On the Subject of Creatures...

Another advantage of coming from an RPG background is that I've seen plenty of variations on a theme. Especially on the subject of magic users there is plenty of variants out there.

At first I thought I'd take one of them and alter it a bit to my own specifications. I soon realized that I was still within copyright infringement territory so I decided to make a whole new system.

I will not go into details (out of fear of people taking my ideas and making it their before my WIP is done) but I've got a reasonably unique way of explaining where magic comes from.

An interesting, and quite welcome side-effect of this is system was that it also includes grouping certain types of creatures with certain types of magic. Most notably I have Vampires and Werewolves classified as one and the same type of creature, a shapeshifter. One only changes their jaw, the other changes into an animal. But in the end they do so in exactly the same way. Garlic, silver, wooden stake? All stories, none true. These methods will kill them just as easily as they would a normal human. Do Vampires drink blood? Yes, a lot of them do, and so would any other human and/or creature that knows what power lies in blood and how to get the power out of the blood properly.


I try to go one step beyond a slighty altered checklist of what a creature is like by re-arranging the playing field. Fae can do nasty deals, yes, as they do in many other sources. But the art of deals, curses and gifts is not just theirs, anyone can do it. In fact, that art isn't even linked to any type of creature. I've got 5 types of creatures and 6 types of magic. Deals/curses/gifts/etc is magic type number 6.

Personally, I often find "tweaked" cliches worse than plain cliches. Sometimes you can really tell that the writer took an existing creature and added something new to it JUST to make it more original, but the change doesn't affect or change the actual story in anyway - the originality of the creature is completely cosmetic. I find that boring and annoying.

If you want dragons in your story, use dragons. Does your story call for underwater-breathing bisexual ghost half-reindeer half-dragons? No? Then don't make your dragons that just to be original and cool - it's silly.

However, if the tweaking you are doing is more than just cosmetic, if it actually serves the story and has a purpose, then it can be very good and interesting to read. Just be careful not to overdo it.. being cool for cool's sake is not cool! I like your description of the wizard - he seems like a character I could like. I don't like him because he's black with white hair (though that is a pretty combination), I like him because of his personality and how it affects the world and the people around him.

As for my own creatures, well, my elves are sea-based rather than forest-dwelling. My dragons are water or earth based, they don't fly around and breathe fire. That's about it though.. I don't really have many creatures in my stories. (Yes.. I'm pretty boring and down-to-earth as far as fantasy writers go!)

Sophie, I quite agree. I also think authors should have an awareness that most of these tweaks are just lesser-known cliches. The creature should be what the narrative requires it to be.

Especially in the Urban Fantasy corner is see a lot of tweaked cliches. Most notably the many variations in the Vampires and Werewolves I mentioned. A lot of it is the usual stuff. Silver for instance is always a fun one to look out for. One book has it as a Werewolf killer, another as a Vampire killer, and in yet another book it doesn't help at all.


I decided to throw them all out the window and put in stuff that is really needed. I don't need silver to be a weakness, nor garlic or a wooden stake. The use of excessive force will also kill them, so that good enough for me. Do elves really need pointed ears? No. Do dragons need to exist? No. I'd much sooner put in a surviving group of dinosaurs of a type that's been catalogued than actual dragons.

In genres like scifi and fantasy, there are few tangible concepts that haven't been hit on yet. That being the case, I think some tweaking is necessary for the sake of an original story.

I agree - adding a load of elements that aren't vital to the plot of the story...that's not going to make it original. That's going to make it ludicrous and ultimately unreadable (and most likely unpublishable too - any editor worth their salt can sniff out things like that a mile away.)

Some of my "literary engineering": My elves (both the highland elves and the dark elves) are far from perfect; they're subject to many of the same faults, weaknesses, and mistakes as my human characters are. Nor are my human characters entirely inept in the magickal department. I'm trying to establish a healthy balance that gives these very different cultures some common ground.

My primary characters are a rebellious axe-weilding elven princess, a transvestite dark elf armed with two .50 cal. Desert Eagles, and a morbid, eccentric [but ultimately virtuous] Catholic priest...

