Magic-Using Dragon

Writing, especially fantasy writing, is one of the few creative activities that just about anyone can do. It needs no expensive equipment and you can write at any level you are at, whether high school or PhD. The texts that you see published are a tiny proportion of the texts that are written all over the literate world, writing that never sees any print or even Net presence. These texts are written solely for the satisfaction of the author and his or her friends. Every so often, an ambitious writer will try to publish his or her fan writing, or even original work. It is always rejected, but at least the would-be author tried. I am among that number. I have stacks of old and unreadable writing that I amassed over the years. What you see on my various blogs are the more coherent passages that make enough sense to publish on the Web.

This illustration is from one of these fan texts, written by a lawyer acquaintance. I wanted to illustrate it simply because it was so generic, so character-less, that anything I did could be re-interpreted as any story. I didn't tell him that, of course, but I did him the favor of reading his novel-length manuscript (quite a job, I will say). It was almost entirely in dialogue, which had all the excitement of a corporate legal document, but it did have one mildly interesting idea: a dragon who was intelligent and was able to use magic just like a human magic-user. This dragon could battle with human wizards, as he is doing here. In the book, this dragon didn't have wings, but portraying him without wings made him look like a fat crocodile, so I added them anyway, which annoyed the author. Since this book had no chance of being published, it was not much of a deal. I later sold the art to someone else at a convention.

"The Wizard-Dragon" is acrylic on illustration board, 13" x 22", July-August 1992.