Dragon Mode

Welcome to the shadowy and not-so-shadowy space behind Sally's books. If you're not familiar with this blog, scroll down to see what it's all about.

 Dragon Mode (Post 32)

 Dragon Mode (2007) is another of those books that just popped into my head. I was out shopping (which is fairly unusual, since most of my shopping is for essential groceries, op-shop clothes or books) and the word mode was on my mind, probably because I'd been wrestling with one of those electronic gadgets with black icons on black buttons and a nasty mode switch... I was possibly wondering about the different applications of the word mode which I recall from maths lessons and also know as a short-hand term for different hats we wear... writer mode, parent mode etc. I wondered if animals had modes and, by degrees, I came up with the title Dragon Mode. The story is told in the first person by a boy who believes he has two modes. Sometimes he is a boy, but when he's feeling angry, grumpy, confined or misunderstood, he moves into dragon mode. He describes the different things that make him switch modes and concludes, rather resignedly, that mothers... brothers... teachers... cats "don't like dragons much". 

Nevertheless, even as he learns a little more about accepted social behaviour, he still treasures the dragon inside him, because sometimes, when his imagination takes flight in the park, dragon mode is exactly appropriate... as long as he remembers when to switch back.

As you can see from the picture to the left, the illustrator caught the boy/dragon beautifully; just as the boy retains a few dragon elements, so the dragon is never all that far removed from the boy he really is.

Dragon Mode was launched at the Brisbane Writers' Festival, making it one of a tiny handful of my books to have an official launch. It came out in hard back and also paperback, and is still around... you can buy it here.

 About the Blog

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 is to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. This preamble will be pasted to the top of each post, so feel free to skip it in future.

The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist.