la_marquise | Unexpected dragons

So, right now, I'm working on revisions for the work in progress, which is a modern-day magical family fantasy romcom with Arthurian themes, dragons and a very clever cat. This is not at all the book I expected to write, and it's a lot sillier than anything else I've written.

It started by mistake. It was going to be a self-indulgent short story, as I said before, as a kind of fanfic coda to the Book of Gaheris. (Yes, I know, fanfic of my own original fic. I am hopeless.) That became a novella, which I sent to interested parties, expecting to move on. I even made a start on an entirely different project, which I'm still pondering.

And then... I sat down at the computer to work on a review, and the phrase 'Wednesday, there was a dragon behind the Co-Op. Kay encountered it on his way back from his morning run' wrote itself. This isn't the first time something like this has happened to me: the ferret women bounced their way into The Grass King's Concubine this way too. But I was already working on GKC at that point, I just hadn't met them yet.

(In an aside, characters who arrived in my books unannounced and unexpected: Quenfrida, Yelena and Julana, Safere, Essyllt, and, in the WiP, Elene.)

I looked at the dragon for a while. It looked at me. It looked at Kay. Kay wasn't at all impressed.

Kay had already established himself as one of the main protagonists of the unscheduled Arthurian novella. So he wasn't too much of a surprise. The dragon, on the other hand... I don't write dragons. I can, in fact, take or leave dragons. But here it was and Kay had Opinions, and, well... Novel. Fantasy comedy novel.

My subconscious, it is not disciplined or tidy at all.

Skirt of the day: black Haruka.