It's just cat stories

The Prophecies Begin

Allegiances - TC1, RC1, SC1, WC1. TC2, RC2, SC2, WC2. TC3, RC3, SC3, WC3.

Family Trees - Thunderclan, Riverclan, Shadowclan, Windclan.

The Fic - Fic Cover

Shadow and Blood

Not out yet. - Fic Cover

Shallow Roots

Not out yet. - Fic Cover

Solar Winds

Not out yet. - Fic Cover

Bitter Gifts

Not out yet. - Fic Cover

Shadows Within

Not out yet. - Fic Cover

The Prophecies End

Not out yet. - Fic Cover

Vulture-Men! :D

I really doubt it comes up much if at all in SR (or if it does, it'll be in later arcs, not TPB), but I wanted to give the Bloody some kind of extra flavor or culture. They haven't been around long enough to have major traditions and like a super solid group culture, but they do have the beginnings of one!

Idk, in canon Bloodclan kinda felt like...ya know, they're just mean. That's their whole deal. They're mean city cats who love violence. Which was fine, since their only real purpose was to be an uncomplicated antagonistic force that they could pretty much wipe out instead of Tigerclan, cause if they get rid of most of Shadowclan and Riverclan then where does that leave the series? But if I'm already trying to flesh out the other antagonists, and I don't do anything at all with the Bloody, they feel kinda like a cop-out.

Anyway, to answer your question more specifically, what the fuck vulture-men:

They're the city workers who come to clean up dead animals

The cats who follow them kinda treat them like the ferryman, carrying the dead to the afterlife.

Cats who don't follow them think they eat the cats, feed them to the beasts, or just dump them somewhere else.

I've written over 400,000 words of warrior cats fanfiction.

Sorry it took so long to get to this, I typed out most of a reply, went to double check something, and it disappeared without saving as a draft.

I assumed this was about SR specifically, but if I'm wrong feel free to send another ask!

There's a few easter eggs about either future events or fandom jokes. There's a reference to Midnight when Firepaw first joins the clan. And Dustpelt enjoying the camp repairs was initially kind of a reference to the fandom joke about him being the clan builder. Also there's a reference to Thornclaw being the patrol guy, Mousefur complains about not having time to do much battle training or hunting practice with him and says he's going to be a warrior who only knows how to patrol.

Then there's also been a few things that weren't references, just points of inspiration that felt really obvious to me but actually weren't lol. Brokenstar being scentless was largely an accident, but part of why I kept it (in addition to working with a different thing I needed accomplished) was that it reminded me of a scene from a podcast I adore. Minor spoilers for The Wizard The Witch and The Wild One (specifically the Children's Adventure), but the titiular wild one loses his magical fae scent when bathed, taking on the scent of the soap used instead. Grandmother Wren comments that it's a good thing they didn't use unscented soap, so he won't have to go without a scent. It's not really brought up again, but I've listened to it enough that it stuck with me.

Then one book inspired both a scene and some world building. Spoilers for Briar's Book (or The Healing in the Vine if you have the cooler UK title), by Tamora Pierce (in case anyone cares about spoilers for a 30+ year old book series that's been out of print for a hot minute lol). The book is set during an epidemic, and there's a character who becomes ill, but then recovers completely except for a cough that won't go away. Now, in the book it become pnemonia, not redcough, but you can probably see how that became Crowfrost's whole everything.

The other thing inspired by that book is also Shadowclan/Crowfrost related! There's a part that really stuck with me - "Daja was a Trader: they held it was mad to argue when the sick thought that Death approached. Denials only told Death here was someone who would be missed, Death's favorite kind of victim."

Did I....did I never make an intro post??

I guess not. 4 years on this blog and I've never actually introduced myself, wow.

If I was going to do that I would have to do a lot of rewriting, some of y'all have gotten pretty good at figuring me out!

In all seriousness, no, I haven't. I know there are some people who get upset about twists or plotlines getting guessed, but my take is that it just means readers are paying attention and my foreshadowing is working. And that's exciting!

