What's your opinion on the creation of different fantasy humanoids? Or even better different creature all together? At the moment I'm at th begins of a story and I've created a few new human races. My favriote are these human-bat things that live's on the floating sky islands (I really need to think up a name for them). I also have other races in the making. I'm kinda sick of the Elf, dwaf, human thing. Have you ever made a new speicies or humanoid? What do they look like? If you wrote a novel with this creature and it puplished can you tell me the title? I want a break from this vampire and werewolf infested world.
I think this probably belongs in something like "Setting" rather than "Publishing"? I made a race for a worldbuilding project called the suleng, which were a little like fauns. Their lower legs had tough, platelike scales on the front, and ended in something like a cross between cloven hooves and claws. They had long, scaly tails, something like lizards', but ending in a tuft of fur. They had ears like deer and scaled horns. I need to draw them again, they were fun. D: Another species was a lochan, which was a little more than three feet tall and sort of like across between a squirrel and a snake, with lots of eyes, heh. Wonky. I also made a vampire beast (pretty much based on the OP's ideas) for a discussion here. I love playing with weird anatomy and stuff.
I've still got Dwarves and Elves and such, but I make sure to make them unique in comparison to the usual ones we see in fantasy while still staying true to their roots. I also have an insectoid race called the X'krt which I'm still working on. I'm planning on using them as a deconstruction of the usual evil hive minded insectoid species.
I'd appreciate seeing a completely abstract and fresh view on alien life. I find it hard to believe that most intelligent life would resemble people at all. Unless we're talking pure fantasy here. I'm more of a sci-fi guy.
Cade just illustrated why I gave up on writing sci fi. When we actually meet alien life, we'll probably realize even the most alien depictions in fiction were still too Earthlike. Even when they don't resemble humans, they usually resemble some kind of earth life form, or else something that could exist on Earth but doesn't. We can't really get away from that.
Agents don't like it. Anything new that hasn't already been a confirmed success is considered a risk in the publishing world. New things will cause the agent's hands to shake in fear and drop your MS like a vampire ducking a cross.
