Even the most jaded and cantankerous critic was once a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed reader. Well, they were less jaded and cantankerous, at least. What books bewitched them in this time of innocence? What stories inspired their desire to tear apart every story you’ve ever loved and also to write their own stories that must then be torn apart in the great cycle? Listen and find out!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Bunny: Welcome to another heart-pounding episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And…
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: And as you can see, I’ve boing, boing, boinged my way into regular hosthood and taken up residence in the big purple Mythcreants’ clubhouse where we all live. There’s no escape for me now. Sorry.
Oren: No, you’re trapped.
Bunny: [Chuckles] I’ve set up my little bunny hutch in the living room and have taken all of the TV controls, so you have to live with me.
Oren: Gonna have to just start having to get up to press the buttons on the TV like some kind of medieval peasant.
Bunny: Boo. Anyway, today we’re going to be talking about lovely, perfect, flawless books. Books that make our hearts a flutter and our nostalgia ooze out our ears like silken honey. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I wrote that line.
Chris: [Laughs]
Bunny: Books that make you sigh for the simpler days of yore. Books that you’ve shared furtive pink-cheeked glances across the classroom with and might have kissed if you weren’t so worried about your braces locking together. I’m sure everyone has felt this way.
Oren: This is getting pretty steamy, admittedly.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: But not just me.
Chris: I don’t know, Bunny. That would mean I have to not hate everything.
Bunny: I don’t know, it could be an enemies to lovers type thing.
Chris: [Chuckles] Or a lovers to enemies.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: Sadly, that is my tale of first book love woe.
Oren: I hate everything except for the things I love which are perfect and can’t be criticized.
Bunny: [Fake cough] Discworld.
Oren: Yeah, it’s perfect. Nothing is wrong with Discworld. I have never once criticized it. You can’t prove that I did.
Bunny: [Fake cough] Mouse Guard. Sorry, I’ve got something caught in my throat.
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: I think it’s a point.
Chris: [Laughs]
Bunny: Today we’re talking about our first book loves, the books that first inspired us, the stuff that we got into writing. And I have quite a few of these. And a lot of them started out as just very early things that I then tried to copy while trying to pretend that I’m not copying them because I don’t use the exact same characters. I use a character who is me and therefore is not canon in the novels. It’s legally distinct.
Chris: As long as you put yourself in there, it’s no longer what you’re copying anymore.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: Look, they’ve got green eyes this time. So it’s different.
Bunny: Yeah, exactly. And for me, the first kind of book love, the very earliest, is the series called Rainbow Magic. Have either of you heard of that?
Chris: Actually, no.
Oren: Only vaguely.
Bunny: It’s this massive, ridiculously massive by this point. And it was then too, I remember going into the library and there was a whole shelf that’s entirely these tiny little Rainbow Magic books. And each of them had a fairy on the cover. And the fairies were all themed, there were groups of themed fairies. The first ones were the jewel fairies. There was an emerald fairy and an opal fairy and what have you other jewels, fairy, sapphire fairy, that sort of thing.
Chris: That sounds very cute. Sounds like something I would have liked had I ever known these books existed.
Bunny: It was adorable. And I love these. And basically they all have the same plot. The villains are goblins. They’re led by Jack Frost because why not? What happens in each mini series in this greater series and happens in each book, was that Jack Frost has stolen something and the two main characters, Rachel and Kirsty, have to go and get it back by working with one of the themed fairies.
Chris: Oh, so the themed fairies aren’t actually the main characters. We’ve got a couple of relatable girls to work with them.
Bunny: We got Rachel and Kirsty, Jack Frost, maybe he stole all the original jewels or he stole all the sand so nobody can have nice soft sand this summer. There’s just a ridiculous amount of fairies by now. There’s sport fairies, the jewel fairies, there’s pet keeper fairies, which have dogs and rabbits, which aren’t the same thing as the baby animal rescue fairies. And then there’s the after school sports fairies, which aren’t the same thing as the sport fairies or the water sports fairies or the fun day fairies. Yeah, it’s a bit ridiculous.
Oren: I’m sensing some theming issues here.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Bunny: “Building Rainbow Magic. How Daisy Meadows failed to theme her world”.
Oren: I predict a highly divisive grimdark TV show adaptation in this series’ future.
Chris: [Laughs]
Bunny: Look, it’s owned by Mattel.
