The Featured Creature 2012-13: Last Bites Part III, Crawling From The Wreckage

A new year dawned and I began to fully recuperate from my bout of Bronchitis. Within me, new fictions grew from the sorrows of the previous November.  I slowly began to put my life back together and crawl my way back towards health.  The first  Featured Creature of the year, a nasty three tongued demon, was also the first color creature of the year.  It would be spring before I would create another color creature, but by that time a lot would change for me personally and professionally.


With the next creature, The Thing in the Cave, fiction pieces began to integrate more with the Featured Creature posts.   Although some creatures would have only descriptions of their inspiration, as with Deconstructed, other creatures, like the Spirit Path would be accompanied by short flash fiction. The end of January brought me to the first of many turning points of 2013.

As the month wrapped up, I tried my hand at longer fiction.  I began what I intended to be an short story but, as I began to write, the floodgates opened.  It would take me until the end of February to wrap up the story I began in The Night Thing.  This was my first experience with the a fiction piece overtaking the image of a Featured Creature, but it would not be my last.  The storyline begun in The Night Thing would appear again later in the year as part of a larger over all course change for the Featured Creature.

In February,  I began an intentional world building within the Featured Creature with the Priest of The Eye post.  Introducing the fictional ancient text, Die Tür Des Bösen, I began to knit the stories within the posts into a larger landscape.  My greater intent has always been a movement towards comic book generation, but this simple addition would surprise me in its effect.  Much like adding a final grain of salt to a fully saturated glass of water and watching crystals magically coalesce before your eyes, the added layer of fiction within the stories of the Featured Creature would crystalize in many unexpected ways.  The introduction of a larger world within the posts would continue to bear fruit as the year progressed.

In the next creature, The Melted Man, I explored more emotional fallout from my winter traumas with a small bit of flash fiction.  Although the piece that followed, Girl in Shadow, bore only a small of flash fiction, the creature within would easily fit anywhere within the Featured Creature worlds.  February wrapped up with another creature connecting to Die Tür Des Bösen: the Lover's Tongue.  Also introduced with that post was a twentieth century text, Marge Hollander's: Digest of Demons and Devils.

With these fictional texts, my initial intent was to bring a greater "reality" to the Featured Creatures.  This would turn very quickly into something much larger, but before that larger reality emerged, I would have another trial by fire similar to November.  The threat and the damage this time would come from outside myself and nearly bring my ability to produce Zombie Bites to an end.

~ Continued in Part IV ~