...I'd say that thusfar I'm doing reasonably well with my "tweaking"

i started a story i promised never to finish (and i kept that promise, damnit) that began: 'All elves are whores.' that got a pretty positive response. as far as opening sentences go, that seemed to catch peoples' attention. (the elf in question indeed was a prostitute and after performing her services got murdered in the man's bed as he stepped out for a moment. you can plug in the rest of the story... were you me, i.e., you ruled.)

anyway, coincidentally, i came across this site today while researching sci-fi channel movies ('researching' is rather a loose term when it comes to sci-fi channel's original movies. used here, 'researching' amounts to slowing down to see if you can see any blood splatters caused by the train wreck's death toll):

http://www.amazingben.com/arc0138.html

by the way, don't go there if you're adverse to colourful language. however, i do have to agree with some of what the site says elsewhere in that ninjas rule. now, if you had a ninja vampyre, well, hm, i'd be torn. add some cyborg parts that dr. frankenstein had to build because the vampyre body parts he collected from the vampyre rave explosion wasn't in the best condition and/or didn't fit, and, well, that sounds like a job for elvis. in space. er, in spaaaaaaace! of course, you have to time travel back to pick elvis up before he dies, but after he's made an FBI by nixon, so you'd have to whip him into fighting shape ala a 'rocky' montage. in the end, king fu prevails of the vampjas and ninpyres. toss in a couple of samurais, 9/11 conspiracy theory analogies, naked women, and boom pow! box-office bonzo, bay-be. i'm tellin' ya, boy howdy, you betcha, etc. etc..

if, after reading said link, you still feel inspired to jam a leprechaun together with godzilla and tack on some giant dragonfly wings that drops magick dust, hey, knock yourself out, i guess. if you've got a mad scientist what makes clones for spirits/daemon/gawds/aging wives to inhabit, i'm down with that. sounds like a story (especially a sci-fi channel wannabe, but only if tara reid stars... my golly, has anyone seen how awful she looks now? serioiusly, she looks like she's been rode hard and put away wet).

besides, i suck as describing weird creatures, and i don't want to be one of those slack writers who puts in stupid characters just so they can ask, 'a jabberthrope? what's that?' i'd rather write about brooding vampyres who dress in black leather and sits on rooftops trying to cope with their beings. just kidding, i'd rather be listening to country music. JUST KIDDING! nipple-twisting with needlenose pliers is preferable to any of that.

i don't think you have to go especially out of your way to be original if you've got great characters and at least an entertaining story (as long as you're not ripping stuff off *too* blatantly).

'tweaking' characters is especially easy. just throw a bunch of attributes their way. it doesn't matter: intelligent, obese, hypchondriac, pious, cruel, has glass teeth and a wooden eye, animals tend to deficate on him while he sleeps in the woods, had fingernails replaced with talons, whatever. personality traits and quirks are easy, too. then subscribe to a dating web site which'll give you a personality profile and you can compare that with other personality profiles (answer the questions in character, obviously). hit submit and see what freakazoids would date your weirdos. hey, the internet is a great tool: it's there to abuse, so do thusly.

oh, yeah, creatures.... mashing stupid, unrelated bits and pieces from here, there and everywhere into one lumbering crapfest... just hard to take seriously more often than not and it's not a real showcase of the writer's 'originality.' being original is having the ability to write a country song that doesn't make me want to assault the nearest poetry spouting goth hiding in the shadows. that's probably just me, though.

can't you just see godzilla doing a jig on some poor japanese city unfortunate enough to be at the end of a rainbow? because, rainbows, as you know, bring forth horrible killing machines wherever they land. evil wizards shoot rainbows at their enemies while standing atop obsidion towers that reach the clouds. fat wizards with talons for teeth and dragonfly wings. how else are they supposed to reach the top of their tower? hey, ever seen a rainbow saddle? you find them in the same non-existant woodland dragon saddle store brohm (sp?) bought eragon his dragon saddle at in the movie (oh, gads, i couldn't resist watching that. and, yes, it's every bit as awful as i hoped).

