Fireborn
Dragons secretly live among us, in human form. But their species is on the brink of extinction.
Fireborn takes place in our modern world, except there are dragons in it. I know how this sounds, but please stay with me for a little longer, I promise this goes well.
Let’s get one thing out of the way, it isn’t a “US army defeats gigantic monsters” kind of story. There are two key unique points:
1- Dragons, while shedding their skin like any reptile, can emerge from the process in human form.
2- Their position in the story is that of the victim, not the antagonist.
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In terms of world-building, one of the first challenges I had to solve was:
How come each of these dragons is awesome and powerful, capable of doing magical things… but they are forced to live in secret instead of having taken over the world? How do I make them individually powerful, but collectively weak?
It had to be their numbers. There were so few of them they would lose any all-out war with humans. But why so few? The answer came in the form of a reproductive disadvantage: dragons barely gave birth, most of them were sterile. Therefore, not only were their numbers small, there was an urgency to their situation.
From that tension, the main plot was born. Everything else trickled down from there:
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They need to live in hiding, and influence our society in secret. Several of them will act in the shadows to take control of human communities. They will wear the names of the villages or cities they had managed to control, like a badge of pride. That's where Valladolid, Chicago, Orleans, even Kwambonambi get their names from.
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They have an immense respect for life. Births are considered true miracles. Their reverence for all forms of life is a down-to-earth philosophy that many humans aspire to, but can’t seem to ever attain.
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They look at humankind with mixed feelings, as we would look at a species of beautiful, intelligent, creative locusts who can't stop waging tragic, large-scale wars on each other.
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Some of them blend in society, enjoying what it has to offer, while others loathe humans for caring so little about the environment, and life in general. This would become a fertile ground for reflections around eco-sustainability and our place on this planet...
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If you would like to read the novel, please email me. It will be my pleasure to send you a copy.
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If you don’t mind spoilers and would like to check out some sample writing, you can download Chapter 20 here.
It is sort of the origin story of Fireborn. I hope it will make you excited about reading the rest some day!
Some words about the journey
Fireborn started from a pitch I made for a pen & paper RPG back in 2003. You would play as a dragon in the real world, capable of taking on a human form, and blend in society. Instead of them portrayed as final boss-type villains, dragons would be survivors, and humans the threat. Individually powerful, capable of magic, dragons would be collectively weaker, their numbers very small compared to billions of humans. They would be forced to live in hiding, their species on the brink of extinction…
Another pitch was preferred — it was Echo — as it made for a more open design space for an RPG.
As I moved to trash it all, however, something stayed my hand. There were characters in there. People I had grown fond of very quickly. People I wanted to figure out, to spend time with. People who felt like they didn’t deserve to be discarded. Several years later, once I had a plot I felt good enough about, I began writing a novel about them. Probably for the same reason anybody writes: I was lucky enough that nobody told me it was impossible.
The first draft, roughly a hundred thousand words, took something like nine months. Insert some overused, cliche metaphor here. Anyone who’s written anything that long will tell you that the moment you type The End is charged with emotion. And it’s true. It should be special. It’s just that, if it’s your first time, chances are you’re deceiving yourself. You feel like the work is finished, or nearly so. Achieved. Complete. Dunzo. And you couldn’t be further from the truth. To call back a metaphor I’ve used before, the first draft is you conjuring a block of stone out of thin air. Congrats, you made a rock. You’re about 20% done. Now comes the process of chipping away at it until it looks like a David. Or at least, that it’s worth somebody else’s time.
I didn’t know that. And it almost killed my budding career as a storyteller.
You see, there was a bit of a gap between my expectations — I’ll read it once, make sure there aren’t any typos — and reality: I was going to rewrite Fireborn seven times over the course of the next eight years.
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Looking back, one of the most pivotal moments of my entire life happened when my friend Logan, having brought no entertainment on an LA-Dublin flight, reached out. “Hey, I saw your post, that you finished your novel. I have 10 hours ahead of me. Do you want some feedback?” Oh wow, sure, absolutely, please and thank you.
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Logan came off the plane and met me at the pub. “I have notes,” he said. He actually had 3 pages worth. “You have something there, but there are problems,” he said. He then proceeded to trash my entire novel with calm and collected feedback. Nothing was spared: pace, clarity, dialogs, naming conventions, every single thing that he had found to be sub-par. Seventy-nine bullet points. By the end, I could barely breathe. Logan was right. About everything. Fireborn needed a ton of work.
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Taking on feedback and iterating has always been a core component of making video games. It is programming software, after all. Testing, fixing, testing again… I was very familiar with the process, I know it was meant with love, for me, and if not for the current product, for what it could become. So I staggered back home, wounded but clear-minded, and resolved to start in the morning.
It was hard. It’s facing all of your faults without any idea of whether they can be fixed. It’s taking what you thought was your greatest victory, merely a week ago, and scanning it with a ruthless shit detector, to paraphrase Hemingway. No bit of it felt good. I kept telling myself that I owed it to the characters in the book, to make their story better. I pushed myself, clenched my teeth, day after day. It didn’t matter: it was too long, too tedious. Two steps forward and three steps back. I wasn’t going to make it, and I hated myself for it. Whatever I lacked... motivation, discipline, genius of course, I could neither find nor fix. How did I even think I could do this in the first place?
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It was then that this work taught me one of the most important lessons of my life: if you want to achieve anything that takes a lot of effort, you need to learn to fall in love with the effort. Not with the result of it. Not even with the promise of the result. With the effort itself.
The initial motivation is what gets you to build discipline. The discipline is what turns the effort into routine. Any fitness coach will tell you the same: you must make this simple, recurring effort a part of your life. Day after day, you take a handful of rocks, and you move them. Again. And again. And some day, a few months, a few years into it, lo and behold, the mountain has moved.