Meredith Mansfield, Author

Part of the fun of writing fantasy, or really any speculative fiction for that matter, is you get to make up your own worlds.  And sometimes those worlds are populated by strange creatures.

I didn’t really make up any creatures for BLOOD WILL TELL.  I just used existing mythological or fantastic creatures like werewolves, unicorns, and dragons.  Of course, I get to make up the rules for these creatures in my world.  My werewolves don’t have to be just like everybody else’s–and they’re not.  I also decided that all of the magical creatures would be able to take human form.  It’s a gift from the dragons, to help them communicate.  Once they’re all in human form, however, there’s more they can do with each other than just talk.  So I have a few hybrids, including my main character.  Then I get to make up what the challenges might be for these hybrids.  Valeriah is half werewolf, but she’s also one quarter unicorn.  She craves rare meat at the full moon; but at the new moon, she’s a vegetarian. 

Sometimes, though, you have to make up entirely new creatures.  Sometimes, for that, I’ll take characteristics of existing creatures and put them together in new combinations.  I did that for THE SHAMAN’S CURSE.  I had to.  One of the first significant events in that book was based, in part, on the Maneaters of Tsavo (real-life maneating lions).  The problem was, my main characters were members of the Lion Clan.  I decided that it would probably be taboo for them to kill lions, their totem animal.  So, I had to have some other dangerous creature for them to hunt.  I came up with a sort of very large saber-tooth cat, with a greenish-tawny striped fur, and a rhino-like hide over its shoulders.

But then I decided that I didn’t want to have just one made up creature in this world.  That made it seem somehow too convenient.  So I added a kind of lion-maned flying squirrel.  “Chit” ended up getting a fairly large part in the story, actually.  There’s also a wild horse that’s sort of like a zebra or onanger, except it has leopard spots and an antelope  that’s kind of a cross between a chamois and an markhor.  And a giant lake otter that’s something like the giant river otters of the amazon.  Oh, and wyverns, but I didn’t make them up.

I had other creatures, too, but they got cut.  Who knows, maybe they’ll turn up later in the series.  There’s a rhino-sized wild boar, with tusks and horns, which is supposed to be the natural prey of those saber-toothed tigers.  There are a couple of large lakes, just begging for some kind of lake monster.  And I had thought of a herd of miniature unicorns with very nasty dispositions, just to really confuse my horse-loving protagonist.

I haven’t made up any creatures for DREAMER’S ROSE or SEVEN STARS.   Hmm, maybe I need to.