Chris: Like the Winx?
Oren: The first time I saw this, I thought of Winx and how divisive that show’s adaptation was.
Bunny: I do remember seeing clips of that recently and looking at clips of Winx, the animated version. I would never have guessed they were the same thing.
Oren: Chris and I watched both to try to get a feeling for what it was about. And my hot take is that there were some issues with the live action version, but generally it was fine. It had some strengths too. I didn’t think it was a horrible betrayal of the original, but I didn’t have a huge amount of attachment to the original.
The biggest issue is that there was a little bit of whitewashing, which was unfortunate, but they also increased diversity in other ways, which was good. I’m not saying that cancels it out. There were both good and bad things.
Chris: So this book series you’re talking about, Bunny, were these middle grade novels?
Bunny: I think they were even younger, so probably elementary school is when I would have been reading these. They were very short books and having the same basic plot. It was the sort of thing where if you’re a little girl like me and you like little things and fairies and you got all these fairies that have common little girl names, so you’re like, “Which one is my name?” And you go looking for your fairy and then you’re like, “I identify with Rachel and Kirsty and I like fairies”, so you read the rest.
Chris: But they were still mostly text, I take it.
Bunny: They had pictures in them, like drawings, but it was mostly text.
Chris: Sounds like Boxcar Children level.
Bunny: Yeah, I would compare it to The Boxcar Children just a bit better because it’s magical.
Chris: [Laughs] Boxcar Children had its own wish fulfillment of being in a boxcar, which would not normally be fun. But of course, I think that was the charm, is that it made it sound like your fun hideout where you get to be free of adults and everything’s just fine.
Oren: Everyone go live in the woods.
Bunny: I did read the first book of that series. It didn’t hook me the way the fairies did.
Oren: There are fairies, that does help a bit.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: I suspect the fairies have a little bit more novelty than The Boxcar Children does.
Bunny: I have massive nostalgia for one Rainbow Magic book in particular, which was one of the special edition books, which were like slightly longer. So when I mentioned that Jack Frost stole the stand from a beach, that was this book. And he also stole all the seashells and all of the something else.
So what makes this book a special edition is that instead of stealing one thing per book, now he’s stolen three things in this book. And it’s not part of one of the theme series. It’s Joy the Summer Vacation Fairy.
Chris: Did the book ever tell you what Jack Frost was gonna do with that sand? [Laughs]
Bunny: He built a castle out of it, and then studded the walls with the seashells? I don’t know.
Chris: [Laughs]
Bunny: He just kind of seems like he likes taking stuff.
Chris: That seems like an unusual thing for a Jack Frost character to want. Doesn’t he have an ice palace or something?
Bunny: He does have an ice palace. So I guess he just wants a summer getaway home.
Oren: The fairy thing helps give the books a burst of, “Oh, wow, that’s neat”. That was basically the same thing with me. I may have mentioned this previously at some point on the podcast before, I honestly can’t remember. I really struggled learning to read, partly because of my dyslexia.
So by the time I started at a school that actually knew how to teach me, I was pretty behind. And at the same time, everything I tried to read was really boring. I’m not sure how much of it was actually boring and how much I just had a bad attitude. It’s been a long time. The stuff I remember was “See Spot Run” level stuff. I had no interest in that. It’s possible that my teachers tried to show me more interesting stuff and I just wasn’t interested for whatever reason.
Bunny: It’s very tense, though. What if Spot trips?
Oren: Yeah, what if he does? What if he doesn’t run? What if you don’t see it?
Bunny: Where’s your God now?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Oren: The way I remember it is that I basically just didn’t read until fourth grade because of a combination of difficulty and not feeling like there was anything worth reading. Then I was introduced to Catwings by Ursula K. Le Guin, an author who I would go on to have no disagreements with.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: As the book suggests, is about cats with wings. And I was super into that because I already liked cats and these ones had wings and they flew around and had adventures.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: This was literally all I needed. There wasn’t really a super complicated plot, except in the second book where we introduced one of them with trauma, which was pretty dark. They still had to go on adventures and explore a forest and that was all great. That’s really all it was. And I would reread those books for years because those were the books that made me think that there was maybe something worth reading, that it wasn’t all really boring nonsense.
Bunny: You still have similar critiques of almost everything that you read. Has that changed?
