Cryptid Types

Bigfoot — The Elusive Writer. You’re definitely writing. Allegedly. There have been sightings. Someone saw you open your manuscript three weeks ago, and you occasionally emerge from the forest to announce that you wrote 4,000 words at 2:00 a.m. before disappearing again. You prefer privacy, long stretches of uninterrupted work, and minimal poking from other humans. Approach quietly and leave snacks.

Nessie — The Deep-Dive Writer. You spend a lot of time beneath the surface. While everyone else is happily drafting Chapter Twelve, you’re contemplating your protagonist’s childhood attachment style and researching the socioeconomic consequences of an imaginary war that occurred 400 years before the book begins. You may not surface often, but when you do, you bring up something fascinating.

Mothman — The Deadline Writer. You appear shortly before disaster. You had six weeks to finish the project, but apparently your natural habitat is the forty-eight hours immediately preceding a deadline. Suddenly your eyes are glowing, the coffee is flowing, and you’re producing words at supernatural speeds. Is this sustainable? Probably not. Will you do it again? Absolutely.

Chupacabra — The Ruthless Editor. You have no sentimental attachment to words simply because you wrote them. Weak scene? Gone. Unnecessary character? Gone. Four-thousand-word subplot that took you three days to write? Delicious. You stalk through your manuscript looking for anything that isn’t pulling its weight and leave a suspiciously lean draft behind.

Yeti — The Glacial Writer. You do not write quickly. You do not want to write quickly. While other writers are celebrating 5,000-word days, you have spent an afternoon producing 400 words—and those 400 words are staying. You move through a manuscript slowly and deliberately, shaping it as you go rather than racing toward a messy first draft. Like a glacier carving a valley, progress can be difficult to see from day to day, but given enough time, you leave something remarkably solid behind. You’re also happiest working alone, somewhere quiet and preferably far away from anyone asking about your word count.

Jersey Devil — The Chaos Writer. Outlines are suggestions. Plans are temporary. Your protagonist was supposed to visit the grocery store and somehow started a revolution instead. You routinely discover that the book you’re writing bears only a passing resemblance to the book you intended to write, but frankly, the weird thing you ended up with is usually more interesting anyway.

Kraken — The Epic Writer. Your “little side project” has developed seventeen POV characters, three continents, an invented religion, a 900-year political history, and an appendix. You keep discovering additional tentacles every time you work on it. Cutting the subplot is impossible because the subplot is connected to another subplot, which is connected to the protagonist’s grandmother, which is crucial to Book Five.

Alien — The Experimental Writer. You have received the standard Earth instructions for how stories are supposed to work and have elected to disregard them. You like unusual structures, strange POVs, genre mashups, unconventional formats, bizarre premises, and asking questions like, “Okay, but what if I did it this way?” Sometimes the experiment crashes spectacularly in a cornfield. Sometimes you discover something nobody around you has seen before. Either way, you’d rather explore strange new territory than follow a familiar flight path.

Chessie — The Long-Haul Writer. Like the legendary creature supposedly lurking in the Chesapeake Bay, you spend a lot of time beneath the surface and occasionally reappear just to remind everyone that yes, you’re still here. Your projects tend to be long-term affairs: novels revised over years, series you keep returning to, abandoned manuscripts that eventually resurface, or ideas that refuse to disappear completely. You’re patient, persistent, and surprisingly difficult to declare extinct. You may vanish for a while, but sooner or later, somebody spots your manuscript again.

Loveland Frogman — The Happy Little Weirdo. You are writing exactly the thing you want to write, and you have remarkably little concern about whether anyone understands why. Frog detective cozy fantasy? Excellent. Sentient mushroom romance? Obviously. A literary space opera about an accountant who befriends God? You’ve already written 30,000 words. You thrive when allowed to embrace your strangest ideas, and Badger Camp strongly encourages your nonsense.