Dragon Writing Prompts

Why Dragon Writing?

I find self-reflective writing prompts uninspiring. I suppose they're good for you. Like vitamins. At least with a vitamin you swallow it and it's gone in a second. But writing prompts you have to live with for 10, 15, 30 minutes. More like a meal. I wanted fantasy prompts to savor so I started collecting and writing some.

I named the site after the main character from my first NaNoWriMo novel who was a dragon rider. I wanted a name that said "These aren't your dig deep and tell about your most humiliating childhood experience writing prompts." That was a bit long and, though I didn't love it, Dragon Writing sounded better. I've grown used to it.

I write fantasy. I read historical fiction. I grew up on science fiction. (The pictures to the right represent some of the slim pickings available at the time.) It seemed odd that I liked the juvenile science fiction better than the adult but Star Trek made me realize that it was the characters in extraordinary situations that drew me. Fortunately there is a lot more of it now than when I was younger (like Buffy and Xena and Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl). And now manga and anime which are heavily character driven. (Yes, that's me dressed as Robin Sena from Witch Hunter Robin for the Anime Boston Convention. :-)

Oh, yeah, who am I?

I'm Joyce Fetteroll, wife to Carl, homeschooling mom to Kat, writer, artist, computer nerd, (rusty) black belt in Tae Kwon Do. I was born, grew up, and went to college (Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh with the idea of getting a degree in electical engineering based on some circuit problems in middle school science class that I thought were fascinating. Turns out the problems pointed more to an aptitude for writing computer code, but at that time computers were as common and nearly as big as particle accelerators. Even by the time I got to college computers were still kept locked behind glass in refrigerated rooms and CMU didn't offer an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. So, I managed to eek out a degree in electrical engineering.

I got married and, by way of the middle of Pennsylvania to watch the steel industry collapse and Nashville to watch the war on cockroaches, we ended up where Carl grew up in Boston. By that time computers had been trained to sit on desks and I got a job as a technical writer and software engineer.

I worked for almost as long as I went to college, got laid off, did some writing to keep the paper industry strong with my very own desk trained (Apple of course!) computer and then Kathryn came along. While I generally liked school, they seemed to make interesting things exceptionally dull and I thought there had to be a better way. That belief eventually led me to unschooling which we've been doing for most of her 15 years. (There's a longer version and more about that at Joyfully Rejoycing.)

And that's about it. You can write to me but I'm not as prompt as I should be about responding. ;-)

Joyce Fetteroll, 2006