Welcome to Rintaria

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I've told you about my cousin, the one who inspired Chris in The Ankulen. That same summer, my sister and I were studying Greek mythology, and I told him all about Jason and the Argonauts.

He was hooked, and the next two stories we did, he was Jason. The first one has become part of Bookania, but it's the second that I'd like to talk about here.

It was a story of a young knight who wants to marry a princess, and had been told by her father that he could - if he slayed thirty dragons. Then he joined a group who were also hunting dragons - though for very different reasons. They informed him that the thirty dragons he hunted were actually the last of the good dragons, and that the princess, who loved the good dragons, would only marry him if he helped slay three hundred evil dragons.

I decided that I wanted the party to be made of seven people, including Jason. But I needed reasons for the others to be hunting. My character was secretly the princess in disguise, so she was easy (This cousin has played my love interest so many times ...). Then I tossed in a pair of siblings whose family was wiped out in an evil dragon attack.

That left three more members.

A brilliant idea came to me - what if the last three members were actually dragons - the good dragons - trapped in human form. And they hunted the dragons because it was a way by which they could someday restore their scales. And the reason that the princess loved the dragons so much was that her mother was one of them.

The cousin loved this idea.

(And yes, my intention had been to withhold this plot twist from ya'll until you read the book, but I've realized that it's a plot twist that most of you would figure out, and since there are other somewhat popular books that have the same twist - books I hadn't read until I'd already formed the basic plot, I'd like to point out - I decided that I'd just put it out in the open and let ya'll deal with it.)

The story game we played outside eventually fizzled away, and it's possible that he's forgotten about it. I started writing a bit of it in my RambleK document, but I didn't officially start digging into the story until last year's Camp NaNo.

And by the way, the reason for the change in this Jason's name to Jyson was not because they were too similar (I'm a huge fan of overusing names) but because their love interests have too much in common. Both have two names but go by the second predominately, both are associated with dragons, and both are associated with the color gold. And both have knives as their weapon of choice.

This book is part of the Ankulen universe - basically, if you read about a certain redhead talking about dragons in The Ankulen, she's almost certainly talking about the dragons in Rintaria. It's a desert world, and I would describe its culture as more Arabic than many of my other worlds. I'm very much looking forward to sharing this world with all of you.

Also, check out Robyn Hoode's blog for an interview with Stardrana, the half-Hidden (the name that the humanized dragons gave themselves) heroine of the book.