'to use magick you first have to learn the ancient language of the elves....' or something like that. ...wait for it... wait for it.... BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! (<--- note the four !'s for extra super effect.)

oh, man, that movie just really blew goat.

then again, there's got to be some people out there who don't mind giants with the heads of crocodiles (because if they had the head of a bull, that would be too obvious). 'crocotaur.' now *that's* sci-fi channel worthy!

I still think a continuing inspiration for bizarre creature design is the little known video game, Sacrifice. Those things are just weird. My personal favored is the Deadeye, a daemon that looks like half-Freddy Crouger/half-Gymnast with scythes for arms. Oh and they SUCK your soul out through your nose in a very graphic fashion with lots of brains and blood shooting out of the ears.

Then there are the Squalls. Kinda like two legged elephants with a big air bladder on the back. They shoot mini-tornadoes at the enemy. Hence the name.

Oh and who could forget good old Firefists? Trolls who've had their arms chopped off and replaced with steam powered flame throwers and big read eyes and a voice like a twelve year old eunuch. I suppose losing their arms adversely effects Trolls...



So whenever I need to think up something new, I just play Sacrfice.

Then I die after a minute thanks to the fact that Sacrfice is INSANLY hard, then I get frusrated after twenty minuts and my twentieth death, I log off and actually start writing.

However I still haven't come up with a new creature. Oh well there was the slug creature that communicated by varying the flavor, thickness, consistancy and speed of the goo coming out of their goo glands. So to talk, the creatures have to press up against one another and start pumping that goo.

Fun, eh?

i loved the puppets in 'devil may cry.' i think one of my all-time favourites, though, are mechanical men ala ed409 (or whatever those robots from 'robocop' were called) that looked like buckstoves on legs in the game 'thief II' (and a truly more deserving video that needs to be made into a movie there isn't). you killed them by shooting water arrows into the hatch when they had their back to you.

i know what you mean, though, zoom: video games come up with all sorts of crazy crap. while there is, or can be, a world of difference between reading about a creature and seeing him on tv, there's still a big difference between those two and a video game where you interact with the beast on *some* level, even if it's just a mindless, random battle out of nowhere that makes no sense whatsoever ('final fantasy' i'm looking at you).

when it comes to the written word, i'm not one of those readers who're looking for authors in a mad rush to out-do someone else's creature corral. as mentioned, doing that for its own sake doesn't prove anything. in fact, it doesn't even prove you're trying that hard. those video games often have awesome villains and meat to tenderize (and by 'tenderize' i mean take a sword you could shave chewbacca with and dice up things till only a red wet spot remains to show they were once alive), but they're not characters, per se. okay, if your story calls for mutant zombies, fine, but too often these things exist in stories for no good reason and that's why they read like transcripts from a video game.

of course i'm not saying *never* put fantastic creatures in a story. as far as i can tell from the movies, harry potter really doesn't face terribly exotic fantastic creatures (mandrake root noted). they're basically tried and true critters like mountain trolls, wraith-like things, unicorns (i mean, c'mon, how original are unicorns?), giant spiders, snakes, those little gnome banker things (one of which was played by warrick davis, btw), hypogriffs or whatever those things are, etc. okay, okay, i forgot the flying keys, big deal, but, still, pissed off trees and giant fighting chess pieces aren't exactly groundbreaking obstacles. the point is she's used these classic creatures (certainly inspired by her devil worship in some cases) in the right context. and the more bizarre of these things tends to make some semblence of sense (ironically these creatures make more sense than huge tracts of prime english countryside just sitting there undeveloped and unnoticed as if it were an endless, untamed continent). and by most accounts rowling has done pretty good for herself by sticking to the classics. (anyone who thinks three-headed dogs are original must have slept through greek mythology class.)

