Androids & Dragons!
I got an exciting email from Androids and Dragons on November 8, 2023.
“Dear Amy:
Thank you for submitting “Thunderbirds, Kraken, and Other Dangers to Dragon Reproduction.” I loved this story and would like to publish it in Androids and Dragons in April 2024. If you are still interested, I just need you to confirm your email address for purposes of PayPal and send me an author bio. You can just send it in the body of the email. If you have an illustration you want me to use for your piece, you can also send that as an attachment.
--
Jenna Hanan Moore
Editor, Androids and Dragons Magazine”
It was my first accepted short story for publication. It also received an honorable mention in the prestigious Writers of the Future contest [Volume 40, Q2] and took first place in Southeastern Writers Association’s 2023 The Vega Award for Speculative Fiction. In addition to getting one of my short stories published, this came with the opportunity to submit original art to accompany my story which was fun to create.
I had been submitting short stories to markets for a couple of years and was used to receiving form rejections and a sprinkling of personals, so this was a huge boon to my confidence. A lesson to my writer friends, keep at it and consider spending time to find markets that suit your submission [and don’t worry about how much money you will receive].
The idea behind the story came from several sources. One source was the prompt: Dragon Dreams. I got the prompt from Wulf Moon who shares a prompt once a week on the WOTF forum. He also has a list of prompts in his two writing books: Wulf Moon’s Super Secrets Illustrated Volume 1 published by Dream Forge Press 2022 and his How to Write a Howling Good Story: Wulf Moon’s Super Secrets published by Stark Publishing 2023.
From Dragon Dreams I went to the idea of what if there was a person who was born a dragon but could shapeshift into a human? And what if that person was left at an orphanage by a dying mother dragon? And what if that person decided to become a biologist whose expertise was the study of dragon reproductive behaviors?
This idea led to my own experience as an academic who collected several degrees including a master’s degree where I took a lot of animal behavior classes, a doctorate where I went on several long field trips to collect snails, went on to do a postdoc, and was hired to be a professor of biology at a small university where I taught animal behavior which included the fascinating Herring and Great Black-beaked gull behaviors at Appledore Island conducted by researchers at Shoals Marine Laboratory.
I decided my hero [Mori] would be a PhD candidate who needed to travel to a remote location to study dragon behavior for her doctoral research. And considering the connection between birds and dinosaurs, I decided the dragons in my story would face similar challenges as the gulls at Shoals Marine Laboratory, but worse! They must worry about Kraken in the sea and Thunderbirds in the sky as well as those who would steal dragon eggs for medicinal purposes, even at a protected wildlife refuge!
To add more personal details to the setting of Mori’s story, I drew on my experience living in an apartment complex and my interactions with one of my neighbors who was obsessed at her biological clock running out. Sadly, neither she or I wound up having children, but it’s something any woman thinks about, especially as she enters her thirties or early forties and hasn’t started a family of her own.
My dragon story will be published April 1.