Hi all!
If you’ve been following my social media, then you’ve probably seen that I went to a zoo earlier this week. I was mostly interested in the big cats, though my boyfriend and I did see other animals as well.
At one point, we came across two housecats that were just wandering around the zoo. (My boyfriend was more excited to see them than any of the other animals…). I did remind him that we see a cat every day as we have Mishka, but he said that these cats were different. Thanks to Mishka and Rocky, I think I’ve almost maxed out my research on cats!
I wanted to see the big cats the most as I wanted to see the way they acted and moved, to make sure I had it right for all of the books that contain big cats. I’ve watched a lot of videos and studied pictures of them, but I wanted to know whether seeing them in person would be any different.
The cheetahs were sunbathing and rolling around, just chilling out. It reminded me of Mafdet, and how playful she is with Bastet and Sekhmet in Curse of Anubis. The way they swished their tails also reminded me of her!
We briefly saw a lion as well, who was also sunbathing before he got up to patrol the other side of his enclosure. I wasn’t aware of how often lions flick their ears to keep flies away, so I’m going to make sure that I add that into Curse of Anubis. I imagine Sekhmet to have a proud strut than a tired lumber that the lion had. I didn’t see any lionesses, just the one male lion. As Sekhmet and Mother Earth are both lionesses, I’m going to do some more research into them.
The tigers were out of sight so we didn’t see them unfortunately. I’m planning on writing a tiger into a LitRPG book I want to write, but that it is in the very earlier stages right now!
Once we’d seen almost all of the animals in the zoo, I couldn’t help myself at the giftshop. I got two little stuffed animals that look exactly like Sekhmet (maned lioness) and Mafdet!
I think I’ve managed to get a few pointers from the big cats on how to write them better. Although, it was quite sad to see them in enclosures than out in the wild. In the future I will just stick to videos and pictures, and try to gauge their mannerisms that way.
Currently, I have the following big cats in my books:
Panther - Celestial Plague series.
Lion - Years.
Lion, Cheetah, Leopard - Curse of Anubis.
Panther - Street Rats.
Tiger, Snow Leopard - unnamed LitRPG.
That’s it for this week, I hope you enjoyed reading! For my blog post next week, I’m letting you decide! You can head over to my Twitter to vote on what I should blog about next.
