Favorite Holiday-Adjacent Movie: I am Dragon

 Christmas (or similar holiday) adjacent movie that I love?

I Am Dragon

It's a charming YA Beauty and the Beast-ish Russian flick that has amazing costumes. It's not a blood, guts, and gore movie. Sure, there are villainous moments, but we're talking villain-lite. The scariest parts are in the trailer, so safe to use that as a guide for whether it's suitable for your kidlets.

Jeffe's Sly FanFic Move

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is "If you were going to write fan fiction, what show/characters/etc would you write?"

Now, I'm not an author who got her start by writing fan fiction. I totally respect that many writers developed their chops that way, but it frankly never occurred to me to do that. I fantasized plenty about the books I read, made up stories in those worlds where I got to be the hero - but I never thought to write them down. It seemed wrong to me.

The intervening years have seen a huge growth in the world of fan-fiction writing, and a legitimizing of it. Still, I've never done it and don't think I ever would.

That said...

In my Sorcerous Moons series, I gave my heroine a winged white lizard Familiar, who breathes fire and communicates with her telepathically. This is totally my version of Anne McCaffrey's fire lizards and dragons from her Pern books - one of my favorite daydream subjects.

So ... maybe the line between homage and fan fiction is a fine and narrow one. But it's an apropos topic for me, because ORIA'S ENCHANTMENT, book #5 in the Sorcerous Moons series, just released. Buy links are going live as I type this, but you can find them here as they're available.

The Temptation of Power

No longer a princess and not yet a queen, the sorceress Oria welcomes the rush of power the ancient mask brings her—though the obsessive connection to it frightens her and alarms her barbarian husband, Lonen. But retreat is not an option. She must wrestle the magic to prevent an annihilating war, even if she must make the ultimate sacrifice.

A World in Flames

If Lonen wants to reclaim his throne—and save his people from destruction—he must return by sunset on the seventh day. What he thought would be a short and simple journey, however, leads them deeper into the mountains—and Oria deeper into the thrall of foul magic. Until he must choose between two terrible paths.

A Heart-Wrenching Choice

Struggling with conflicting loyalties, Oria and Lonen fight to find a way to be together…
lest they be separated forever, and their realms go down in flames with them.

Here Be Dragons

If the tilt of reality suddenly shifted and opened the door to the improbable, what would I hope to see come through to inhabit this world with us? Easy. Dragons. Because I have no sense of self-preservation maybe. Or because I'm taken with the notion that I am a dragon (according to Chinese astrology.) More to the point, though, there's value to casting your gaze to the sky when a shadow passes over and shuddering a combination of awe and dread. It keeps the human animal humbler to be reminded that there are forces in the world that cannot be harnessed or tamed or controlled. While I'm not entirely keen on having friends and family predated by a hungry dragon, watching a massive winged force of nature soaring the skies might be worth a few 'accidents'. Certainly, I'd be one of the dumb ones going out to look for the dragons' caves/nests/roosts. Just to catch a glimpse. On par with courting a tiger.

Maybe what I'm really looking for is something to strip away the illusion of control the human race so loves to pretend to have. I have no data to back it up, but I maintain that humans are better for having something bigger and more awesome than themselves to envy. As a species we drive harder when we're challenged. And having a dragon eating your sheep and burning your neighborhood might qualify as challenging.

Dragons have good qualities, too. Some of them bear incredible wisdom and are invested in helping humans. The fun would come in trying to parse out which dragon was which. I don't know. I'm not sure I can fully explain why it would matter to me that dragons made it across the threshold from myth to real. Only that I'd love to see one with my own eyes and experience the shiver that would come from watching a majestic, enormous apex predator claim the skies of this world.

Given the forces arrayed against humans - hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquake, volcanoes and the other assorted ways the planet has to kill us, do you suppose we already have dragons of a sort?