Stacey Kennedy on Wolves & Weres

The winner of the signed print copy of The Duke & The Pirate Queen, per Random.org, is Crystal Jordan. Congratulations, Crystal! I'll email you to obtain your mailing address.

Now, please welcome my guest, Stacey Kennedy!

#

What do we know about wolves? They live in a social hierarchy which is lead by an Alpha. They mate for life and will defend that mate to their death. They’re loving, yet deathly lethal when the situation calls them to be. Needless to say, it’s not a surprise that readers are taken by such a beautiful animal when portrayed as a werewolf.

When I created my werewolves in An Everlasting Bite, I followed many of the same rules wolves adhere too. Alphas lead over lower ranking wolves. Their hearts are destined to only one mate. They’re territorial and vicious when provoked. But of course, I changed a few rules too. My wolves are immortal and can shift to a human on command. Not that it hurts any, more just a shift in senses when the magic brings on the change.

As I created the characters, Briggs and Rynn, it really gave me a chance to step outside of myself. To imagine what turning into a werewolf would be like. How every sound would be crisper, how paws would feel when dug into the dirt, and how the wind would feel across your fur. The experience was quite a ride. I suppose by feeling so connected to the wolf while I wrote this story it made me want to understand them more. Through research, I discovered just how playful they are with their pack. And it was this character trait that inspired one of my favourite scenes in An Everlasting Bite. Below I’ve included an excerpt that shows you the sweeter side to a werewolf:

Briggs howled loudly to the moon. When he lowered his head, his eyes shone of rightness, protection, and happiness. But more than that, they showed playfulness. He nudged her side with his nose, nodded toward the forest.

She immediately caught his meaning. She jumped to her feet, returned the look of play and pounced forward. As she ran, she glanced back to see Briggs hitting the ground with his paws in anticipation and wagging his tail. She focused in front of her and ran as if her life depended on it.

His howl came loud, but far away. He let her have a head start, but as she rushed through the trees, she could hear him fast approaching.

She lunged faster, continued to run harder. Her paws barely touched the ground as her speed increased. Her ears twitched back and he began to close the distance. Briggs’ wolf was three times the size of her as a wolf. Needless to say, it didn’t take him long to catch up.

She had an advantage, though, her small size made her slightly quicker. She could weave through trees with impeccable speed while he had to go around them. He couldn’t catch her. He ran to her right, but she never looked back. She didn’t have to. His presence was there, and she could feel his playful banter coursing through her. For wolves, she suspected this was about as fun as it came, and she felt silly right along with him.

Suddenly, he moved faster--lengthened his stride.

Oh crap! He was only humoring her that she could out run him. Before she knew it, he was behind her and gave her backside a little nibble. She skidded to a halt and glanced behind her. He rested, head down and rump in the air, tail wagging.

The wolf within her knew exactly what to do. She lunged toward him. He jumped out of the way to rest in the same position and waited for her attack. Even in his wolf form, his eyes were so amused. He enjoyed this and so did she.

He growled, the sound rumbled through the air as he called her forward. She pounced again, but this time she ended up right on her butt as he maneuvered away from her.
Determined, she crouched down in the position he displayed--the declaration of an attack. She lunged forward. This time he let her. When she collided with him, they rolled around within the leaves and dirt, nibbling at each other.

After a final tumble, she jumped away. When she met his gaze, his eyes were smiling. She couldn’t deny how fun this was. As wolves, this was happiness. She’d needed this. Just silly fun. No danger, only them.

***

Thank you, Victoria, for letting me stop by and share my werewolves with you! Now I ask all of you, what side do you like most to the wolf―the sweet side or their ferocious protective nature?


#

Thanks, Stacey!

Occupied Lands in World War One

The novel I'm working on now, a sequel to The Moonlight Mistress, focuses on the main werewolf characters from that novel and their marriage of convenience. Tanneken, the female werewolf, was working as a spy in the previous novel, so I decided to make her activities central to the plot.

These are the books I've used so far. I recommend them all highly.

