Authors’ Lounge Article
Let me begin by thanking The Authors’ Lounge for this opportunity to tell you about my book The Accidental Dragonrider, the first in my Dragonrider series.
What is your book all about?
The protagonist is a teacher called Iko, and he has a problem with pirates: they keep raiding his village, taking whatever they want. Dusty documents in the archives suggest a last-chance solution: summon a dragon to destroy them. Of course everyone knows dragons don’t exist, so Iko is as surprised as anyone else when the summoning works.
The dragon refuses to help—his race were once slaves to humans, and he has no desire to become one himself. But in answering the summons, he created a magical bond between himself and Iko, which will have consequences neither of them can foresee…
What is your target audience for the book?
It’s for anyone who likes fantasy with dragons. Officially it’s aimed at teenagers and adults, but children who don’t mind the occasional scary scene can enjoy it too. Readers praise the world-building and the dialogue, and there are moments of humour and light amongst all the grim seriousness.
What inspired you to write the book?
“Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”
That quote was the original inspiration for The Accidental Dragonrider. (Tolkien fans might recognise it as a riff on “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”) Someone on a mailing list in the last millennium had it as their signature, and after seeing it many times, I thought I could get a story out of it. Over the Christmas break in 1999, I wrote the first couple of pages of a story about a man who summoned a dragon to help him, only to find the dragon wasn’t interested.
And there I got stuck, because I hadn’t given any thought to why the man wanted help, or why the dragon wouldn’t give it. I worked on several other books over the next fifteen years or so. I kept coming back to this one, but remained stuck. Then, partway through writing another book (The Mirrors of Elangir), I mentioned in passing that one of the sides in a war uses dragons as a form of aerial cavalry. That led me to realise I could set the dragon story in the same world, which made the characters’ history and motivations obvious. Once I’d finished The Mirrors of Elangir, I resumed the dragon story and soon completed it.
What are your future goals or plans for the book?
Some more readers would be nice 🙂 I wrote a sequel called The Reluctant Dragonrider, which stars Iko’s daughter Tiwan. As of November 2024, I’m working on a prequel, which has the (perhaps confusing) working title of The Last Dragonrider. I want to write another sequel, but that’s currently just a couple of pages of notes in my files.
Tell us more about yourself?
I was born in England in 1970. At the time, my father was a librarian and my mother was a teacher, so it was probably inevitable that I would grow up loving books. For much of my childhood, we lived in New Zealand, returning to England in 1981. I attended the University of York from 1989 to 1992, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. I now live in Lancashire, England with my partner, where I work as a software developer for a large IT company.
Where can we find the book?
The Accidental Dragonrider is available as an ebook and paperback from Amazon. If you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, you can read the ebook for free. It’s also available as an audiobook, read by me, from Amazon, Audible and iTunes.
To find out more about me and my books, please visit my website at www.pembers.net.
I remember that signature line as well, although it never inspired me to write a dragon-based fantasy.