why do these creatures work more than giant flying squids with lion heads at the end of their tentacles, and the lion teeth are really vampyre snakes and the snakes shoot poisonous ichor out, and the ichor gets under your skin because they're not only poisonous and acidic, but they're eggs, too, which attach to your anus until they hatch, and then you've got trouble, pal, trust me, because the last thing you want is a nest of ass monkeys that are tiny hungry hydras calling you momma who feed off human waste and, shall we say, aren't afraid to go and find it. i'm sure even a medieval proctologist would deem this bad news for the home team, and that jackweed's idea of advanced medicine is one notch above sacrificing virgins at midnight so that the grass might be greener that year.

why is that a crappy monster and some messed up conglomeration like a hypogriff is hunky-dorey? why are we so ready to accept anubis before giant radioactive ants? i've got two words for you: symbolic psychology. or psychologic symbology. mix those words up and play around with them all you want, it boils down to those creatures have an innate meaning for us (for example, mermaids have a huge symbolism... they don't exist for someone just to massacre their meaning because they think mermaids are neato and they need some monster thingie in there somewhere because it's been four pages since the last random encounter). mixing symbolism can be like mixing metaphors, and it just doesn't always work on a psychological level.

i think you just have to be really careful. especially when you start melding things together, that doesn't come off as original to me in the least. if you throw all sorts of ingredients into the blender and mash your paw down on the 'slaughter at light speed and hope it doesn't taste like death's crotch' button, you get what you get. think about what you're splicing together, that's all i'm saying.

and then put them in the right setting. i'm not too hep on fifty foot carnivourous octopusses living in a fresh water stream you can wade across 20,000 feet above sea level. during the winter. might as well add a long bit of useless information about how they mate for life, how many eggs they lay, and the fact they've got scales, too. why the hell not? these creatures have to fit into their surroundings. is it practical for squirrels to need a porcupine-like death quill shooting tail? if the thing doesn't need it, don't add it. okay, i'm not sure why those one lizards are able to shoot blood from their eye, but those are real critters, so if your puppies can do the same there needs to a legitimate reason.

so, yeah, video game meatbags might be cool to look at and fight, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're something worth reading. creature design for movies is a pretty big deal, and you'll notice that even those guys don't just move body parts around from one creature to another indiscriminately. hey, maybe there's a reason, ya think? lol. because they know it's crap few people want to see and even fewer want to read. sci-fi channel might let me do the flying spiders deal (as if plastic junk taped to actors' face were terrifying somehow... am i the only one who's *never* gotten swarm movies?), but even those guys might draw the line at cyborg leprechauns, or mechachauns. (oh, gawd, i say that and i'm hoping those guys aren't reading this. start getting tara reid on the treadmill now, sci-fi channel, she's got a whopper of a sagging fat ring around her gut. what, did she suddenly just pork out like eighteen kids or something? man, i've seen trashbags full of bacon grease more attractive than her midriff.)

Note, Preyer, I said "Insperation" not "Stealing."

And anyone who puts in a transvestite nazi gnomebie (part gnome, part zombie) hook with machine guns for arms and four lasers in his left eye socket just to be weird...well...that's just stupid.

Plot first. Monsters that serve plots and are orignal are still nice. A good example would be the Companions in my latest story. Their name is kind of a sick joke...they're used by the evil General Averiy to break the will of political prisionors. Companions stay only in darkness, but they look a little bit like a mix between a flying manta ray and a spider. They're song sounds pretty at first, lulling attackers, but slowly drives them insane. Once insane, the Companion normally enjoys sucking the brains out of the poor person.

I've got a thing for brains sucking, don't I?

JPSpideyCJ said:

.... Some people here say they use mythological creatures in their books and stories, but tend to 'tweak' them to avoid cliches and negative reviews. How do you do this?

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In the last book I completed, dragons were worshipped as gods by one race of people. Most of the dragons knew and encouraged this, rewarding the people with magic and protection from their enemies. The dragons themselves weren't physically different from, say, Smaug, but their interactions with people and their effects on the behavior of their worshippers were what I hope is as original as possible.

Mostly I use humans, a few of whom are members of a race with unconscious magic powers. They don't do magic; their beliefs set the rules of magic.

Oh, and I've got a storm giant.

But mostly it's just people.