I mentioned Tammy Proctor's Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War in an earlier post. I extensively used this book's bibliography to locate other sources, among them those listed below. The most useful thing I learned from it was how the underground spy networks in Belgium were organized, and some specific stories about women who worked in intelligence-gathering, and their fates.

Scraps of Paper: German Proclamations in Belgium and France reproduces actual posters and provides translations. Another of my books referenced this one, so I didn't need the material for the most part, but the coolness factor was important here. Primary source documents, or close equivalents, are great for giving me a feel for a period.

The Long Silence: Civilian Life under the German Occupation of Northern France, 1914-1918 is the most useful book I found. The author, Helen McPhail, points out that it's not a thorough academic study, but there was more than enough information for my purposes. I got a really good feel for what life was like in occupied Northern France, as well as the various problems and subterfuges of the people living there. I'm hoping the information in this book will help me to vividly describe the place and time without directly copying actual events.

Related Posts:
Synergy in Writing and Research

Research Books Whee!

Werewolves in WWI? Why Not?

This post was written for Harlequin's Paranormal Romance Blog.

For The Moonlight Mistress, I combined a historical novel with paranormal elements. As you probably know already if you read this blog regularly, the book is set during the early days of World War One, and begins with a romance between Lucilla, an English chemist and nurse, and Pascal, a French scientist. They're trapped in Germany when war is declared and must escape together.

I could have gone from there to write a straightforward wartime adventure novel, but instead I established that Pascal is only in Germany because he's investigating rumors of a werewolf held captive by an amoral scientist. Soon, two werewolf characters are introduced, one a soldier and the other a spy, and their role in the war and their relationship is woven into the novel's main plot.

I love historical romance, but I love historical science fiction and fantasy even more, particularly when there are romantic elements. To me, mixing genres is a way to avoid the same-old, same-old of historical romance.

For example, the plot of a historical romance might be: hero and heroine meet, family/money/status/scandalous past/amnesia keep them apart, then they must resolve their issues to be brought together romantically. For me, those plot complications and their resolutions become more compelling if the family issue is that a werewolf needs to marry another werewolf or she can't have werewolf children, or if the scandalous past results from the heroine not being human and not having human standards of behavior. Not knowing what to expect makes the journey more fun.

I've been asked, more than once, why World War One? Why werewolves?

I'm fascinated by World War One and the period immediately before and after. It might be because I grew up reading Dorothy Sayers' Peter Wimsey mysteries, or might be because my school history classes rarely spent much time on those decades, and that made me more curious rather than less. Regardless, I have several shelves of reference books on the period and love to read about it even when I'm not writing it. Also, I rarely find fiction, especially romance, set during World War One. If I want some, I have to write it myself. So I did!

For me, World War One is a period when large parts of the world underwent a major change. One of the themes of that change, in my opinion, is technology and the way humans relate to it. In that war, technology was used for violence: massive artillery, airplanes, tanks, poison gas. Humans used technology to kill each other in mass numbers.

I chose werewolves as my paranormal element because werewolves are often used, thematically, to symbolize or represent nature and the vital life force of wild creatures. Wolves are hunters, killing to eat; humans at war are killing for reasons distant from immediate survival. For that reason, I felt werewolves were a good contrast to the technology theme.

In particular, my werewolves are rare and growing more so. What happens when nature suffers at the hands of technology? What happens when a scientist tries to bend nature to his will, in order to gain power over other people? How do the goals of the humans and the werewolves come into conflict? I enjoyed these questions so much that I would like to write another novel with the same themes one day.

Also? Werewolves are sexy. There's something about all that animal energy that makes them appealing – think Wolverine in the X-Men comics – he's not a werewolf, but he has a similar appeal. I wanted my characters to have some of that energy, and at the same time to be more like people to whom I'd be drawn in real life.

One of the things I love most about real-world wolves is that they are playful. They play with each other, and they will even play with other species, such as crows. I included that element by having my male werewolf be a bit of a joker. The female werewolf is much more serious because of her past experiences, but that aspect of play is one of the things that most attracts her to her future partner. I incorporated verbal banter into most of their dialogue and of course into their sex scene, which takes place in human form. For them, being able to talk to each other is an added level of intimacy. When one of them is in human form and the other in wolf form, play is still an element of their relationship; one teases the other.