Oren: [Laughs]
Chris: This is another series that it’s really weird that I’ve never heard of because when I was young, I was really into the idea of cats with wings. Maybe my parents just only gave me like “serious” quote unquote, not actually serious literature. They’re still geeks.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Bunny: Serious cat book.
Chris: [Laughs]
Oren: I can’t explain Catwings. The books Bunny was talking about are a little bit after our time. They’re from 2003. They wouldn’t have been an option for us when we were first learning to read.
Chris: Oh man, that’s the year I graduated from high school.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: A little too recent.
Bunny: Little baby Bunny.
Oren: I can’t explain Catwings because that one is not only really well known, it’s by Ursula K. Le Guin, who is one of the high profile prestige authors that people love to heap praise on and talk about how deep she is.
Bunny: Nobody talks about Catwings.
Oren: Catwings doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Everyone is all obsessed with Earthsea and The Dispossessed. I’m like, “What about my cats with wings?” And they’re like, “No, we need to walk away from Omelas again”. And I’d rather not.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: What are you talking about with The Left Hand of Darkness? What about the left wing of the black cat?
Oren: One of them is a black cat. It’s very dark. That’s the one with the dark backstory.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Bunny: I think I read like a few of those books because again, I was a very cat obsessed little kid. I’ll get to the way that intersects with Rainbow Magic in a moment. All I remember from those books is cats with wings. They go to the big city. There’s a book with the black cat where he has his own adventure. That’s all I remember.
Oren: There aren’t actually that many of them. There’s only four. There’s like the first one where they have to leave the city for reasons. And then there’s the next one where they meet the next cat with wings. I was always confused where that other cat came from because as far as I could tell, it wasn’t one of their siblings.
Bunny: Oh, Jane on Her Own.
Oren: And then there’s one where they go back and meet their mom again, which I liked because I was always really sad that they had to leave because I’d anthropomorphized them something fierce. There’s four of them. I think the ones that I reread were mainly the first two, but I’m sure I reread the other ones as well.
Bunny: I think I would have gotten really into those because the funny thing is, when I set out to “copy”, quote unquote copy, legally distinct Rainbow Magic, see it was called Tree Line Magic, which is very different. And instead of having jewel fairies, it was just a jewel fairy and her name was Ruby and she was not a fairy. She was a cat fairy.
Oren: That’s different.
Bunny: That’s completely different. An anthropomorphic cat with wings. Posed the exact same way that the fairies in the Rainbow Magic series are. It’s just more misspelled.
Oren: The misspellings give it flavor.
Bunny: This is how you add novelty. Spell things ways nobody spelled things.
Oren: Put some apostrophes in there. You’ll be good to go.
Bunny: I remember there’s a few notable misspellings, but because I live in the Pacific Northwest, the story was also set there. And at one point they ride the “fery”, F-E-R-Y.
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: They see some “ocas”.
Oren: [Laughs]
Bunny: The sentence was, “Suddenly, ocas apart”.
Oren: Which is of course a huge mistake because it should have been “the boat”.
Bunny: [Laughs] Oh no, shut up. [Laughs]
Oren: Probably shouldn’t have brought up that in joke on the podcast that literally no one else will get, but it’s fine. We’re leaving it in there. Everyone can wonder what the heck I was talking about.
Bunny: [Laughs] We’re leaving it in.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: Why were you so mad that you said “the boat”? How strange.
Bunny: It’s a mystery. Don’t ask.
Chris: We know Oren loves boats. How could he be angry at this?
Bunny: [Laughs]
Chris: How could this be out of place?
Bunny: Spooky.
Oren: Alright, Chris, we haven’t heard from you yet. What’s your deal?
Bunny: Was it cat related?
Chris: No! I didn’t read any books about cats. Isn’t that sad?
Bunny: Ugh, loser.
Oren: I don’t know if we can let you back into the club, Chris.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: I just had a deprived childhood. If I’m going to talk about something that I still think of positively, which is a rare thing indeed, and I’m allowed to go back to picture books, I think it’s worth talking about Chris Van Allsburg.
Bunny: I don’t know if I’ve heard of that.
Chris: Okay, but you have, because he’s the one who wrote Jumanji, for one thing, and The Polar Express, which have both been made into movies and absolutely should not have been made into movies. [Laughs]
Bunny: Oh my god, The Polar Express. That movie.
