The Dragon Orb Series – Research

I thought it would be fun to keep a journal of my adventures in writing this year, as my new series looks set to take me on some interesting voyages of discovery. If you take time to follow this blog, I think you’ll quickly come to see what I mean.

When I proposed The Dragon Orb series to the team at Simon & Schuster last year, I gave them a sample of writing that began with the prologue that can be found at Chronicles Network. The Senior Editor felt that although the writing was alright, she really wanted to see a more dramatic meeting between the primary character, Elian, and his dragon. The suggestion was that my character should fall off a cliff and be rescued by the dragon, who would pluck him from the air as he fell. I’ll be honest – I had a few problems with this – not least of which were practical aerodynamic ones.

It took a while, but I eventually came up with a feasible way in which to have my character fall and be rescued in dramatic, mid-air fashion. Having done so, however, I felt that having never experienced freefall I needed to rectify this with a bit of practical research.

Having flown aeroplanes for a living for over 20 years, I have always held the position that to jump out of a perfectly serviceable aircraft is tantamount to madness. With this in mind, I sought out a more sensible solution and discovered a wonderful facility in Milton Keynes where I could get just the experience I needed without having to risk life and limb – my kind of freefall! A chamber has been constructed in the Xscape centre where one can experience what it’s like to fly through the air at terminal velocity. It is a vertical wind tunnel where they can generate windspeeds in excess of 150mph. It was perfect!

I had one small problem – protective clothing. My character was hardly going to fall off the cliff conveniently wearing goggles, a helmet and earplugs, so I wasn’t going to get the full experience I needed. My thanks must go to the staff at AirKix for allowing me to lean into the airflow without any of the gear on in order to gain a most useful insight into what it would be like to reach terminal velocity. The instructor was intrigued to hear my thoughts on the experience afterwards, as he admitted that he’d never been mad enough to try it! I don’t think I’d ever make much of a skydiver, but I can recommend the experience to anyone who always fancied the idea of freefall without fear of getting vertigo!