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THE BLOOMSBURY FESTIVAL
PLUS THE INSPIRATION BEHIND DRAGONS VERSUS HELICOPTERS

Thanks to those who were there for the reading/talk I gave at the Art Worker’s Guild as part of the Bloomsbury Festival on Saturday 20th October. The event was filmed too, for use by Great Ormond Street Hospital TV, so I suppose more people may eventually get to see me talking about my dragon-boy trilogy, Worm in the Blood, Beast Beneath the Skin and Heart of the Serpent. As part of my talk, I read an extract from Heart of the Serpent, a chapter near the end of the book, which describes a dragon (Fen) attacking and destroying a helicopter in flight. This reminds me of a film that came out some ten years ago I think, called Reign of Fire. It was in the Sci-Fi post-apocalyptic tradition. In Reign of Fire, huge fire-breathing dragons had laid waste to modern Britain. The poster advertising the film showed dragons on the wing and, in one corner, a flight of helicopters homing in, as if to confront the giant beasts in aerial combat. This never actually happened in the film, a fact that was noted with disappointment in a review I read somewhere. Remembering this, and with the cost of special effects not being an issue when you’re writing a novel, I resolved to make sure there was a dragon versus helicopter encounter somewhere in my book if at all possible.