The Return of the Dragonriders Trilogy is a slice-of-life/cozy X epic fantasy, and one of my first works. It’s the first Areaer novel, and the setting of Areaer was born alongside and through it, when I was about thirteen and a number of inspirations finally came together in one whole.

However, I considered the moment when I first conceived of DragonBirth – the first book in the trilogy – to be when I read the first Harper Hall book, Dragonsong, and I got to Jaxom’s Impression to Ruth. Anne McCaffrey’s stories were the first I’d read with dragons that weren’t villains, and I really wanted more of the dragons.

At that point, I didn’t have access to the Dragonriders of Pern – just the Harper Hall – and I started writing the story I wanted The White Dragon to be. I made uncounted attempts, usually following girls or young women named Silmavalien, though there were other names as well, and it took a while before I found the white dragon’s name: Minth. Some of them were almost completely cozy, slice-of-life stories. Others of them were far more epic and showed distinctly Tolkeinesque inspirations (as Tolkein was one of the few other fantasy authors I had got my hands – or eyes – on at that point).

There are perhaps three that I still remember well: the earliest one was absolutely epic, and my characters may have been chosen ones. It was also rather tragic and involved a lot of death. It was full of towers and wars between the gods, of new races born and the fate of worlds and who-knew-what-else hanging in the balance, as my character’s destiny took her across the world.

In the next, a servant found an albino egg squirreled away in some hidden spot and the dragon hatched to her. This one was highly episodic and very slice-of-life, following my MC’s struggles adapting into the dragonrider community.

Last came the one I think of most fondly. The coziest of them all, this main character was definitely named Silmavalien, and her dragon was Minth. The story had very little conflict, and it was mostly about Silmavalien’s efforts to be a very good friend to her dragon, even while she has to contribute to the village and do the extra work needed to take care of him.

I never got around to writing the sequel. Instead, I came across some stuff about plate tectonics and mountain ranges that fascinated me. My imagination transformed some of it with magic. Areaer was born, a world enhanced and enriched by magic present within everything, and gently guiding it, sometimes creating wilder features, such as the Greater Aravin Mountains, nearly shear cliffs on one side, their peaks stretching up well above the breathable atmosphere. But for the most part, the magic is not too obvious or flashy. It is gently there, but the wildernesses are much like those of earth. Mundane, yet magical. At this point, the seed planted in DragonBirth has grown into far more, and if you’re interested, you can take a short tour of Areaer’s solar system here.

Even as the Aravin Mountains first formed in my mind, the story of Silmavalien and Minth found its home in them. In a way, this new story bound together all the earlier ones into something a bit new and much more complete. Here, Silmavalien is a devout huntress in a village of hunter-gatherers transitioning to a more agrarian way of life, even as their religion blends with a new one brought up from the plains.

A fear and hatred of dragons as demons from hell is ever-present, and when Silmavalien bonds Minth and realizes dragons are not at all what she thought, she has to deal not only with the fact that everything she has been taught is wrong, but with the possibility that those she knows and considers friends will burn her alive if they find out about Minth.

But, there’s truth to the old stories, too. The nightmare is real, and this force of fear and hate, and the creatures that are formed from it, may be behind the stories in one way or another.

Frustrated by how a lot of fantasy novels I’d read gloss over the mundane aspects of life that are so much a part of who we become, as our responses shape us day-by-day, I strove not to let that happen in this story. I tried to keep the initial closeness to the protagonist’s daily life, even as the story develops, paying attention to how this is who she is.

The everyday struggles, and the everyday loves, are really the greater part of a relationship, and I wanted to show that. The most epic thing isn’t a moment in which you throw yourself in front of an arrow for your loved one, but caring for them, encouraging them, doing all you can for them but also making the time for connection, day after day after day. It’s caring, when it’s all you can do to put one foot in front of the other.

These moments may not be the relationship itself, but they are what gives its form, the place in which it develops. The body to the soul. The soil in which the tree grows.

The tree’s environment, from climate to soil, is a lot of what it is and shows us what it is made of.

As a result, the Return of the Dragonriders Trilogy is a kind of high stakes cozy/slice-of-life fantasy. The stakes are often death, and sometimes they may be far more. To a very real degree, Silmavalien and Noren may have the power to decide the destiny of their souls, often in moments when they are not thinking about that, and their lives have the potential to impact a lot of other people, too (after all, their lives are impacted by everyone else as well).

There are times when the story feels more cozy, and times when it feels more epic, but it is my hope that I succeeded in always staying close to those themes about relationships and who we are, and that I set the good vs. evil themes within that context, as that was another thing that was very important to me when writing this series.

A lot of good vs. evil stories pit a group of people (the good guys) against a group of people (the bad guys) and the conflict is resolved through a great deal of bloodshed. This sometimes gives the good vs. evil theme a bad name, though that was not what I was thinking about when I started DragonBirth.

I just didn’t like it, and I wanted to write something that is definitely a good vs. evil story, but the conflict is fundamentally within my character’s souls, and not with other people. In fact, one of the things that’s evil, that has to be fought against, is that very temptation to see another group of people as “the bad guys,” to fear and hate them as the enemy. You see it in the way much of the world hates and fears my dragons and their riders, but you also see it in the temptation for them to act of a responding hate and fear that seems more justified.

Until it seems to justify other’s fear and hate towards them.

Anyway, I hope this interests you, and I hope if you are interested and decide to read, that you enjoy the story!

I also hope you enjoy the illustrations! It’s always been my dream to illustrate my novels, and I can now say I am very proud of the illustrations that grace the real paper pages of the paperbacks AND the virtual pages of the ebooks! Each and every one of them is lovingly crafted original art 😀

I also want to thank Midnight Rose for the beautiful new covers for the illustrated versions!

Book One, DragonBirth

Book Two, DragonWing

Book Three, DragonSword

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And here is a little extra for you!

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atdm7xHEWWg