Sunday, August 3, 2008

A new pleasure!

I bought a fantastic new book yesterday, The Search for the Last Undiscovered Animals by Karl P.N. Shuker (formerly titled The Beasts That Hide from Man). It's a cryptozoology book written by an actual zoologist, so it's not overly credulous like so many cryptozoology books; instead, it's well-researched and open-minded and it covers obscure cryptids, like the Mongolian Death Worm, instead of rehashing the same old Loch Ness Monster sightings and so forth. It reminds me a lot of Willy Ley's wonderful essays from the 1940s and 50s, and in fact Shuker covers some of the same ground as Ley did (like legends of man-eating trees), but much more up-to-date.

It just goes to show that reading nonfiction is at least as important as reading fiction for generating story ideas. Within pages of starting this book, I realized I had the perfect plot for my NaNoWriMo book. Sorry, Charmed Circle, you've been pushed back yet again.

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