Mimi the Dragon Slayer

Calcutta, India

So I decided the dragons have got to go.

I don't remember precisely why I decided that the Awful Space Opera would be infested with flying reptiles, or what pseudo-scientific excuse I used to justify their existence, but they gotta go. Most likely, they made their first appearance on a day when I couldn't think of anything else to put down on paper. Of course, that is the basic backstory for the entire novel, but I think maybe in this case the problem was a lack of action for several pages, and I thought readers might start to notice how awful my prose is. Or that I lifted at least two characters from Firefly. (Not on purpose—it's just something that happens when you quit writing and devote an entire week to your DVD-boxed set collection instead.) If you want to kill boredom, you can't go wrong with a dragon attack, right?

Wrong.

The Most Boring Monsters In Pulp Fiction are dead weight, and my first task in this month's mammoth rewrite was to cut them out.

That means replacing several scenes with, ummm, some other kind of death-defying crisis? Something less likely to induce hysterical laughter at all the wrong moments?

I'm thinking quicksand. With flesh-eating worms.

Editor's note: The frightened J-school student in me demands that I admit to backdating this post. Internet access has been iffy on the rails, and I am marking the date according to when this was written, rather than posted.