The first time I reread this, years ago, I was so embarassed. I don't even really remember why, to be honest, I guess just because it's a thing I wrote when I was young. But now I think it's kinda cute. I can actually see some of the things that eventually became hallmarks of my writing style. The tone I use when the elders are telling the story is pretty similar to what I've used in SR for the elders' stories and the grave-crawlers. Obviously there's some rough bits - why did my girl Willow have to cross every clan's territory? There was no need to zig zag like that lol. But I was a kid and I didn't have the map in front of me, and also I had an idea that I wanted to run with even if it didn't make perfect sense. I was just having fun, and I think that's nice :)

Elder's Tails - Originally published May 22, 2011, under the username WolfFang of LeafClan (I changed it to Hysterical Insanity later).

A little peek behind the curtain - even before I decided to kill Crowfrost, he was never going to be the father of her kits. Apologies to anyone who liked that ship, but the timeline got weird and I had to decide which version of reality I was going to stick to.

Canon Crowfrost is introduced as a warrior in Eclipse, and I don't think there are any descriptions of his age. If we assume he was a young warrior, that puts him being born just before arc 3. Which would make him a bit older than Dawnpelt, but not the biggest age gap by any means. If he wasn't a young warrior, he would've been born during arc 2 or possibly earlier.

Except the timeline for the arcs has shifted. Arcs 1 and 2 have very little gap, arc 2 and 3 have a wider gap, and Dawnpelt might not even be born until arc 4. Now, luckily Crowfrost is unattached - the only parental info he has is from a fb post, not canon, so I could have just pushed him back to be born later, but then I got sidetracked by that non-canon family info, because it turned out to be fascinating.

According to that fb post, his parents were Dawncloud and Smokefoot. Dawncloud already has a whole host of prequel-related timeline issues, and Smokefoot is introduced as a warrior in The Sight. Considering that Dawncloud died in Arc 1, Crowfrost would have to be super old or the first recorded kit born to a Starclan cat. It was obviously never made canon, but the weirdness of it captivated me.

Oh absolutely! Thanks for asking, it's absolutely alright to send in as many as you want :) Sorry this took me a bit to get to lol, it kind of got away from me.

I think my all time favorite goes to Toast at the End of the World, the first short story in a post-apocalyptic slightly sci-fi/fantasy anthology I've been working on off and on for years.

Five years after most of the moon crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, Kate’s toaster caught fire.

I think it sets the tone of the story really well. A catastrophic event happened years ago, but the more important thing is that some lady named Kate is having a terrible day. The whole theme of the anthology is how, even in the face of terrifying, world ending events, a lot of elements of daily life continue on. The moon broke apart, falling into the ocean and causing the entire coastline to shift radically, throwing a large number of things into chaos. But Kate still has to make toast for the guests at her bed and breakfast, and now her toaster is on fire.

Waaaaay better than the original first line, the first draft started with the sentence I used to be a fan of the apocalypse genre. Followed by a paragraph of, quite frankly, trite ramblings that got way too close to just spelling out the point of the story directly. That was written December 2020, and the most recent draft (where I nailed that opening) wasn't written until May 2025. Never delete your drafts, you might come back to them later with more experience and write your favorite thing!

I think a close second is the start to a novel that I've been chipping away at, called Portraits of the End. The opening line of this one actually hasn't changed at all from draft 1 to draft ?? whatever I'm on now.

The End, when it came, was golden.

Mysterious, evocative, impactful. I wish I could say it's some kind of masterful writing technique that I learned and can explain, but uh this one came to me in a dream. PoE is just fully a dream I had, with the weirder dream elements replaced. I mean, the dream ended with the legendary pokemon from Sun and Moon doing a dance that summoned a cosmic kitten that ate the End, and some of the titular portraits were actually of Marceline and Bubblegum from Adventure Time living in a log cabin, and the younger brother had a potato that could detect ghosts soooo...

The End was a strange golden light/radiation storm that destroyed the Earth and sent the surviving humans into space. Decades later, the End is approaching one of the new human settlements. The main character has to protect her family while also dealing with the Queen's strange fixation on her, unraveling what happened during the End of Earth as well as what's going on now.

Thanks for asking!

