Or, "The Ovulation of Fictional Beings!"
Another fairly unscientific look at something only an author would bother thinking about
You know what most people don't ask themselves every day? "What would it be like to be a sexually mature female lizardfolk?" You know why? Because... well... why would you? "Because you're an author writing about anthropomorphized lizard/dragon people and when and how they ovulate is something that you want to know!" Now why would you want- "Stop asking me questions and read the blog!"
My novel features lizardfolk, if you haven't noticed, so one thing I recently started wondering was how they reproduce. It may not come up explicitly in my novel, but it affects the language you use when discuss their culture and life cycle. Do you call an infant a baby or a hatchling? Do you say," When you were born," or "When you hatched?" Do they build a sort of nest? Do they incubate? These questions need to be answered as they impact how the characters go through life.
My answer was for them to come from eggs, and that was enough for me to answer what I needed to know. Later on, however, I began researching how eggs are fertilized in order to understand what would be involved for harvesting eggs from a different chicken-like creature without them becoming fertilized. That sent me down the mental rabbit hole of egg laying frequency in chickens, which made me realize that my lizard people might have a situation on their hands. If you're an egg eating, child-rearing, sentient species, what would your people do if mature sexually-inactive females laid an infertile egg at semi regular intervals?
If you think about it, humans do this, if in a very different way. Female menstruation is quite literally the human body passing an unused egg out of its system. Now granted, humans don't lay eggs covered in a shell filled with nutrients for the potential fetus inside. They pass a microscopic cell and an internal lining along with some blood. Messy, inconvenient, and often painful due to cramps. Birds and reptiles, however, can lay unfertilized eggs complete with shell and yolk, and a humanoid bird/lizard person might do the same.
Now, these creatures I'm thinking about are completely fictional, and the answers to these questions of how, why, when, and what are entirely up to me, their creator. It could be said that there is no need for me to decide or go into detail about any of this especially when it may not come up directly in the story. But knowing how this might work will proactively answer questions I would need to ask if my characters have children. In my book's case, the answer to "what came first: the chicken or the egg?" is the chicken, but that just means I have to figure out the eggs before they show up in my story.
My novel features lizardfolk, if you haven't noticed, so one thing I recently started wondering was how they reproduce. It may not come up explicitly in my novel, but it affects the language you use when discuss their culture and life cycle. Do you call an infant a baby or a hatchling? Do you say," When you were born," or "When you hatched?" Do they build a sort of nest? Do they incubate? These questions need to be answered as they impact how the characters go through life.
My answer was for them to come from eggs, and that was enough for me to answer what I needed to know. Later on, however, I began researching how eggs are fertilized in order to understand what would be involved for harvesting eggs from a different chicken-like creature without them becoming fertilized. That sent me down the mental rabbit hole of egg laying frequency in chickens, which made me realize that my lizard people might have a situation on their hands. If you're an egg eating, child-rearing, sentient species, what would your people do if mature sexually-inactive females laid an infertile egg at semi regular intervals?
If you think about it, humans do this, if in a very different way. Female menstruation is quite literally the human body passing an unused egg out of its system. Now granted, humans don't lay eggs covered in a shell filled with nutrients for the potential fetus inside. They pass a microscopic cell and an internal lining along with some blood. Messy, inconvenient, and often painful due to cramps. Birds and reptiles, however, can lay unfertilized eggs complete with shell and yolk, and a humanoid bird/lizard person might do the same.
Now, these creatures I'm thinking about are completely fictional, and the answers to these questions of how, why, when, and what are entirely up to me, their creator. It could be said that there is no need for me to decide or go into detail about any of this especially when it may not come up directly in the story. But knowing how this might work will proactively answer questions I would need to ask if my characters have children. In my book's case, the answer to "what came first: the chicken or the egg?" is the chicken, but that just means I have to figure out the eggs before they show up in my story.
