Why furry fiction?
*taps keyboard to see if it is on*
I admit I'm not entirely sure whether to take the Amazon Author Central invitation seriously. I've been writing for quite a while, but only a tiny bit of my fiction has ever made it to general publication. I'm confident that most readers would have little interest in my non-fiction, and it's all out of print now anyway.
The question of why anyone would write anthropomorphic fiction comes up pretty regularly. People who devour Patterson, Higgins, and Grisham usually do not find fantasy or science fiction suited to their tastes. Those of us who write in this narrower genre have an equally narrow audience.
We do have some very well known writers as models, though. Richard Adams (Watership Down and other novels,) William Horwood (Duncton Wood and many others,) and Brian Jacques (Redwall and sequels) come to mind as modern exemplars. Looking back through the years, we can't omit Orwell's Animal Farm, or Salten's Bambi, or Grahame's The Wind in the Willows either. I find it interesting that all but one of these authors was British, and all but two of them wrote with an adult audience in mind rather than children. Critics and educators alike have a tendency to lump all fiction that features anthropomorphic characters into children's literature, just as they often assign all animated films to the children's audience. I think those critics and educators are short sighted and very unimaginative if they can't see the adult messages that underlie works like Watership Down or Bambi.
Human history and prehistory is filled with stories that use talking, rational animals as their enactors. There is something that links those legends and tales directly to our souls and makes them stick with us (or at least, with those of us who aren't critics and educators.) The Native Americans told each other about Coyote and Loon around the fire or under the moonlight, and Aesop taught his lessons of ethics and wisdom by using animal characters more than two millennia ago.
We are all animals, after all. No matter how much we try to separate ourselves from our animal brethren and cousins, they manage to remind us that they share a good portion of our heritage. When the protagonist in a story is a coyote or an owl, it lets us skip past some of the assumptions we make about humans, and see things in a different light. Or at least, I think it does and strive to make use of that leverage in my storytelling.
For those with deep curiosities (or idle ones for that matter) I can be found on Twitter ( Altivo) and have an older website that links to some of my podcasts and reviews: The Clydesdale Librarian. I do try to respond to questions and comments when received.
I admit I'm not entirely sure whether to take the Amazon Author Central invitation seriously. I've been writing for quite a while, but only a tiny bit of my fiction has ever made it to general publication. I'm confident that most readers would have little interest in my non-fiction, and it's all out of print now anyway.
The question of why anyone would write anthropomorphic fiction comes up pretty regularly. People who devour Patterson, Higgins, and Grisham usually do not find fantasy or science fiction suited to their tastes. Those of us who write in this narrower genre have an equally narrow audience.
We do have some very well known writers as models, though. Richard Adams (Watership Down and other novels,) William Horwood (Duncton Wood and many others,) and Brian Jacques (Redwall and sequels) come to mind as modern exemplars. Looking back through the years, we can't omit Orwell's Animal Farm, or Salten's Bambi, or Grahame's The Wind in the Willows either. I find it interesting that all but one of these authors was British, and all but two of them wrote with an adult audience in mind rather than children. Critics and educators alike have a tendency to lump all fiction that features anthropomorphic characters into children's literature, just as they often assign all animated films to the children's audience. I think those critics and educators are short sighted and very unimaginative if they can't see the adult messages that underlie works like Watership Down or Bambi.
Human history and prehistory is filled with stories that use talking, rational animals as their enactors. There is something that links those legends and tales directly to our souls and makes them stick with us (or at least, with those of us who aren't critics and educators.) The Native Americans told each other about Coyote and Loon around the fire or under the moonlight, and Aesop taught his lessons of ethics and wisdom by using animal characters more than two millennia ago.
We are all animals, after all. No matter how much we try to separate ourselves from our animal brethren and cousins, they manage to remind us that they share a good portion of our heritage. When the protagonist in a story is a coyote or an owl, it lets us skip past some of the assumptions we make about humans, and see things in a different light. Or at least, I think it does and strive to make use of that leverage in my storytelling.
For those with deep curiosities (or idle ones for that matter) I can be found on Twitter ( Altivo) and have an older website that links to some of my podcasts and reviews: The Clydesdale Librarian. I do try to respond to questions and comments when received.