The best 'tweaked' dragon ever was the one in Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger. I won't spoil it, you'll just have to read the book ... comrade.

'And anyone who puts in a transvestite nazi gnomebie (part gnome, part zombie) hook with machine guns for arms and four lasers in his left eye socket just to be weird...well...that's just stupid.' ~ and yet this weekend i was flipping through the channels and on, you guess it, the sci-fi channel, there was a giant cheetah or something with big ol' dragon wings or something terrorizing some people. i didn't get a chance to watch. true, this is just lame... but at the same time this 'writer' was able to sell it, so it would seem 'stupid' sells.

actually, there's a market for schlock movies. schlock fiction? pulp fiction? oh, there probably is. i mean, if you can still have books that are purely deriviative of LOTR still sell well.... i think if your 'serious' fantasy involves giving the island of misfit toys a run for their money, you'd be best served being careful with your monstrocities by making sure the mismatches are servicable, not just stupid junk jammed together (as in random encounters against bugbears with eggbeaters for hands ~ is that original? no, not really, imo).

i'm not sure what impresses people, though. if the idea of evil keebler elves is awesome to someone, who am i to say? depends on how it's told, imo. to me, fairies exist to catch and grind into medicinal powder (which is just a rip-off of the victorian era's practice of grinding mummies up for the same thing: what some people call 'inspiration,' i call rip-off. there are lines and boundaries there which are different for everyone). the only reason you'd not grind a fairy up is if it served from sexual purpose for mankind, otherwise you abuse the species for all they're worth until they're nearly extinct and/or the cawing of fairy abuse societies gain enough political clout (invariably the wife of some prominent politician's pet cause) to get laws changed/enacted. the first time a prankish elf plays a joke on the wrong person and now you've got a story about deforestation as the pissy prince starts burning and slashing their environment under the guise of 'progress.' then the author is making commentary about hunting and gun control as hunters exit the forest with a string of elves over their backs (which reminds me of an old 'far side' cartoon where the game warden is writing out a ticket to a guy with too many elves on his stringer). segue into fairy carcasses tacked onto a woodsman's front door, zoos and pets and, if you're paying attention, fairies in a scientist's jar of formaldehyde.

and then the fairies strike back....

is any of that original in the slightest? nah, i was just 'inspired' by the keebler imagery. damn keebler elves, gawd how i hate them....

anyhoo, paste a machine gun onto that cheetah's spine and you've got a sequel.

what's truly missing in fantasy nowadaze? excessive lesbian sex scenes and the wanton slaughter of children. that may just be me, though: i like things with more of an edge (i distinctly remember my wife once showing me a scene in her romance book where a character has graphic sex with the devil. 'what the hell crap are you reading?' i asked, thinking to myself, hm, maybe i should start reading more 'romance').

as an aside, don't ever say, 'i have these great characters....' the reader will be the judge of that. we all have what *we* think are great characters, that's not to say they *are* great characters. it's like saying, 'i've written an awesome book.' if you have to say that, chances are it's not as awesome as you think, lol. reminds me of a half-remembered story:

nine-year-old beethoven: hi, how may i help you?

39 year old wannabe composer: hello, there, young man. do you think you can teach me how to write symphonies?

beethoven: you should just write minuets.

wannabe: why do you say that? i'm 30 years older than you.

beethoven: yeah, but the difference is i never had to ask anyone how to write symphonies.

and that wannabe grew up to be dan brown.

I love dragons, but I've only written one story with them. The dragons were shapeshifters (not original, I know, and some of them had a thing for human women -- also not original,) and were worshipped as minor deities. The religion was started by some dragons of course... I know, again I'm not being original, but I was thinking the planting religious seeds thing worked for those guys in Dune - LOL. The funny thing was that I ended up with very few dragons in the story. There are some descendants of interspecies love-children though... I can't help it, I think womanizing dragons are funny.

