Almost immediately, I thought of Cimorene. I went home and reread the chapters in which she appeared, and decided that I could write a story about her early life. I was still dubious about my ability to write anything short, but I figured that it would be an interesting experiment, and if Jane rejected it, I would at least have tried.

“The Improper Princess” took me about three weeks to write, as best I can remember, and Jane did not reject it. It appeared in her Spaceships and Spells anthology, and I thought that was the end of it.

It wasn’t. A few years later, I got a phone call from Jane, who informed me that she would be editing a line of young adult books and that she wanted me to write one for her. Once again, I objected that I didn’t know how to write for children; once again, she pointed to Talking to Dragons. This time, though, she said, “Why don’t you take that short story and turn it into a novel?”

And so, a little more than twenty-five years ago, I started writing Dealing with Dragons. The book took me roughly ten months to finish, which is faster than any other solo project I have ever written. The short story I began with takes up the first twenty-one pages and ends with Cimorene declining the Latin for “dragon” in preparation for beginning her new duties. This book was a tremendous amount of fun to write, because I liked Cimorene and her intensely practical approach to all the fairy-tale tropes I have always loved.

Since Cimorene began life as Daystar’s mother in Talking to Dragons, her younger self in this book needed to be someone who would grow up to become that kind of person: strong, smart, self-assured, practical, curious, and willing to take on and solve all sorts of problems. From what I’d written in “The Improper Princess” and from the history I’d given in Talking to Dragons, I already knew the general outline of her adventures, which, again, required someone smart, practical, and sure of herself.