I think I might've already answered for already published SR chapters (or at least I answered about my favorite moments? Something similar idk), but Sandstorm checking for bees and Cinderkit trying to learn about bones are up there.

I was going to look through my non-warrior cats wips but tbh there are so many of them...what if instead I gave you out of context dialogue from future SR scenes? I have a habit of writing out future scenes when I have a vivid idea of them, so I have a collection of some things from the distant future lol. But! I'm not going to say who says them or when, and some of these are from really far in the future (like, multiple arcs away)

Under the cut cause it's long and I guess some people may not want to read them.

Thanks for asking! Probably a little bit will be revealed later on, but he won't have time for a full monologue anytime soon, so I'll answer more in depth!

Basically, my idea for Brokenstar's motivation was that he thinks he deserves power and respect, resents the fact that he had to work for it, and views himself as having worked harder than other cats (even though he probably worked about the same as the other warriors overall).

Some of it is his natural personality. If he were a kittypet, he'd be the sort to wake you up by screaming to feed him breakfast, then wander off and not eat once you're up. If he were a regular warrior, he'd make small changes and demands when leading the patrol, like oh no we're not hunting there, I want to hunt over here.

But this was really encouraged by Raggedstar and Clawface while he was growing up. There was a mix of pressure (you have to work harder than other cats, you need to be the best, the strongest, a leader among the other apprentices) and an encouragement of arrogance (you're the son of an important cat, the clan owes you respect, how dare that cat speak to you that way, leadership is in your blood).

The result being that he doesn't want to wait for a natural leadership opportunity (working hard means making your own opportunities, plus this is what he's owed). He deserves to be in charge, and other cats have only ever been beneath him, so why not just get rid of the ones in his way?

And then he has power, and it's his right to exercise it however he sees fit. Except cats keep telling him he can't? The warrior code restricts what he can do, and he doesn't even really care about apprenticing cats young or who eats first, he just can't stand that his authority (the authority he worked so hard for and also was born to wield) is being challenged.

That's why he punished Flintfang. Brokenstar wasn't ever going to give him another apprentice, but the fact that he said he would refuse if Brokenstar tried just can't be allowed. But he can't force him to take on an apprentice, both because they're fresh out of kits but also because apprentices are meant to be a sign of his favor and if Flintfang simply refused to take the apprentice out it would undermine his authority further.

Thanks for asking!!

17- Are your protagonists always the “good guys” and your antagonists always the “bad guys” or do you like to do anti-heroes and grey morality?

I love love LOVE heroes who could've been villains and villains that could've been heroes! For me, agency is a big part of morality. If they aren't chosing (or trying to choose) to do good/evil, then they're just a guy in a situation. And don't get me wrong, there are definitely great stories out there about guys in situations! They just usually aren't written by me lol. Also, if they're chosing to do the things they do, there's also the wiggle room to have a hero chose to do something bad, sometimes for a good reason, sometimes not, and for a villain to do something good. How many bad things do you have to do to become a villain? Can you be a hero in the eyes of some and a villain to others, and how will you deal with that? I <3 questions!

I also enjoy villains who think they're choosing to do good but their definition of good/what they're willing to sacrifice to achieve it is what makes them a villain. Not every antagonist has to fall into that, but I do love getting my lil racoon paws into villain motivation when I can. To use SR as an example, Brokenstar didn't think he was improving Shadowclan, he just thought he deserved to do whatever he wanted. But Tigerclaw did think he was helping Thunderclan, and that all the awful things would be worth it in the end.

25- Do you start your novels with dialogue or description? Do you end your novels with dialogue or description?

I almost always start and end with description. I like to ease into my stories rather than starting in the middle of something more intense (although when it comes to reading, I like both equally), and description gives me more wiggle room for the pacing. I do sometimes end chapters with dialogue, especially if there's something dramatic I can use.

Buuuuut admittedly the main reason I don't typically start or end with dialogue is cause I'm bad at it. I think I'm fine at dialogue overall, and sometimes I write really good lines, but there's a lot of weight on the first and last lines of a story. Your hook has to draw people in, make them curious, but not be too confusing without the full context. And I'm not great at coming up with lines that do that.