News & Blog
Come and Say Hello!
News | Posted by Carole on Thursday 27 September 2007
There will be a book launch for The Dragon Companion in Melbourne. All welcome. I hope some of you will come along and say hello and help me celebrate the publication of this book which I have been working on for a long time. Here are the details.
When: Sun 21 Oct 3 pm
Where: Readers Feast, Basement Midtown Plaza, Corner Swanston St and Bourke St, Melbourne, Vic
Also I will be in Adelaide next week speaking at a librarians’ conference. I will be doing a book signing while I’m there. I hope to get a chance to meet some South Australian readers there as well.
When: Sat 6 Oct, 2-4 pm
Where: Mostly Books, Mitcham Shopping Centre, Torrens Park, SA
Comments (32)
The Dragon Companion
News | Posted by Carole on Thursday 27 September 2007
The Dragon Companion should be in bookshops (in Australia) next week (1st October). It is an A-Z encyclopedia of dragons.
black dog books has set up a terrific microsite for the Companion. It has some of the illustrations from the book. Here’s another one. 
There are extracts from the book as well. The extracts are all to do with Chinese dragons and it shows how the cross referencing works. It’s a bit like a link on a website that leads you to another place, except that you have to turn the pages of course!
If a word is highlighted in gold, that means there is an entry in the book with that name. For example if you come across the word “blood” printed in gold, you turn to the letter B and look for the entry by that name (I can’t make word gold on this blog!). There you’ll learn all about dragons’ blood.
Also wherever you see a golden dragon claw symbol there will be a list of other linked entries. You turn to the relevant letter and look for these entries.
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Dragon Moon Overseas
News | Posted by Carole on Wednesday 19 September 2007
The publishers who publish the Dragonkeeper series in other countries don’t always let me know when the books will be available. So I am grateful when overseas readers let me know.
Tamina tells me Dragon Moon will be out in Germany in February 2008, and Ryanne has let me know that it will be out in Hong Kong in April 2008.
Comments (40)
Dragon Research
Dragon Companion, Featured Post, News | Posted by Carole on Tuesday 11 September 2007
Sarah wanted to know how I managed to collect up 17 folders of information on dragons for my new book The Dragon Companion: An Encyclopedia (see post More Dragons on the Horizon.)
Well it took a long time. I started reading general books on dragons. They led me to more specific dragon information, in books like the ones in the picture.
What I really wanted to find were the original stories, so I searched for the stories translated from ancient Greek poems and Scandinavian sagas etc. Dragon information can be found in unexpected places such as Chinese medical books and Medieval science books. I found articles about dragons carved on churches and decorating prayer books.
As well as information, I also collected images of dragons—photos, paintings—and I picked out some of them and gave them to the illustrator, Dean Jones, when it came time for him to illustrate the book. He studied the pictures and made sure that the different dragons had the right characteristics. For example, the Iranian dragons had one branched horn and the Russian dragons several heads.
It was a big job, but a very enjoyable one.
Comments (11)
FAQs
Website | Posted by Carole on Monday 10 September 2007
I’ve added a page of Frequently Asked Questions to this website. See FAQs in the menu. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to answer readers’ questions, it’s just that when I answer a comment on this blog, I do it off the top of my head and sometimes (particularly with the writers’ tips) I forget something. I’m still happy to answer other questions or talk about anything you might disagree with.
Comments (4)
More Dragons on the Horizon
Dragon Companion, Featured Post, News, Uncategorized | Posted by Carole on Thursday 6 September 2007
It is now only three weeks till my next book comes out. It’s called The Dragon Companion: an Encyclopedia.
I am very proud of it. It is a beautiful hardback book with fabulous illustrations by Dean Jones. Here is the cover. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)
It isn’t something I’ve whipped together since I finished Dragon Moon. It is a result of more than 10 years research into dragons. I actually started writing the first version in 2002 and kept changing my mind about how to write it. And I didn’t have a publisher who wanted to publish it. Then in 2005 Andrew (my black dog books publisher) said he’d like to commission the dragon encyclopedia he’d heard me talk about so often. I started writing this version in Dec 2005.
When I talk about my dragon research at schools, I sometimes think that people don’t believe me when I say I collected 17 folders of notes on dragons from around the world. Well here is a picture of Rita in front of the 17 folders.
It took a while to find the right illustrator for The Dragon Companion, but finally we decided Dean was the right person. (He did the illustrations in my version of Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter.) He has created some wonderful dragons—some scary, some cute; some gorgeous, some downright ugly.
Now I have to wait and see if everyone loves the look of the book as much as I do. It’ll be out in Australia at the beginning of October.