![]() ![]() He has chosen Tao to be his dragon keeper but at first they cannot talk to each other and Tao, being a novice in a remote monastery, has no social skills. Once again I enjoy Wilkinson’s research and her convincing historical setting which now supports the story of the Buddhist period in which Tao sees a statue of the Buddha for the first time, is appalled by the un-Buddhist behaviour of a charlatan Abbot who wants to build a golden pagoda and get the support of the barbarian leader.Īnd of course, there are dragons, especially Kai, who at 466 years old is in a petulant, adolescent stage. They continued the dangerous journey together while bands of barbarians roamed the country.Ĭarole Wilkinson realised that dragons live a very long time, so she wrote this story in an era of turbulent history in China. The dragon started talking to Tao in his mind. He met a girl called Pema who he shouldn’t have spent time with. Tao had never broken the precepts before and although he tried not to, he lost his cloth for sieving water, so it was pure. Tao knew this boy was a dragon in disguise. The silent boy, was sent to travel with him. Tao didn’t expect people there to be able to share food with him. The Abbott sent Tao to collect Alms in the city of Luoyang, the city that had been raided and burnt to the ground. Tao realised the dragon was injured an he could help heal the creature. That’s when the other boy shimmered and changed shape, he became a green dragon. He tried to usher the boy away as he couldn’t go inside the holy place. While running to complete his tasks after having slept in Tao ran into a boy monk about his age in old fashioned clothes. All this quiet and contemplative life was to earn him good Karma to bestow on his brother, who’m he hoped would be cured of a malady that he’d suffered from birth. His other privileges included lessons in Sanskrit by the old monk Lao Chen. He was attentive to his duties, including transcribing the sutra, the Vinaya are rules that the Buddha had set down. The interview with Graeme Base, was on Life Matters on ABC Radio National on 5 Nov and you can listen to a podcast of the full interview.Tao is a novice monk, he’s the abbots favourite in the small Yinmi Monastry that sat hidden in mist high in the mountains. (And if it was a big hit, bigger than Harry Potter and I got a seven picture deal and became a millionaire, then the person who gave me the idea would sue me!) I have to stick with my own ideas. And even if someone did write to me and give me a fabulous idea for a fourth book, I couldn’t use it, because it wouldn’t be my story. What I’ve run out of is enthusiasm for continuing that story with those characters. I only write the stories that I really want to write, that I have to write, that I would still think were worth all the effort, even if they didn’t do well. You never know if a book is going to be successful. “I just do the stuff that I feel suddenly inspired by and that I will get joy from doing and which I honestly believe is worth two years of my time.” ![]() I heard Graeme Base talking on the radio the other week and he said the same thing. ![]() I’m not the only one that feels that way. I know that sounds selfish, but for me it’s the only way to do it. So it has to be something that I want to write. You have to slog away at it every day, whether you feel like it or not, whether it’s working or not. It can be stressful, getting it all to work. Writing a novel takes a lot of time, about a year for one of my books. But if my heart isn’t in it, it wouldn’t be any good anyway. ![]() It’s wonderful that people liked the books so much that they want more. They seem to think I’m just being difficult. After all her adventures, I think Ping should have a nice quiet life. Since Dragon Moon was published, I’ve had quite a lot of emails and blog comments asking me to write a fourth Dragonkeeper book. ![]()
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