Why Make Monsters?

When I was a little girl, I was fascinated by dragons.

I had a huge collection of them: books, toys, models… You name it.

I especially loved how they changed from culture to culture, story to story. Sometimes fearsome, sometimes kind, often wise - some with wings, some with none, two legs, four legs, even no legs.

There was no “right way” to be a dragon. I loved that.

But they weren’t the only monsters that caught my imagination.

As I got older, I started reading up on different monsters. I’m not going to say “researched” because it wasn’t that coordinated. I just looked for stories about monsters and read as many as I could find.

Ancient myths.
Legends from the Middle Ages.
Urban legends.

Whether it was the Story of Gilgamesh, or reports of Spring-Heeled Jack, or reports of the Jersey Devil, I loved them all.

As an adult, my favourites were the ones that had, oddly enough, been the hardest to find as a child: Australian legends.

Oh, sure - tales of the bunyip, the yowie and drop bears (which are totally real!) were everywhere.

But no, I mean stories like the irrinja, the tale of a magician who uses sandstorms to become a dingo and seek revenge. Or the tuntapan, a mysterious sea creature that haunted Port Phillip in the 19th century.

I remember as a child reading the story of The Giant Devil Dingo - an incredible story by Dick Roughsey that retells a story from the Dreamtime. It was… oddly terrifying for a child, but endlessly fascinating to me. That’s where my love of Australian monsters began.

With Gaiya, the Giant Devil Dingo.

There are so many stories out there.

So. Many. Stories.

And all of them were utterly captivating to me.

Obviously, I did what any self-respecting neurodivergent person would do and immediately began keeping a spreadsheet of my favourites.

Long before I even came up with the idea for the Slipworld books, I had around 2,000 entries. Today, that’s closer to 3,000 and still growing!

The Slipworld came from an idea I had looking at that spreadsheet:

What if all of it was real?

With so many incredible creatures at my disposal, I figured there would never be any need to make one. Why would I? There are literally thousands out there to choose from!

Well, I’ll tell you why.

When I started writing Blood on the Ferns, the second book in the series, I realised I needed a very specific kind of monster for the prologue. It had to be just right, or the prologue - and, actually, the rest of the story - wouldn’t work!

But could I find one in all those stories I’d collected?

Nope.

Not one fit what I needed.

And I was left with a choice:

Change my entire approach to book 2 - or create a brand new monster.

I created a new monster. And then another one. And then a third.

But that was it, I said.

No more.

Until book 3 came along and - you guessed it - I couldn’t find a sea monster that matched the niche I needed to fill.

After that, I became less precious about it and just created my own monsters whenever I ran into that issue. Which, as it turned out, was a total of fifteen across the seven-book series.

Fifteen creatures you’ve never heard of before.

But how? Where do you even start?

I found inspiration where I always found inspiration - in other stories and in nature.

For some of them, like the umbrathril, the squalorian, and the Baba Tibira, I took inspiration from stories I’d heard and just gave them a name, a defined set of traits, and a backstory.

For others, such as the lycodasous and the Xylothrax, I had a specific problem to solve and made up a creature with the features and abilities I needed to make the story work.

I would look at the environment the creature needed to exist in and think about what animals lived in habitats like that, what adaptations they had, what they ate, how they lived - and how I could make that stranger.

What they looked like was the fun part. Fur, scales, wings, teeth, claws - it was nature with a supernatural twist. And, if I’m honest, that supernatural twist was usually bioluminescence because that is the coolest, weirdest thing in the natural world.

I mean, come on - have you seen flashlight fish? Or those deep-sea jellyfish? 🤯

I tried to match the familiar with the unfamiliar: panther-like creatures with horns and scales like a pangolin. Tiny dragons that swam through the air like fish. Wolves adapted for arboreal life.

The hardest part was naming them.

Oh, good heavens - the struggle was real!

I always started with a root word: something that represented some core element of the creature. Then I’d fiddle with it, adding different syllables that sounded creepy, or scary, or noble or whatever I wanted it to represent.

Kind of like the way they name prehistoric animals. 😏 (Looking at you, Zuul crurivastator, destroyer of shins!)

Rinse and repeat, until I found something that looked right and sounded right when I said it out loud.

And - no word of a lie - my beloved Beta readers didn’t always know that I’d made them up. Bless them, they probably don’t obsess over cryptids the way I do.

But I took it as a compliment. 😊

I suppose, in the end, I’m still that little girl who loved the fact that there was no “right way” to be a dragon. I just have a spreadsheet now.

I try to detail how each monster came into existence if they’re one of mine, so if you want the nitty-gritty on that, head on over to the Monster Encyclopedia!