Fireworks!

It’s nearly November. I can almost smell the sulphur in the air as people let off fireworks and burn Guy Fawkes on their bonfires. Mind you, when one of us (Eleanor) lived in Leeds, it was much more fun to open the attic window and watch the fantastic display put on by the parks department in Roundhay Park. It was like watching hundred-pound notes burn!

Going to a big firework display is what Hannah and Kris do in Farkris. It’s a fabulous occasion, run by the school. But putting this scene in helped us continue the plot. This was in three ways:

1 Ru continues being horrible to Kris, and Kris can’t answer back. That would mean saying he is a dragon not a boy! This makes Kris even more annoyed and Ru starts to look for worse things to do to get even with Kris and Hannah.

2 We have fun with the fireworks, showing how they look and how people react. I bet you’ve seen amazing expressions on people’s  faces as they watch firework displays. The last one to be let off is called The Grand Unbeatable Bang Factory. Get that for a whizz name – we had fun inventing it!

3 But the most important thing that happens at the firework display is that people think they see a black outline of a dragon flying past among the storm clouds. You see, the mage power is growing weak, because they’re having to defend the layr against the toxin in the water. And now the dragons don’t have enough magic to always hide behind their clouds.

This last point leads up to the worst, most sad thing we’ve ever written in the dragon books – someone dies. You’ll have to read to find out who.

But we do wish you a safe and fabulous bonfire night this year.

A zentangle Farlkris

I felt as if I was calmly mind-speaking with the dragons as I thought about life in the Great Hall underground where they all gather in the afternoons to speak and rest. Doodling is a really good way of dreaming up ideas – you could try it when you have to write a story in English!

If you haven’t heard about zentangle, you can find lots of stuff about it if you google “zentangle”. But we all doodle on our notebooks, and it’s just a new name for doing these regular patterns. I wanted to do them in a dragon shape because it made me think of Farlkris and Scordril and all the others.

I can’t now find the site where I downloaded the outline (but it was there to be downloaded and coloured, so they won’t mind too much). If you’d like a copy, you can get it from here until I find the original site.

One thing is the map at the start. You can have a look at it here. All the books I read as a kid had maps to show you where things happen. I especially like being able to visit the place to check it out myself.

The other  thing is the dragon dictionary. This is at the back of the book. It looks like this:

Dragon Dictionary

(The camera flash has made the words show through from the next page – sorry about that!)

But we like words, and it was fun to make up phrases using the words the dragons would use if you translated them into English.

With a map and a dictionary, you are set to enjoy the plot.

Anyway here are five things I love about our second book.

1 We have Hannah going into the dragon layr early in the story so we see straight away how awesome it is. Can you imagine being morphed down a size or two to get through a manhole into the sewers? Holding the hand of a dragon??

2 We have a really terrible event happen when the baby dragon dies. I feel sorrow each time I read about it. Hannah and Kris were choked with grief.

3 I love the preparations for the annual town advent service. That’s in the run-up to Christmas, and some very special things happen as the dragons plan how to make the other children in the book  forget about seeing dragons.

4 I love the part played by Ru. She’s fed up at having a baby sister who takes up her mum’s time. Wouldn’t we all be? And she’s fed up that other kids have better clothes and boots because there’s no spare money. It makes her do something very horrible – but she later changes her mind, which is nice.

5 And I love the role magic plays in the book. Getting the magic right is very important in a fantasy story. You can’t just click your fingers and sort things out or there wouldn’t be a story!

We didn’t tell stories this time, we wrote dragon poems. The sort that don’t rhyme. We gathered together a “bank” of words to describe all the different parts of the dragons and then pulled out the ones we really liked to make into a poem.

Some of you were brave enough to read yours out – brilliant. I know others would have liked to, but there’s never enough time to do everything we want.

Here is the one I put together as an example:

There’s nothing like a dragon:
mauve-grey scales
glittering, glistening
enormous wings
unfurled like umbrellas
lacy
bony
veins like black net.
Huge frightening dragons
with claws like daggers
sharp, smooth, cold.
Belching smoke and fire
and wanting to play with me.

