Lately, I cannot get enough of documentaries on Prime about scary, creepy, and deadly animals.

I prefer the ones that don’t feature the insane individuals who try to keep such animals as pets, but I’ll watch one of those if it’s all I can find.

(No, I never watched Tiger King, and I don’t plan to or want to. I bet it’s a trip, though!)

I have a huge phobia of snakes, and I LOVE snake documentaries. I LOVE them. They creep me out in the best way. I would never want to see a rat snake, much less a venomous snake, in the wild. But I really am fascinated by documentaries about these fierce, deadly creatures.

Anacondas are the only snake to give birth to live babies, rather than lay eggs. That’s nuts. I had learned that in college but forgot about it. And I had no idea how big king cobras can get. I just saw one as wide around as a human man’s arm. UUUUUUGH!!!

How anyone willing chooses to interact in any way at all with these monsters is beyond me. But I can’t look away from film of the encounters. It’s fascinating.

To bring this back around to my books, I did create a fake species of venomous snake in The Magic Council: The Fight for Home. I didn’t name it for some reason. It wasn’t necessary to do. My fake snake is roughly based on a coral snake, but the coloration is different.

Coral snakes are one of the four kinds of venomous snake found in the contiguous US–the others being rattlers, cottonmouths, and copperheads. ALL FOUR CAN BE FOUND IN MY HOME STATE. Lucky me.

It’s not like I have a snake phobia or anything.