Zedephants

Inspiration is a wonderful thing. It makes something so much easier when it just comes to you instead of sitting in front of a computer screen wondering what in the world you’re going to write next. Today that came in the form of a Zedephant.

If you were to ask me what one of my biggest challenges with writing was I would say, grammar. Obviously. Sorry that was a poor way to start that paragraph, but we all do it. It makes me think of a how I met your mother. Barney constantly says he has one rule, and other rubbish of a similar nature, but the rule’s different almost every time. I digress.

Something that has been a challenge in writing is animals. Why are animals so hard? In a fantasy world you have fantastical animals. Right away you have to make a decision do animals I’m familiar with exist in my world, and are they called the same thing. Avatar: the last air-bender does a great job with this. All of it’s animals are mixes of things we’d recognize. It makes it easy to relate to and the name basically says what you’re looking at. Other creatures are staples that everyone recognizes, Dragons, Fairies, Vampires, Werewolves, etc. These creatures you expect your audience to have some idea of what they’re looking at.

When you create a unique animal you are suddenly stuck with describing it. If you’ve decided to omit the creature that would best match it’s description you’ve suddenly given yourself the challenge of describing something that is almost like something that isn’t that something. Your description would probably be as confusing as this paragraph.

A Zedephant is an elephant. How does a brain work? Look above. Somehow while sitting in a car driving to the zoo we got talking about elephants. To mess with my son I began switching the first two letters for fun, mephant, pephant, zedephant. All those names got me thinking about new animals I could introduce into my fictional world. This lead to my complicated thoughts regarding the challenge of describing those creatures. Thus I present you with a literal form of word vomit.