Happy Wednesday Scribblers. I hope you are all having a great day. It’s time for another book announcement. No, not mine. This week I’m pleased to share with you one of my author friends newest Sci-Fi/Fantasy works. Today we have J. Scott Coatsworth here to chat about his new book, The Dragon Eater, and to share with us his thoughts on dragons in general. Let’s not waste any time and jump right into the world of dragons.
The Dragon Eater
Raven's a thief who just swallowed a dragon. A small one, sure, but now his arms are growing scales, the local wildlife is acting up, and his snarky AI familiar is no help whatsoever.
Raven's best friend Aik is a guardsman carrying a torch for the thief. A pickpocket and a guard? Never going to happen. And Aik’s ex-fiancé Silya, an initiate priestess facing a magical crisis, hates Raven with the heat of a thousand suns.
This unlikely team must work together to face strange beasts, alien artifacts, and a world-altering threat. If they don’t figure out what to do soon, it might just be the end of everything.
Things are about to get messy.
Pick up your copy here.
What Is it About Dragons?
I’ve loved dragons since I was nine or ten, when I first discovered Anne McCaffrey on my mom’s sci-fi bookshelves. My mother was (and maybe still is?) a member of the Science Fiction Book Club, and new books showed up regularly in her mailbox, to end up on the imposing built-in bookshelves on what we called the “spare bedroom.”
When I discovered The Lord of the Rings on those shelves, it opened a window into a new world for me, a world where magic was possible, where starships could carry me from here to a world so far away even light would take a thousand years to get there. And there was a dragon in The Hobbit – the infamous Smaug – but he was in many ways a traditional one, hoarding gold and killing knights... even if those knights were dwarves.
And then I found Pern.
I remember the beginning as if it was yesterday, Lessa working as a drudge and caring for the watch wher, and meeting Flar for the first time. The amazing ability of McCaffrey’s dragons to travel between anywhere on the planet in just three seconds, and the fire lizards. I was hooked.
These dragons bonded with their human counterparts, even during sex, and there were gay dragonriders!
And though the Pern books were sci-fi (with a clear scientific basis for the origin of these great beasts), they were also in some ways fantasy, with the aforementioned dragons, with magic (the ability to travel between) and with a medieval setting worthy of an epic fantasy novel. That heady blend of fantasy mixed with technology and scientific advancement makes me swoon.
So maybe it’s not just dragons, but dragons of a very particular type.
When I began writing The Dragon Eater, I admit my new charges were influenced by McCaffrey’s beautiful beasts. But they’re also different, creations of a natural world and with a kind of “magic” all their own.
I hope you enjoy my dragons, aka verent. I’m so happy to see them fly.
About J. Scott Coatsworth:
Scott lives with his husband Mark in a yellow bungalow in Sacramento. He was indoctrinated into fantasy and sci fi by his mother at the tender age of nine. He devoured her library, but as he grew up, he wondered where all the people like him were.
He decided that if there weren’t queer characters in his favorite genres, he would remake them to his own ends.
A Rainbow Award winning author, he runs Queer Sci Fi, QueeRomance Ink, and Other Worlds Ink with Mark, sites that celebrate fiction reflecting queer reality, and is the committee chair for the Indie Authors Committee at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).
Where to Find Scott:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jscottcoatsworth
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jscoatsworth/
Mastodon: https://mastodon.lol/@jscottcoatsworth
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jscottcoatsworth/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8392709.J_Scott_Coatsworth?from_search=true
QueerRomance Ink: https://www.queeromanceink.com/mbm-book-author/j-scott-coatsworth/
LimFic: https://www.limfic.com/mbm-book-author/j-scott-coatsworth/
LimFic: https://www.limfic.com/mbm-book-author/j-scott-coatsworth/
BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/j-scott-coatsworth
I hope you’ll go and grab a copy of The Dragon Eater as the novel promises to be a lot of fun and Scott always crafts great stories. Until next time have a great week.