Chris: Yes, that movie was absolutely terrible, but here’s the thing.
Bunny: So gummy.
Chris: The reason why it’s terrible is because all of Chris Van Allsburg’s books have very little in the way of content in them. They’re all based on not telling you anything, so it all feels extremely mysterious. One of his stories just has a series of illustrations with one sentence to make it mysterious. The Polar Express is just a wish fulfillment story about a kid going on a train and coming back. There’s no story there, which is why it doesn’t work as a movie.
Bunny: It’s also weirdly religious. I don’t know. I never understood that. You must believe in Lord Santa.
Oren: That’s a pretty common Christmas trope. I’ve never liked it, but it’s not uncommon.
Chris: I don’t remember it being a particularly religious book.
Bunny: Believing in Santa is the premise of a lot.
Chris: But Jumanji is the one where the game becomes real.
Oren: Admittedly, I liked that movie.
Bunny: What?
Chris: That movie’s better.
Oren: Yeah, I liked the Jumanji movie. It’s not great, right?
Bunny: No, it’s not the Jumanji movie. You liked it? You liked? Wow.
Oren: Yeah, I like things.
Chris: [Laughs] Oren likes things.
Oren: I actually like a lot of the things I critique.
Bunny: Careful, you’re going on record saying this.
Oren: The movie Jumanji is very silly, mostly a comedy. It’s got some serious moments that are a little bit, sure, this is happening now. But it’s mostly just a Robin Williams vehicle, and I don’t dislike it for that. I think that’s fine.
Chris: Well, he has one book where a kid falls asleep and sees the future, and it’s an environmental message. He sees everything has gone wrong with the environment and the future, and it inspires him to recycle and stuff like that. He has just a lot of very magical feeling books, and they even did one where they took one of his books and actually got a bunch of speculative fiction writers to write short stories based on some of the lines and pictures that he had. And he wasn’t so into it. I think the point is the mystery.
Bunny: That’s a good idea, though, for an anthology.
Chris: But anyway, his work is really well known, and it is speculative, and if you have not seen his books before, they’re definitely worth, next time you’re at a bookstore, pick some of them up.
Oren: Chris, was there a specific book that kind of ignited your desire to write your own stories? Because Bunny’s mentioned hers. I’ve got one that I haven’t brought up yet. I’m just curious if that happened with you, or if your desire to write happened some other way.
Bunny: Yeah, what legally distinct fanfic?
Chris: No, actually. My inspiration for writing was insomnia.
Oren: Yeah, that’ll do it.
Bunny: Oh, woah.
Chris: [Laughs] You have to do something when you’re laying in bed for hours every night as a child, wondering when this mysterious thing called sleep will come. I found writing by hand, because I didn’t start typing until I was 10, because that’s when home computers started to become popular. I didn’t want to write very much. I did it a little bit, but it was too tedious, because I would write down a sentence, and then as soon as it was down, I would just want to rewrite it, and it was all on physical paper, and it just got mangled very quickly, and I didn’t like it.
When I was 16, I was finally inspired to actually write something, and that’s when I finally became a lot more fluid at typing. Until then, I had avoided typing, because I found it tedious, too. But no, I did not write any child fanfiction, unfortunately.
Bunny: Wow.
Chris: Instead, in school, I wrote morbid stories about a vampire cat that killed its owner.
Bunny: Cat! Okay, good. You’re welcome back. Welcome back to the club.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: I wrote down that entire Rainbow Magic thing on paper. My parents had kept it in our family vault, which is how significant of a document this is, and it’s really something else. Yeah, I also didn’t really type until I got older.
Oren: For me, I started typing as soon as that was an option, but that wasn’t until I was a little bit past the age when I started reading. And before then, I had story ideas, but they were mostly just, “Hey, mom and dad, what if this happened?” Usually based off of some kind of Star Trek episode we’d been watching.
I couldn’t really write by hand very well, because every problem that I had learning to read, it was way worse learning to write, so that was just not on the table. It was all they could do to get me to do my school assignments. I had to learn to type first, and that took a while.
Then the books that actually inspired me to try to write my first novel were the Animorphs books. Those were, of course, the big thing at that time, right? They came out exactly at the right time for me to read them, and were very much products of that exact moment in 1996.
