It was a while ago. I had noticed that different trends seemed to do the rounds in teen fiction – there had been the Harry Potter reinvention of the boarding school novel, and before that there had been a trend for horror, best characterised by the Goosebumps series.  At about that time, something about vampires was beginning to take off, and I wondered what was going to be next.  Now, in those days (which seem dim and distant now) Livejournal was a thing that mattered and on LiveJournal there were communities devoted to DragonKin and OtherKin (look it up – I’m sure its still going on somewhere).  And – despite the fact this wasn’t my particular interest ( I’ve always been more the sort of guy who likes to kill dragons with the aid of polyhedral dice ) –  this inspired me.  Dragons hadn’t been in vogue for a while.  And a character who was gradually discovering that she was a dragon, and right in the middle of the political games played by the other very real dragons seemed like quite a fun idea.

And thats about as far as I got.  The idea swims around in my head, and details crystallise over time, so this is what I’ve learned

The main character – who has most commonly been called Tia (Her full name has been Tia Matthews – based mainly on the possibility that the Babylonian chaos monster Tiamat was a dragon – which seems debatable.   Anyway, the things we know about Tia is that she is an orphan (or maybe has a single mother), does not like school, may well be a shoplifter, but in any event is certainly a troubled teen.  Tia has vague memories of a golden period in her childhood when an elderly neighbour would look after her and tell her fantasy stories.

There are then two supporting characters:  A female engineer / girl-geek type and a male roleplayer/thesp.  They don’t have fixed names in my head yet.  In short the roleplayer/thesp is there to provide access to knowledge about mythology and history, while the engineer is there to find out information in the ‘real’ world (and to provide support to the idea that school is cool – to counter the rebellious ways of Tia)

Finally, a later addition to the mythos is a more mysterious figure.  I have variously called him Bran and Mihai.  In any event, Mihai (lets call him that for now) is this good looking guy who really ought to be the object of Tia’s affections, but there is something special about him – everything seems to imply that he is a vampire.  He is clearly from Romania, he doesn’t like going out in the sun, and, when its looked into, he is quite clearly a direct descendant of Vlad the Impaler.  The idea was to play up the book to look like it was going to be another vampire romance, then turn the tables.  You see Mihai is actually a member of the Order of The Dragon (which is where the Drac in Dracula comes from – Vlad’s dad was initiated into the Order of the Dragon), and the conceit is that the Order of the Dragon was actually a secret society dedicated to keeping dragons under control (Either by killing them or ensuring they remain hidden).  Mihai is really here to locate and ‘contain’ the dragon that is supposedly being raised in this locality (though he doesn’t know who it is)

The story begins with Tia skipping school and getting caught up with some people who seem to be egg thieves.  Tia realises that stealing eggs is a bad thing and decides she want to stop them.  What Tia doesn’t realise is that these guys are working for a dragon and that the ‘egg’ they are hunting is actually a  dragon in its larval form… The larval form being, well, Tia.  However, in a slightly ham fisted puberty metaphor, the teenaged Tia is also gradually discovering she has unusual powers.  SInce Egg is designed to be a series, in this book she would only have the ability to be super fast fit and strong, especially when cornered – and to breath fire right at the end in a particularly dramatic scene.  Later books would introduce flying and shape shifting.  The heart of the idea is that dragons reproduce by shapeshifting to be human, impregnating human women, then sodding off.  The resulting child is a larval dragon.  Since there are only a few dragons, dragons are more or less immortal (unless killed) and most dragons like it that way, they tend to be keen to get rid of the larval dragons early on – they just have a lot of trouble identifying them.

So – there we have it as it stands.  There isn’t much structure yet, and in many ways it feels like a half-hearted rip off of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (though actually Tia is more clearly ripped off of Suze from Meg Cabot’s 1-800-Missing books in my head).  To move this idea forwards what I really need to do is come up with a plot structure, then use that to break the story down into actions.