On Dragons

I have a unique relationship with dragons. The first piece of art I ever sold was a charcoal sketch of Smaug that I drew from the Rankin & Bass animated film of The Hobbit. When I started showing at SF&F cons, some of my earliest pen & ink pieces were of dragons. I love dragons, I think they're really beautiful and they play a part in mythologies all over the world. A couple of my earliest paintings had dragons in them as well, but they're very time consuming and detailed in the extreme, so I haven't painted very many of them.

The two largest paintings I did of dragons turned out very nicely, and I'm quite pleased with them. When one of my collectors contacted me and asked to buy both originals, I was delighted to know that they would be going to a good home. But what happened next wasn't so delightful - they were lost during shipping. By lost I mean there was a good chance they were stolen. Luckily I shipped them insured, and my collector was reimbursed, but they're out there somewhere with someone who did a dreadful thing to get them. It made me pretty unhappy, and I'll be very careful about how I ship my originals in the future.

Right now I'm reading His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik and I'm almost done with it. Luckily I already have the next book in the series to jump into right away, they were Christmas gifts to me from my sister. I love what this author has done with the dragons and it's a really cool re-telling of history, only this time there's dragons. This is why I'm still a fan after all these years, because there's no end to how tall a tale can be and still capture my imagination. I can see the dragons in my mind and go along with the well-crafted story of it all. This is a delightful historical fantasy series set in the Napoleonic era, and as the author is working on Book 5 right now, I have hours and hours of adventurous reading to look forward to. Just not all at once...well sometimes all at once...oh wait, I only have a chapter left of this one...
must...
finish...
book...