Preyer,

I think you should write a story with every chimera you mentioned. It would be both wonderful and hilarious.

the one dragon story i ever did involved the last dragon (again, not original in the least) exiting his cave to wreak havoc on humanity one last time before flying off to the dragon graveyard to die. groundbreaking, eh? not really. there was some wizard involved who tried to bridge the gap between technology and science, but the dragon knew their time was over and toasted him when the wizard pleaded for his help. puny humans.

could it have been more cliche? not unless i tried. then again, i wrote it in high school. the one redeeming thing about it, imo, was there was this thing of massive power... and it behaved like a thing of massive power. it didn't moralize about killing humans any more than the average person moralizes over slaughtering cows. i think it's a big fallacy to equate our problems and ethics to those of wizards and kings and majestic beings, as if what's important to us is important to them when that's not necessarily true. we don't fret over stepping on an ant, but we're the ants so our perspective on how things should be is very different and too often we put our ant-perspectives into characters who have wasp issues, if that makes any sense.

preyer said:

i think it's a big fallacy to equate our problems and ethics to those of wizards and kings and majestic beings, as if what's important to us is important to them when that's not necessarily true. we don't fret over stepping on an ant, but we're the ants so our perspective on how things should be is very different and too often we put our ant-perspectives into characters who have wasp issues, if that makes any sense.

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Depends on the individual being and its background I think; the dragon, or the king raised from birth to be royalty, may have that elevated perspective - a legendary warrior who grew up as a country girl, and whose first love was a normal "ant" type guy who got killed trying to help her? She'd likely be more sympathetic towards our outlook, even if she's powerful enough to have smashed down her share of dragons, wizards, and kings.

I still think Rose should be some form of Demi-god or something. She's really herculian. But that's a bit off topic.

Preyer...you need to write a story with every single one of these monsters. Right now.

a dragon is a dragon, king of the beasts kind of animal. with emphasis on animal. even giving dragons the ability to reason and talk and pitch magick to from her to yonder, it's still an animal with an alien intelligence with quite probably a very different set of instincts than our own... and there's never, it seems (without rare exception) a dragon what doesn't exactly reason and react and hold the same values on things a normal human does. you're a dragon, you're raised a dragon. you do, think and act the way dragons do... not the way a human necessarily would were they to wake up in dragon form one day. (there's a story called 'dragon pride' in this reply somewhere.)

you're right, though, in that it depends on the character background. what's irksome more often than not are 'good kings.' 'good kings' don't necessarily care whether or not your mud fields dry up: that's your problem, peon. 'good kings' aren't above raising your taxes to justify what they feel they need. irksome things part deux: 'good kings' with completely dark ages setting thinking, rationalizing and behaving like, well, some 21st century writing thinks they should. given their sense of entitlement, 'good kings' of the day could be brutal, boorish, and illogical by our standards. case in point: king arthur. now, *everyone* would agree he's a 'good king.' but try reading 'le morte d'arthur' and try to see him as anything but despicable. he was screwing his step-mom, as i recall. a lot of things we'd attribute to 'evil' now he was just happy being. from a modern standpoint, arthur wasn't exactly the kind of guy you'd want to call a friend. by dark age standards, he was a 'good king.'

but, i guess most people nowadaze wouldn't want complete historical accuracy. they want knights errant traversing the countryside righting wrongs and what not, not the brutes in metal gear and essential mercenaries they often were. all the girls were married off by the age of 14 by the latest and old age set in at 30, and you'd die by 35 guaranteed. nevermind that that's complete rubbish. 'good kings' *cared* what peasants thought and felt without question because, you know, the opinion of an uneducated bunch of cow pie collectors is exactly what kings value and they *never* consider themselves better on every possible level than their lowliest serf. that's not to say kings hate their own populace, just that a king who gives up his front seat so some peasant can sit comfortably ain't behavin' like a king.

I have a mermaid in my story. She's essential to the story with nothing new attached.