We (that is, Kelsey Drake, two of us) wrote some special poems called acrostics a while ago, using the words Dragon and Morris. You can find them here.

If you can do one with the word Scordril, put it in the comment box underneath. We’d love to read them.

It was great meeting you all this week. You took part really well and we all had an excellent time discussing story telling.

I thought your school was a great place to spend the day. Will you find room for me and some of the dragons??

Your ideas were totally brilliant and they inspired me with some more ideas for stories. So thank you.

If one of your teachers sends me a photo or two, I will put them up here so that everyone can see what a good time we had. Watch this space.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy reading the dragon books you bought. If you took Scordril, you can find some of chapter 2 here, so that you can listen instead of reading. How’s that for lazy?!

Some of the dragons are coming with me and they say they are looking forward to hearing me read about themselves. I wonder – do dragons’ ears to go red when we talk about them?!

Threah sunning herself on a rock

I’m also working on a new (very short) story about what happened to Threah when she was a youngling in the layr, just developing her love of herbal healing. What do you think she would have done if she’d met a little overgrounder whose mum was ill?

I think they’d have made friends – but would they have been able to save the mum? That’s where the plotting comes in. I shall go to bed and let my unconscious mind take over. We found that always helped when we were writing Farlkris and Scordril.

This visit was both a Lothian Dragon visit to talk about Farlkris and Scordril, and a pumpkin visit about Splat!, because one of us (Eleanor – in other words “me” here) also wrote a book called Splat! in which Benj and his dad try to grow pumpkins for the Harvest Show.

I was taken by surprise to find the road outside the school so busy, but hey! it meant that lots of Musselburgh “overgrounders” were voting at the election booth over the road. So I didn’t mind.

And then – amazingly – there was a photographer to witness the opening of the new school library. I’m hoping to get a photo to put here soon. But believe me, I have never pretended to cut a tape so many times. But I finally cut it for proper, and the new school library is well and truly opened. We used it four times in the first few hours. I hope you’ll read every book in it!

It was great to meet you all, and a real surprise to be given so many dragon pictures. I piled them all in the car and brought them home. Then I had a wonderful time looking at all the detail you put in your drawings. It was really hard to name a winner, but I did and here it is:

Abigail's winning dragon

And then I decided on the runners-up and here are their entries.

Runners-up: Liam, Amy, Nyaradzo and Christian

But well done to everyone. In the dragon world, taking part is what counts. And that’s why we went out together on a dragon hunt. All the dragons hunt together. It’s more fun that way!

What else is there to say? Well, the flowers you gave me were fantastic and the smell from the lilies hit me as I wondered into the kitchen this morning. A real reminder of how great East Lothian is – well, you’d expect me to say that, wouldn’t you, since we chose to set our dragon books in Musselburgh and Traprain Law?

Still, a winner was promised and that person was:

Col A.

Well done, Col!

The runners-up were:

Jessica B.

Ben G.

Sam J.

Here are the art winners’ pix (Col’s is top left):

The stories were really entertaining. So many different ideas.

The winner was:

Katie B.

Well done, Katie!

The runners-up were:

Niomi N.

Katie M.

Ben TW.

Thank you for a lovely day’s reading! Here is the winning story (the runners-up are just below it – if you click on the image on my computer, you get to see a larger version. Give it a try):

It was great to meet you all on Monday at Cramlington Library. You had brilliant ideas and were fun to be with. You took part in all the activities during the session and I loved meeting you all!

I hope you’re enjoying reading the books you bought. If you poke around on this blog, you’ll find out lots more about the Lothian Dragon books. Those of you who bought Scordril can find a podcast of some of chapter 2 if you scroll down. Or click here.

And we’d love you to write to us and let us know which bits you liked (or even didn’t like – but be kind, we’re only sensitive overgrounders like you!).

You can leave your messages by clicking on ‘Leave a comment’ below.

Dragonclaws, but I’m hungry now! Back soon with some competition results from Sea View school.