Thanks for the offer! I'll keep it in mind.

Nah, it's all in my head. I have a friend who's done sketches for her dragonkin character, in a D&D campaign I ran set in this world, but nothing professional.

Blue & lightning, just 'cause it's super striking. I've also got brown scales for poison fumes, green scales for acid vapour, and white scales for icy vapour (super rare)

Probably their dragonbreath, the element of which is keyed to the colour of their scales. Red scales for fire, blue scales for lightning, and so on. I can't take too much credit for that though, because I lifted that directly from D&D.

Not for this story, but by far the one I've put the most thought into is the dragonkin, from my short story "Clanless". These guys are what they sound like: bipedal dragon-people that live in a clan-based warrior society.

I just think they're neat!

Probably coming up with the different characters and fantasy races. I strayed away from the "elf/dwarf/orc" model and tried to come up with my own creations (though it's mostly just superficial differences).

It's a mature dark fantasy adventure story, set in a desert world with some Ancient Egypt flavours. It WAS supposed to be a short story, but it's ended up being closer to a novella.

Y'know the more I talk about this the less sure I am that it's a good idea but I've gone down this road so I'm sticking with it.

Ideally, I don't want to wait *too* long before putting the story up on my blog, 'cause I want the stories to all be bundled together. There's also the issue that if I want to release my stories later in an physical or digital anthology, "Makina" would be technically considered a reprint.

There's two other magazines I want to try and submit to before giving up, but there's a caveat. Literary magazines get first publication rights to successful submissions, and I don't know with these two how long I would have to wait before I can put the story on my blog (if I can at all).

I've only submitted to two magazines, neither of whom were interested. One of them thought the first part of "Makina" had too much exposition (which isn't inaccurate) and the other said it was over the word limit (which it was, I flat-out did not read the guidelines properly).