As a way of making the werewolf characters less like ordinary humans, I used their senses of smell. Scent affects their perceptions and feelings, including their relationship with each other. When they meet, they can immediately tell that they are both werewolves, and that affects the ways in which they interact. They're human, but they're also something more.

Finally, werewolves are an important element of the genre-mixing I mentioned back at the beginning of this post. They're the unexpected element. A novel about World War One has lots of available conflict for the characters. Any reader can predict what might happen to a group of characters who go off to war. So why not add werewolves, and see what happens?

Nifty Werewolf Books

If you have a chance, check out Werewolves At Home, a webcomic tie-in to The Moonlight Mistress.

This is a list of werewolf books that I've liked a lot or had recommended to me. Suggestions welcome!

Benighted (alternate title: Bareback) by Kit Whitfield is one of the most original werewolf novels I've ever read. There's a romance, but this isn't a romance novel (so don't expect a happy ending). If not for the werewolves, I would call it mainstream or noir suspense. The world of the novel is filled with werewolves, and on moon nights the only ones who can police the lunes are "barebacks," humans who through a genetic accident cannot change form. Lunes lock themselves up on moon nights, or are supposed to make their way to designated shelters, but what about the children with no oversight? The drunks who can't find their way to a lockup? The lunes who like running free and don't care if they hurt someone?

It's also a novel about minority oppression, from the first-person pov of a bareback who works as a sort of lawyer for those involved when lunes attack humans. When the book opens, she's slated to defend a lune who bit off a bareback's hand, and she's pretty sure it wasn't strictly an accident.

Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause. This one's Young Adult. Interestingly, the heroine is the werewolf; she is wrestling with her love for a human boy, and whether he can accept her wolf-self.

Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn. This urban fantasy series is still going on, and I'm still enjoying it - recently, Vaughn added some new plot elements that I think gave the series new life. What I like best about it is Kitty's radio show, which despite its supernatural discussion topics, feels absolutely real to me. I also loved, in the first book, Vaughn's take on pack dynamics.

Alien Taste by Wen Spencer is not quite a werewolf novel, but it sort of is at the same time. It has some really wacky stuff in it, nothing like anything else out there, and I recommend it for that reason.

Finally, Lycanthia or Children of the Wolves by Tanith Lee is fantasy, and thick with gothic atmosphere and her complex, unique prose. I didn't actually like the protagonist much, but this is a great read for when you're bundled up in a blanket, occasionally staring out a snowy window.

Related post: Spooky Book Recommendations.

Werewolves All Over the World

I think that the werewolves currently depicted in paranormal romance are, gradually, creating a new idea of what a werewolf in fiction ought to be - in other words, reader expectation is being affected by what mythological details writers choose to present, or invent. Also, of course, writers who read in their genre can't help but be influenced by it.

There are plenty of werewolf types I haven't yet seen in paranormal romance, and I'm wondering if, as the subgenre ages, we'll see more different types, as writers try to stand out from the crowd and as readers grow tired of the "same old thing."

Here are a few to get you started:

The Lobisón is of Argentinian and Brazilian origin. The idea is that the seventh son in a row (daughters don't count in the seven, and a seventh daughter in a row will be a witch) will turn into a werewolf. The Lobisón spends the rest of his life wandering in the wild, eating carrion, and attacking any humans he sees; if the human survives his bite, the saliva turns them into a Lobisón as well. He'd make a great character for a Gothic, wouldn't he? Or, of course, a "Beauty and the Beast" story.

The Finnish werewolf usually is cursed to have the second form, either from being bespelled or accidentally breaking a taboo. They aren't usually happy about this, and hang around houses, hoping to be recognized for their true self (a perfect romance theme!). They eat animals for the most part, rather than attacking people. Cures include being called by their true name or being fed bread, or both. And perhaps True Love could factor in?