I <3 mermaids.

check out the feejee mermaid:

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/fj_mermaid.html

i'd like to see a story where mermaids also weren't well-educated, human speaking beauties, as opposed to relatively small creatures that swam around in large schools. following the feejee mermaid as 'inspiration,' you have quite a different story, albeit one that lacks most of that mermaid meaning we've been given all our lives. mermaids are perfect examples of things easily researched, have a deep psychological symbolism, and are yet versatile enough to do most things that you want to with. (see that movie with rufus sewell, 'she-thing' i think it was called. just a weird movie. they capture the queen of the mermaids or some such. things don't turn out pretty for the crew, let's say. ne'ertheless, you betcha there was a lot of research done on that story. mermaids can represent disaster, contrary to what disney would have you believe, and not all of them have your best intentions at heart.)

dragons, too, seem not to have much of a realistic nature, tending to either be good or evil. 'realistically,' a 'good' dark age dragon is one who only eats humans when they're hungry, never for sport. well, it *is* fun hunting humans, they're a good challenge sometimes. ('dragon pride' should have a scene where a dragon is hidden under bushes, still and quietly waiting for passerbys to snatch. and if they deign to communicate with humans, it should be via 'dragon whisperers' of sorts. no crappy mental telepathy (oh how i hate that in any story) and certainly not speaking with eloquence and an english accent. i mean, c'mon, where the frig does a dragon learn an english accent at? eton? if anything, humans learned this accent from *them*, not the other way around, eh? oh, yeah, and dragons always have better grammar than we do. yeah, right. that's believable.)

I think people usually don't want too much realism when they read a fantasy. I know I don't really care as long as it isn't a glaring conflict of interest or continuity thing. I do like new takes on the old themes, but only to a point. I do think it is a lot of fun to write stories with traditional creatures only adding a twist, I just don't think any of the ones I've written so far are any good. It's all practice; that's what I keep telling myself.

In the story I wrote most dragons thought watching humans was interesting, like my children find watching ants interesting. A few thought they were a little more interesting than that -- I got a bit bugged out when I read the bestiality thread... I clicked on a link there, and now I think I might be permanently scarred. It ruined the fun of my human-formed womanizing dragons...I'm so sad, I can no longer laugh.

The religious thing came into play since there were a lot more humans than dragons. It is really convenient when you can eat their cows, etc., and they won't try to hurt you because you're a God. It wasn't clear if they were dragons originally or they settled on that form because they could really F things up like that . In the end it wasn't a good story, but it was a lot of fun to write . The dragon that I had in it was so self-absorbed, he was hilarious - to me of course, no one else will ever see that thing.

I think the problem you run into is how to describe an alien creature's (alien as in different not just ET) thought process with out making them sound human. Even if we try to show it people they just translate it into human motivations anyway. We have a tendency to make everything anthropomorphic.

My main character got to become a mermaid (sort of) in a MG fantasy. She was pretty typical in form. The only other mer-person she met was a little boy because just about everyone else was already dead when she got there. They were all very typical mermaids before they died.

I starting to think I am the most unoriginal writer around. That’s it! I need to invent some new monsters. Hmm...vampire pirates (I heard someone mention those before)...with machine guns...and they eat rainbows? They suck out the rainbow of your soul...using specially choreographed dance moves? Like the rainbow goblins only instead of lassos they use the Macarena? I've always wondered about the vampires-not-crossing-moving-water thing, does the ocean really not count as moving water? God, I suck.

I do think that stereotypes can be useful when we are talking about non-human creatures. We don't have to describe a centaur to most people, they know what it is. That can be a good thing, I just haven't figured out how to make anything work yet.

One of the definitions of unoriginal is funny...it means without origin. My ideas are without origin...therefore I have no brain...hehe

I'm sorry, I have no life.

there are plenty of levels of realizm in fantasy. some like it to make no real sense, some (like me) prefer it be grittier and as reasonably realistic as possible.

really i think the problem is lazy writers not taking the time (probably due to inexperience because fantasy writers are often young and, well, inexperienced) to explain a different culture. that's what it boils down to, imo, is a different culture with different attitudes and priorities. it's hard to get into dragon culture when you've got fifty oddities vying for space at the same time.

The flip side of that is sometimes a fantasy writer spends tons of time describing the culture, but not enough time on the actual story.