I'm not sure if brave is the right word, at this point it's a matter of stubbornness and commitment, lol. With a dash of paranoia that something happens to the art before I get the chance to finish scanning it.

Around the same time I created Tigrin I was in some Titan AE roleplays online and created Tai. I started working on his story later in 2000. Surprisingly, these are the only sketches I found in the binder of him. Unlike Tigrin, physically he's changed very little in 25 years.

More early Tigrins. I drew him only all the time. My early styles were super cute.

Seeing these colorful characters though is making me wonder if I shouldn't go back to something more fun with Tigrin, though, it got so serious over time. Around 2000 is also when I joined the Lion King fanart archive, so some early appearances of lion characters here.

So, when I was a kid I didn't just create one character, I usually made whole sets of characters with very little to no real detail other than their appearance. So early on, Tigrin had a whole cast of characters around him that were just... dog, rabbit, tiger, etc.

A few more early Tigrins.

There's a ton of very small, very early drawings of Tigrin in here. First iterations of Tigrin had him wearing dog tags.

OH, the guide is still up on DeviantArt by the way if you're incredibly bored. www.deviantart.com/tigrin/art/F...

Not saying that the novels ripped me off because I extremely doubt that. I just feel incredibly unoriginal for the ideas I once found so clever when I was in my... 20s. But an idea good enough to get this novel an award I guess.

Even though I've had Tigrin and the furrecats for 25 years now I've never gotten around to actually writing any novels or anything because to be honest, it's not that original of an idea, so the existence of this novel kind of proves to me that yeah, it isn't. That and James Cameron's Avatar movies.

I haven't gotten far enough in Children of Time to find out where the interaction between the humans and spiders leads (the development is very slow and the story drags like crazy), but I can kind of guess, because I know what I'd do if I saw a spider that was six feet long.

The inevitable conflict between the humans and the intelligent creature when the humans discover this nice untouched terraformed world and want it...

The whole general premise of taking an Earth species and making it intelligent using some form of bio-engineering, especially placing humans as a messianic religious figure at the forefront of their culture...

The remaining humans having to sort of pick up the pieces and reuse or repurpose the technology of a generation of humans long since gone, that has sort of passed into myth...

There's a lot of overlapping similarities. The general premise of an advanced future human race terraforming a planet/moon to seed with an intelligent species to rule over as gods, and then destroying themselves in a war that essentially wipes them out and destroys the Earth...

The book was released in 2015. In 2010, I published a brief but fairly detailed guide to DeviantArt of a lot of backstory and information I had compiled at the time of my furrecat species. I'd been working on a lot of that information since the mid-2000s but wanted a record of it somewhere.

To me, the most interesting part of the book is the evolution of the spiders and their civilization. I think a lot of the parallels to humans and the way it flips female/male gender roles kind of bludgeons the reader over the head but that's neither here nor there.

To sum it up briefly, this is a story spanning thousands and thousands of years following separate weaving stories of humans in post-Earth space, and a terraformed world humans have left behind that evolves intelligent life in the unexpected form of jumping spiders that grow to massive size.