Since I just put Chekhov’s hang glider into this story, I thought I would share with you guys some of the items scribbled down in my notebook, on the page designated for Cool Things What I Intend to Put Into the Second Dragons Book:

• talking drums
• griots
• witchcraft
• blacksmiths
• leeches
• malaria
• poisons/hallucinogens
• waterfall island
• guard dragons
• masks
• iron/gold/salt/ivory
• booby traps

And some other things that would be too spoilery to share.

Mind you, Isabella is looking over my metaphorical shoulder and objecting strongly to my classification of malaria as a “cool thing” (she’s no happier about the prospect of me replacing it with yellow fever), but narratively speaking, it qualifies. 🙂 (Confidential to kurayami_hime: at least it’s not the plague!)

I’m still working on stringing all this stuff together into a book, rather than a collection of things I think are neat, but hey. There are worse ways to build a novel than throwing awesome bits of setting at the page. (It’s more or less how I built several of the Onyx Court books, and that seems to have worked out okay.)