no kitchen sinks, though

Since I just put Chekhov's hang glider into this story, I thought I would share with you guys some of the items scribbled down in my notebook, on the page designated for Cool Things What I Intend to Put Into the Second Dragons Book:

• talking drums
  
• griots
  
• witchcraft
  
• blacksmiths
  
• leeches
  
• malaria
  
• poisons/hallucinogens
  
• waterfall island
  
• guard dragons
  
• masks
  
• iron/gold/salt/ivory
  
• booby traps
  

And some other things that would be too spoilery to share.

Mind you, Isabella is looking over my metaphorical shoulder and objecting strongly to my classification of malaria as a "cool thing" (she's no happier about the prospect of me replacing it with yellow fever), but narratively speaking, it qualifies. :-) (Confidential to kurayami_hime: at least it's not the plague!)

I'm still working on stringing all this stuff together into a book, rather than a collection of things I think are neat, but hey. There are worse ways to build a novel than throwing awesome bits of setting at the page. (It's more or less how I built several of the Onyx Court books, and that seems to have worked out okay.)

Poland, Day 0.5 (Krakow)

Having done one of the labors of Hercules in culling my Poland photos from roughly 1300 down to 59, I should get around to that whole trip report thing. But it's likely to take multiple posts, so this is only the first installment.

We flew to Poland via Frankfurt, which I think may challenge Heathrow for length of odyssey from one gate to the next. Seriously, it is the most inexplicably complicated mess of hallways, stairways, escalators, elevators, slidewalks, and tunnels I've ever seen. Plus a five-minute bus ride to the plane itself -- no really, I timed it. Two minutes in, I asked Kyle if we were driving to Poland. Four minutes in, I said they were taking us to a ditch at the edge of the airport, where they would shoot us for holding up the departure. (Our flight from San Francisco took off an hour late.)

( We started with only half a day, but made good use of it. )

. . . you know, this was supposed to be the story of days 0.5 and 1. But since I've blathered on for more than a thousand words already, I think I'll cut it short here. Until the next post!