I've always loved dragons.

I think the fascination is a fantasy version of the interest in dinosaurs that every eight-year-old has. When I met Smaug while reading Tolkien's The Hobbit, I felt an affinity for the old dwarf-eater. Powerful, temperamental, irascible, he reminded me a bit of my father. Maybe that's why he never struck me as evil in the way Sauron or the Balrog did. Smaug was a force of nature, a "calamity" to use Bilbo's phrase -- he might fry and eat you, but it was just business.

As I was getting into dragons my dad gave me McCaffrey's Pern books. I think only three had been published at the time. I loved her imaginative explanations for everything from the calf-scramble like hatchings to the minerals the dragons ate to produce fire. They possessed a noble grandeur that Smaug lacked, mulit-ton, tweening Shire horses.

My third inspiration is animal hero stories, starting with Charlotte's Web and Trumpet of the Swan right up through the epitome of the genre, Watership Down. I had an itch to write one and finally scratched it.

I think the idea came to me while watching Disney's Bambi. Like the Lion King, Bambi follows a young animal from birth through maturity, maturity being defined as producing offspring of his own. It's a simple yet powerful story with universal appeal. If they've done the circle of life with deer and lions and met with success, why not a dragon? Nose-tip to tail, that's quite a circle.