How To Be A Better Dragon

So who's all ready for the first blog post here!? I know I am! I'm pumped, totally prepared for it to be the absolute worst piece of media to grace this barely birthed blog. 

How could it not be? I'm a twenty-four-year-old aspiring writer with three separate stories nearing completion and a speckling of short stories, all of which I keep to myself as a dragon would, curled up greedily atop its hoard of shimmering gems and coins kept hidden from the world. What use does a dragon have with such valuables, beyond admiring and sifting through the wealth. A dragon wants for nothing but more shiny baubles. It doesn't exactly need to pay rent for it's lavish mountaintop cave (in the respectable part of the range, vaulted ceilings, excellent view...), and food's hardly an issue when laying waste to the neighboring farmlands has very few repercussions. Dragons are famous for their lack of moral quandaries, after all.

I, unlike the dragon, benefit most from sharing my acquired wealth in story form. Ideally with as many people as humanly possible. I've heard tell that with diligence, a unique authorial voice, and awareness of tired tropes, I could even be paid in the form of livable wages to continue creating little paper worlds out of paragraphs and tiny chapter sketches! What a dream! 

Yet here I am, without any shared works outside of school. 

And a new blog.

I definitely have a comfort zone in need of expanding, for sure. The fear of completion is one I've witnessed to be common among artists of all varieties. One more layer, one final stroke, an adjustment of the outline here, a tweak in the wording there... If this piece I have begun to create sits in my hands, in this delightful limbo of "nearly done" then it hypothetically could be perfection once done! My skills are only ever improving. If I finish now, it won't be the best piece it could be. What a waste of potential, right? So much energy, so many resources, the thought and time put in, all for a stepping stone towards the magnum opus. 

The revelation here is that's a dangerous mind game to play. I can do better. You can do better. Maybe the dragon sat on its hoard because once it had gathered that multitude of wealth, it didn't know what to do with it but take a smokey nap on the pile. Dragons are actually not very famous for their levels of creativity. It could've been the Great Communism Dragon, redistributing wealth evenly across the peasants of the realm, or it could have established a standard barter system with the local farmers for the freshest cattle and fluffiest sheep. A cuddly sheep hoard seems preferable to lumps of jewels and gold, but that may be because I'm a notoriously bad dragon. So I'm making an effort here. This is the start of the sharing of my hoard, my wealth. I'm trying to be a better dragon here. I would not be the person I am today if my favorite authors hadn't made the effort to complete their works and put them out into the universe for general consumption. So many worlds bound in thread and glue I would be lost without...

Inside this blog I'll be writing about writing. It's gonna get a little meta, but I think it'll help. Outside the blog, I'll be writing about ideas. About characters and places, with their problems that need solving. Maybe most likely there will be a dragon or two.