A Guest Post From ... Paul Hughan! "Where Are They Now?" #2

When I was finding stories for ASIM #60, I wanted to have a good balance of SF, fantasy and dark fiction(to be honest, I never really found anything scary enough to be called horror fiction) and Paul's story intrigued me because it was a bit of both - fantasy and SF. 

In it, the dragon is the good gal and the would-be dragonslaying team are idiots. And the weapons are technologically advanced. Fortunately our heroine has brains and an ability to morph into human shape...

I'll let Paul, whose day job is in music, tell you all about it in his guest post. 

My story 'Soar' in issue 60 of ASIM was my first sale. I set it in the same universe as my first (as yet unpublished) novel, and took as a starting point something that came up in my novel--what would happen if dragons were faced with hi-tech weapons (specifically heat-seeking ground-to-air missiles)? I took the dragon as the protagonist and the hero. How would a dragon outwit a heavily-armed party of humans?

I teach guitar for a living. Music is always either a work in progress or a work of the moment. Writing, in contrast, is a constructed thing, something you can go back over again and again and perfect (more or less). Speculative fiction allows you to create the ground you are working on, and set up the conditions for the subject you want to tackle.

I'm currently in the final stages of editing my second novel, which again is set in the same universe, or at least follows the same rules. As a story, it's many things, but it is principally concerned with whether someone who has been conditioned as a kind of tool or weapon can transform themselves. I also have two other books going--one on the backburner, one that is progressing well.