Dragons? What dragons?

I am going to write lots of things in this blog about the first book of the new Lothian Dragons series. We’ve called it Scordril after the lead dragon – but two young people called Morris and Flick also play a large part. We’ll get to them later.

The Lothian dragons live in Scotland, under the bit of land that sticks out to the right of Edinburgh. That’s under towns such as Musselburgh and hills such as Traprain Law. They are good dragons who sometimes have contact with humans – overgrounders – if they know they can be trusted.

So where shall I start? Well the book started with an idea, so I’ll tell you what happened one day when we  were sitting drinking coffee together. [Yes – Kelsey Drake is “we”. There are two of us and we’ll tell you about ourselves soon. If you can’t wait, pop over to the book’s website and check us out there.]

That day, there was a sudden crashing and clanging outside. When we looked, we saw workmen digging up the pavement, making a hole right down into the underworld – lots of pipes for gas and water and electricity, and the big one: the sewers. We didn’t go near enough to smell anything horrible, but we heard the water sloshing along… okay, that’s a bit of a lie. We imagined the water and said to each other: “Hey! What if dragons live down there and that’s them we can hear banging around?”

So immediately, we had dragons, water and underground living (which in turn suggested the word “overgrounder” for normal people) – and there we were with a brilliant idea on our hands. I’ll tell you about the Lothian bit next time.