could lift it out to dry in the sun, and the grass underneath would get unsquashed for a while and dry out too. Wet grass tends to go yellowy coloured after a while, like Chinese bean sprouts!

4 There were no zips in most of the tents in 1950. The door was tied with short lengths of tape. That’s why Morris fumbled to get it undone the night the nightdragons came back – the dew at midnight had made the tape wet, which is then very hard to untangle.

5 You didn’t have loo blocks to go to. You put up a tiny rectangular tent round a hole you had dug. The earth you dug out of the hole was left beside it so that you could put a shovel-full back in after you went to the loo over the hole. That’s probably as  much as you want to know about going to the loo on a campsite in 1950!

6 Most people had fun lighting a fire made of kindling (dried leaves and twigs), branches and a log or two. You balanced your kettle or billy can over the flames. Some people wrapped potatoes in foil and laid these in the hot ashes to cook. Others stuck lumps of dough on a metal skewer and held it over the flames till it went brown. Torching your food or keeping warm by a log fire was not too different to how Scordril and his kin lived!

If you want to read what happened after Morris saw the nightdragons returning, you can find Scordril here. The main website is here. Six hundred people are now reading about the Lothian Dragons – we hope to introduce some more people to them on Wednesday 18 February at Silverlink Borders in the Newcastle area.

TRAPrain or TrapRAIN?

A big hello to everyone I met at Borders, Fort Kinnaird Retail Park, yesterday. And, of course, to anyone signing on here who bought Scordril somewhere else. 

It was really good to meet so many of you. Only one half of Kelsey Drake was able to be at the shop, but the day was made great fun by all the conversations about Traprain Law, the treasure that was found there years ago, dragons flying behind mage clouds, Musselburgh town centre and all your families.

One subject cropped up several times, and that was how we should pronounce Traprain Law. None of you agreed with each other. When we first visited, a lady in Musselburgh told us TRAPrain. Yesterday, some of you said TrapRAIN, others agreed with the Musselburgh lady, and on some old maps it says TrapAIN anyway. I’m more muddled than I was. And it certainly had a funny effect on those who were giving out messages on the tannoy yesterday, saying Kelsey Drake was in store. I though they were going to get their tongues tied in knots explaining where the book is set!

But many of you had walked on the Law – so just keep an eye out for the dragons coming in and out of their tunnels. That’s what they couldn’t do when the ancient magic finally grew strong enough to trap them. They come out all the time now.

Anyway, as I said to many of you, here’s an offer. If you finish the book and want to write a message or a review, or send a drawing or painting of anything in it – or a different coloured version of the cover pic we’ve been handing out – then please do head over to the main website and find the contact form. You can then tell us what you want to send and we’ll find a way to get it from you and put it on the site for everyone to read or look at.

Most of you asked about the next book, so we’ll have to get our skates on and get that one ready for publication. We don’t want anyone throwing this dragon joke at us, do we:

Knock Knock
Who’s there!
Dragon!
Dragon who?
Dragon your feet again!