Lucinda was born in Edinburgh and spent her childhood in rural East Lothian, where she spent much of her time roaming the beaches and woods, watching deer, pheasants, geese and rabbits, and listening to the bark of the seals float down the Firth of Forth on the evening breeze. It was then that her lifelong passions for animals - from earwigs to elephants - history, reading and drawing began. She spent years daydreaming about the Roman legions, medieval knights and the American west. Rather than write about the dreams and stories in her head, she drew them purely from her imagination. She is hopeless at drawing anything real in front of her. When she was eleven she was introduced to The Lord of the Rings which combined her own passions for history, legend and fantasy. Still her favourite book, she was thrilled with Peter Jackson's recent Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. After reading history at university she went on to pursue a busy and diverse career in many different companies and organisations, ranging from the Argus Newspaper Group in Cape Town, to the Scottish Post Office, and Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt Universities. After marrying Paul in 1999, Lucinda was able to return to those childhood passions, and very soon their house in Lasswade filled up with ever more rescued animals (dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs and ex-battery hens), books, and pastel and watercolour drawings and illustrations covered in dirty paw marks - the cats do always like to help out! This led to Paul's suggestion that she should try putting pen to paper - or rather, given Lucinda's chaotic writing style, get a laptop and start writing. The result was a rapid explosion of ideas and the start of The Dragonsdome Chronicles. It should be no surprise, then, that the characters at the heart of Dragon Lords Rising and the earlier books in the series - apart from sorcerers, gnomes and dwarfs - are in fact dragons; dragons with their own language and character, from the teasing Chasing the Stars to those with serious attitude like the battledragon Two Gulps & You're Gone. The dragons owe the inspiration for their names to Native American culture, and their characters draw on some of the family pets.