The Dragon Lord of Little Musking: A book review

This fantastical tale is retold in the first person by the egotistical dragon himself, Dragonlord Bane Castellan.  Fascinated by humans and civilized behaviour, he moves to a backwater village called Little Musking determined to ingratiate himself with his neighbours and become civilized.  He adopts an unwanted farmer’s son, Arden Barleigh, as his ward the better to learn civilized human ways.

Naturally, Dragonlord Bane experiences difficulties.  For one thing, he has his own dragonish nature to contend with; a habit of always getting his own way (who is going to contradict a dragon?), a tendency to eat people when provoked (preferably roasted), and a certain obtuseness in regards to human diplomacy (outing the local mayor’s son as a thief).

Dragonlord Bane’s other major difficulty is gaining acceptance by his new neighbours.  Everybody distrusts his civilized resolutions.  The local villagers have an aversion to being eaten by a dragon, and so Dragonlord Bane can’t find human servants for his manor house - he is forced to import hobgoblins.  The local fairy godmother is suspicious of his motives and keeps him under a most unwelcome surveillance. 

Worst of all, there’s an evil wizard (the Royal Wizard Naldamus) plotting to take over the kingdom, and he too does not trust Dragonlord Bane’s avowal that he has settled in Little Musking seeking a quiet, civilized life.  To make sure Dragonlord Bane does not interfere with his plans, the Royal Wizard Naldamus has the said dragon transformed into a chicken.

At this point, Dragonlord Bane’s civilized resolutions spectacularly unravel.  Although a chicken, he still behaves exactly as he always has, as a dragon.  And the dragon wants revenge.  Life for Arden in particular becomes hard, smuggling an illegal chicken that persists in acting like a dragon out of the kingdom to find a cure for the evil spell.

In the end, though, it takes a dragon to save the kingdom from the evil Royal Wizard and set things aright.  Well, right for Dragonlord Bane, anyway.

The Dragon Lord of Little Musking is a rollicking tale of high adventure, with a kingdom to be saved, a beautiful princess to be won, shining knights in armour, and most important of all, dragons.

Paperback edition

EPUB edition

See more books by S E Champenby at Lulu.com

Introduction

Hi

This is the blog of S E Champenby, self-published author and amateur photographer.  The reason I've started a blog is because my work has begun spreading across multiple websites.  I intend to reference and link all of my work back to this blog.

The challenge with any blog is; (1) generating enough content to post regularly, and (2) finding enough time to keep on posting.  I believe I have enough material; time might be an issue.  If you ever see a post stating, "I am still alive," you'll know I lack time at present but I'm trying to prevent this blog from being archived.  The plan is to post once a fortnight.

For the subject of my very first blog posting, I'd like to address what is inspiring me right now, and that is dawn watching.  I have become a Dawnwatcher.  Every morning I wake up before dawn, rug up, and trundle out onto the balcony with my camera to take photographs of the dawn.  It's the perfect hobby for an insomniac.

I began dawn watching on 10 January this year, during the summer law break, hoping to gather some usable background pictures for my book covers.  If you check out two of my books, Gavin and the Blue Goblins and Gavin and the Gargoyles - available from Lulu.com - you'll observe I've used the same brilliant sunset as the background for the covers.  I need more background shots.

Once I started photographing the dawn, however, I found I couldn't stop.  Every dawn is fantastically different.  Every dawn is spectacular and unique.  Every dawn starts my day filled with inspiration and optimism.  Those who watch a dawn or a sunset just one day a year don't know what they're missing.

I upload the photos to Zazzle.com under the username Gagothicfunk as posters and merchandise.  Now that summer is over, and the sun has moved behind the trees, plus today's dawn is a washout - it happens - I hope to catch up (because I've fallen behind) and compose a few YouTube videos so that you can see what dawn in Sydney was like on such and such a day.  I think it's important that every dawn be recorded and dated because every dawn is unique, it's of historial significance.  Miss a dawn, and it will never be repeated exactly the same.

Now we come to the big question:  why am I doing this?  To answer all my sceptical friends (and nearly all of them are) I've composed a little something, An Ode to Eccentric Hobbies and Extreme Sports:

     This is crazy
     This is dumb
     But this is also
     So much fun!

by S E Champenby.

Print books and ebooks available from Lulu.com
Posters, mugs and T-shirts available from Zazzle.com