First thing I did was dispense with the "Lord of the Realm" rubbish. Yes, monarchy has an appeal, and you could argue that dragons would be natural kings at the pinnacle of the food chain, certainly, but I'm not big on royalty. If you've got a lousy monarch with a distressing family, there's not much the poor serfs (or bunnies and zebras and so on) can do about it. Plus I always thought the zebras got the raw end of the "we eat the zebras and when we die our bodies become the grass that the zebras eat" deal. Just as well I did so, because in 2003 Jo Walton published her Tooth And Claw, and had dragons as a bunch of Regency aristos.

Dragons are big, powerful creatures so my hero would need a problem equal to his (eventual) strength. I decided to make dragons a race fading into the twilight of legend. They're more-or-less dying off, but not being availed of CNN they're not sure why - they just know that there are less dragons about than there used to be. The idea of dragons as hunted raubritters also appealed, because I knew I'd have to do some hoop-jumping to make a creature as powerful as a dragon be an underdog.

The next big question was the inclusion of elves and dwarves and so on. There are fine writers doing tremendous fantasy with nary an elf in sight (George R.R. Martin springs to mind, but there are others). Someday I'd like to do an utterly out-there fantasy in the style of China Mieville-meets-Talislanta, but since I'm already demanding that the audience accept a dragon's POV I decided not to jump entirely off the path others had trodden before me. I stuck them in because I believed seeing the "classic" races though a dragon's point of view might add a little bit of interest. I also like them, and have since my days of playing Dungeons and Dragons. As novels are perfect-bound indulgences in any event I decided to follow my natural inclination.