It’s a good question, isn’t it? I’ve been asking myself this partly because I just had a story come out “The Monster.” I’m reading it tonight at ICON, and I’m pretty excited about it.

My writer’s group has decided I’m great with the creatures. They can usually identify those in my stories, and when they talk about the types of characters that we’re really good at, those are the ones who come up. Yesterday’s story had about four characters, and one was a dragon.

The monster story had about four main characters, and two of them being a spider and a tentacled thing that didn’t choose to resolve itself into an actual creature. Might be a squid, might be an octopus. Sometimes they’re like that.

So many times I find my favorite characters are creatures. R2-D2 might not count but Chewbacca, Groot, and Grogu are on my list. I never did figure out why I love understandable creatures who don’t speak English. The personality comes out a lot differently in the writing or on the screen.

Often I find my humans are more monstrous than many of my creature characters. That is directly related to how you define a monster. If you’re curious about my story the link is below.