Why I Wrote It

It was very, very late at night. About 10 pm, in fact. Those of you now laughing at my concept of ‘late’ have to understand: at the time I had a four month old baby who NEVER SLEPT. He once went 72 hours with only a couple of catnaps. So this particular night he was finally asleep, and I was so tired that I was seeing sparkly things in my peripheral vision. So my husband and I decided that we’d better go to bed, because we knew that we’d be up in three hours . . . or less. Again. As I walked past my laptop, where I sometimes still pretended to be a writer, I had a thought.

“It was my aunt who decided to give me to the dragon.”

And in that moment I knew. I knew that this was a book narrated by a girl named Creel, who wanted to be a dressmaker. And I knew that she was about to meet a dragon who collected shoes, and that she would get a pair of blue shoes from him that were really made of dragon skin. I knew that she would meet other dragons, with other collections, and that she would go to the big city and be a dressmaker and that her most beautiful gown would be made out of an ugly gown she didn’t want. I knew it all.

And I started to cry.

I was so tired! But I had to write it down before I forgot it. So I sat down and in less than half an hour I had a first chapter which has had almost no changes made to it. I had an outline, and I even had some names. Creel. Theoradus. Feniul. Shardas. And I would put my dog in it, my own little Pippin to be the spoiled lapdog of a princess. This was going to be a great book, I just knew it.

And I was right!