And this was at the same time when we were doing this weird long-distance RV trip around the country that my mom had taken a sabbatical to do. So we were homeschooled that year, and I wanted to write this novel, and each chapter was also a geography lesson, because my mom needed a homeschool lesson. This was the only way she could get me to pay attention to geography, was if in each chapter the protagonists visit a new state and do something there.
Bunny, Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Chris: That’s brilliant. I love it.
Bunny: That is very smart.
Oren: So it wasn’t a good story, but it was a good geography lesson.
Bunny: My dad would tell me Pascal and Princess stories, which are stories about these two little dogs and their owner, Peter. And the little dogs are small, white, and excitable, and they could jump as high as Peter’s knees. That was how the stories always started. And somewhat similar to the Rainbow Magic ones, this time it was gnomes. And the gnomes have stolen something, like, they’ve stolen all the baguettes in France. Oh no. Peter goes to “Special Red Phone” and calls up, “insert child property character I was into here”, so, The Magic School Bus, or Rudolph, and they will help track down the gnomes by going to various places and decoding riddles that my dad somehow came up with on the fly that were like rhyming. And then they would go find the gnomes, do a dance to put the gnomes to sleep, and then bring them back to Gnome Island, where they belong.
Oren: That’s pretty impressive to do on the fly. That’s some skills that most gamemasters would be pretty jealous of.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Bunny: I need you to run the Peter, the Dogs, and the Gnomes campaign.
Oren: I once had a session with a fairy character who spoke in rhyme, and I have never spent longer preparing for a session than that one.
Chris: Oh my gosh.
Oren: I wrote every single question I could imagine the players would ask her, and I wrote a rhyming answer for it.
Bunny: Wow.
Oren: And then I had a reason why she would have to leave the scene if I couldn’t think of a rhyme.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Oren: And I had a rhyme that was basically, “Stop asking me questions”, rhyme.
Chris: Did it work out when you ran it?
Oren: Yeah, it worked fine. I think the players were just so confused by what was happening that they didn’t push too hard.
Chris: Wow.
Oren: That session worked out pretty well.
Chris: That sounds brutal. I would never attempt that.
Bunny: That’s dedication.
Oren: I haven’t tried since, so you’re not wrong.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: That’s like you’re running a marathon.
Oren: That was like college free time level GM prep. I don’t do that anymore.
Bunny: You had free time in college? Man.
Chris: Somehow people in college manage to do an awful lot of GMing and roleplaying.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Chris: We assume you must. I don’t know, or just all the energy.
Bunny: Oh yeah.
Chris: Maybe you don’t sleep. There’s another possibility.
Bunny: That’s true of many of my friends, yes.
Oren: Let me put it this way. I had more free time in college than I had either in high school or after college. I also realized that I went through phases. I would get excited to write, I would try, I would stop and burn out, and then I wouldn’t for two years. And this happened several times in between the ages of 12 and 18.
It was actually video games that got me more into writing than books did. Animorphs was the first time, but after that it was video games. And I think the reason is just that I felt more connected to the characters in the video games than I did in characters in books, because that’s the main advantage of a video game is you get to actually control your character so you feel more immersed.
My most serious attempt was after I’d been playing a really long Escape Velocity playthrough, which is a little space game where you control a single ship. I got through it, almost the whole game, in the same ship that I really liked and I spent a lot of time customizing it and it was my favorite ship. And I just noticed at the end of the playthrough, I clicked on its stats and I noticed that it had a crew of two?
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Oren: And so that meant there was some guy who’d been hanging out for this entire playthrough as I did stuff like become a alien god and awaken my psychic powers and then decided to stop doing that because it was evil. And he’d apparently just stuck around the whole time.
Bunny: [Chuckles]
Oren: And he’s not in any of the dialogue or anything. So I was like, “Who is this guy? What was his deal like?” That was the impetus for my first really serious attempt at a novel. Not that that went anywhere, but it was an attempt.
Bunny: That’s cool. That’s a good premise. Who is that random guy?
Oren: Generic space opera and the search for that one guy.
Bunny, Chris: [Chuckle]
Bunny: I’d read it. I’d read it. Any other notable influences y’all would like to do a speed round?
Oren: Chris, you haven’t talked as much. It’s your turn to do one.
Chris: When I think back at the novels that stick out in my mind as the novels that were important to me, unfortunately, it’s the Belgariad.
