I watched both Robot Chicken Star Wars specials on DVD with the kids over the weekend.

I have to say, they (the creators of the show) have pretty much reinvented the characters of Darth Vader and the Emperor. What they have done is made the once evil characters (and some could say 2 dimensional) more human! The Emperor is a whiny so and so who complains all the time and no one takes him seriously, and Darth, well he's turned into a kind of clown, hanging off the Emperor's cloak!

The same thing happened when the new Doctor Who aired about 4 years ago. The episode Dalek painted the creatures with the famous 'exterminate' catch phrase as beings trapped by their own existence. We actually felt for them by the end of the show.

This of course is all inspiring stuff for me.

In a way, with my new book, The Nourisher (and NaNo project), I have turned some ordinary everyday criters, like spiders and wasps and frogs, into something quite different. The hero of my story is a young male spider who has come of age (yes, he's an alien spider four metres high and as ugly as all hell) and responsible for incubating the next generation of his species. The human hero, Drake, has become his symbiotic partner, and at first an unwilling one. He was kidnapped, forced to nourish the hatchlings within the egg the spider, Vernon, carries.

As their relationship grows, and the depth of the story unfolds, it has soon become clear that everything isn't as it seems. Drake discovers why humans are needed, why they are taken for the spiders, and the end result could mean an all out war, with wasps!

That's all I'm revealing at the moment :-)