Oren: Yeah! [Laughs]
Chris: And I read 12 of them. Because you have two series, a series of five and then a follow up series of five and then you have some standalone books about some of the immortal characters. I quit sometime in high school and I was done partly because they’re just so racist and sexist and I even read some more series by David and Leigh Eddings. And again, the more books I read by them, the more I noticed how extremely problematic they were. They had one book where the protagonists forced the trolls to have less babies so they would eventually go extinct.
Bunny: Wow. Eugenics! Oh boy!
Chris: You have no idea. The Belgariad, one of its distinguishing features, all these countries in the fantasy world that are defined by a single trait. There’s the extreme greedy money country and the knight country where everybody believes in chivalry and unfortunately some of them, again, are really racist. We have all of these bad guy countries where some of them are devious and others are stupid.
Oren: They’re all racist, but some of them are more virulent than others.
Chris: Some of them are really bad.
Bunny: Oof.
Chris: One of the bad races, they decided to try to make them sexy by justifying why they had women on collars and leashes.
Bunny: Eww!
Chris: They’re secretly empowered!
Bunny: Great.
Chris: Yeah, I was a sucker for farm boy chosen one books.
Oren: Because it’s so surprising and a twist that a farm boy could be the hero. You wouldn’t expect that.
Chris: I could identify with the farm boys and then being chosen, it got so much wish fulfillment. And that’s what hooked me.
Bunny: That’s why you’re the queen of the realm now.
Chris, Oren: [Chuckle]
Oren: No, I had a similar experience with Wheel of Time because Wheel of Time was my first high fantasy book. Also the first time I realized that high fantasy really existed, that you could have a story about like swords and magic and stuff. Because before then I had mostly read sci-fi or low modern fantasy stuff. For me that was amazing and it also had the farm boy chosen one thing. Because wow, this random guy Rand? Name even sounds random. Is the special chosen one?
Now the beauty of Wheel of Time is that series went on for so long that I got old enough to realize that it was problematic. By the time I got to the last book that existed at the time, which was I think book 9. That was when I stopped. And then all of the angry Wheel of Time fan ragers were like, “How dare you stop at book 9 and still think you can talk about the series? You’re the worst”.
Bunny, Chris: [Laugh]
Chris: Yeah, I read Wheel of Time around the same period, my farm boy phase, and I didn’t finish it because it just got too depressing. I knew it was real sexist, but I was still hooked for a while.
Oren: I tried to reread it and I got to book 4 and I was like, “All right, surely the slog will end soon”. And I looked at the forums and oh, the slog hasn’t started yet.
Bunny: [Chuckles] That’s telling.
Oren: Alright, we’re almost out of time. Bunny, give us one last one.
Bunny: Warrior Cats. Just Warrior cats. I had so much Warrior Cats. Continuing with the theme of my cat obsession as a kid. I got big into cats in late elementary school and early middle school. All of my friends were into Warrior Cats. I was into Warrior Cats. I was River Clan, of course. We all had different cat personas and we’d run around scratching each other on the playground.
Oren: As one does.
Chris: [Laughs] Of course you did.
Bunny: [Laughs] I have a terrible habit of biting my nails. I was always the weakest when it came to scratching, but I made up for it by hissing and yowling and confusing the playground monitors.
And that was the source of my second manuscript, another fanfic that didn’t want to be a fanfic. It was a mess. It was incredible as the main characters are Fallen Leaf and Tree Bark, which are very compelling names. Their mother was a powerful fighter, not a warrior. She was a fighter. There’s evil wolves who are coming after them. And there’s a tribe, not a clan, a tribe up in the mountains that is getting threatened by a cougar and the cougar is somehow their dad because I wanted an “I am your father” moment, despite never having seen Star Wars at that point. And then actually Fallen Leaf, who’s definitely not my self insert, is a reincarnation of an ancient other cat fighter named Blood Rose, which matters somehow. It was all over the place.
One funny thing about this manuscript that I’ll never forget is just, I was like, “How would cats measure things?” They wouldn’t measure things in feet. They would measure them in “robin lengths”.
Oren: Obviously.
Chris, Oren: [Laugh]
Bunny: That’s intuitive. [Laughs] More intuitive than the standard system.
Oren: All right. I think that is going to be all the time we have.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com slash Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First we have Callie MacLeod. Next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
[Outro music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.