Portugese werewolves are called lobis-homems, easily spotted because of their short yellow tails. Like the Finnish werewolves, the transformational ability was bestowed by a spell. The curse compels the victim to roll in crossroads dirt, which incites them to change into wolf-form and run howling into the night. They don't attack humans, except when the lobis-homem was created by evil arts; the evil ones are set apart by the presence of a demonic mark somewhere on their body, or something strange about their eyes.

This is a classic book on werewolves, and often cited: The Book of Werewolves. I also thought this book looked interesting: Werewolves: A Field Guide to Shapeshifters, Lycanthropes, and Man-Beasts.

If anyone has any good resources on different types of werewolves, please pass them on!

Related posts:
Paranormal Appropriation.

Romancing the Beast.

Why Werewolves?

Werewolves in Moonlight Mistress.

Moonlight Mistress excerpt - First Meeting with the Villain

In this scene, the two werewolves Tanneken and Ashby meet their captor, Herr Kauz, for the first time (Tanneken has met him before the novel begins, but this is the reader's introduction to him). When describing Herr Kauz, I call him a traditional Evil Scientist.

#

Tanneken woke in a cage, together with Ashby. Crouched next to her, both of them still naked, he looked more alert than she felt, probably because his larger form lent him more resistance to Kauz' sedative gas. A hot electric light illuminated them alone, throwing the rest of the room into deepest shadow. Just at the edge of the shadow, Kauz sat on a plain wooden chair, rolling a rattan cane between his palms.

Her urge to snarl stopped before it reached her throat, as fear slammed into her unexpected and vicious as a blow. She had thought she'd forgotten, crushed her memories, but his unexpected appearance, her helpless at his will, was too much like it had been before, and her carefully built defenses crumbled.

Ashby laid a hand on the middle of her back, spreading his fingers wide over her spine. The touch was hotter than the light, tingling out to the ends of her fingers and toes. She sat up quickly, throwing off his hand, and summoned her most arrogant stare to aim at the old man outside the cage.

"Cowardly son of pox-ridden incest," she said. "Come closer, and I will give you all that you deserve."

Ashby said nothing. She could sense him near her, tension singing through his limbs. When she glanced at him, he settled back onto his heels, his hands loose at his sides rather than concealing his genitals. He smiled. "Like what you see, Herr Kauz?"

Kauz used his cane to lever himself from the chair, then stalked a step closer, then another. Tanneken willed herself not to cringe away. Suddenly, he whipped the cane against the bars with a mighty rattling clang.


#

c. Victoria Janssen 2009

Pre-order on Amazon.com.

More excerpts.

More villain scenes!

Leah Braemel
Shelley Munro
Anya Bast
Cynthia Eden
SJ Day
Jaci Burton
Michelle Pillow
Juliana Stone
Moira Rogers
Sacha White
TJ Michaels
Lacey Savage
McKenna Jeffries
Jody Wallace
Eliza Gayle
Kelly Maher
Vivian Arend
Taige Crenshaw
Beth Williamson

On writing The Moonlight Mistress

This post originated as a guest post for Lust in Time in December, 2008.

When I sold The Duchess, Her Maid, The Groom and Their Lover, the contract was for two books. I'd submitted several brief ideas for the second book, but didn't think about it too much until after I turned in the duchess manuscript. All I'd decided was that the story would be set during World War One (a research interest of mine, so I already had a library), and that it would have werewolves. I actually had the beginnings of a werewolf novel set during WWI, but after pondering for a few weeks, I realized that story would not work as an erotic novel. It was entirely too grim.

World War One is not the first setting one thinks of for an erotic romp; a dark, serious novel, yes, but I didn't want to write that kind of book; I wanted something fun, or at least mostly fun. So I came up with the idea of melding pulp adventure novels with the early days of World War One. In a pulp adventure novel, werewolves wouldn't be strange at all, and rather than make the war itself a villain, the force opposing the characters could be a classically cruel and amoral scientist. Overall, I wanted to work in two themes: differences between appearances and reality in relation to self, and technological warfare and a changing world affecting creatures of nature. My original title was Other Skins, to reflect those themes. Though I considered Sweet Savage Werewolves, too. *heh*

I would be writing something along the lines of the Doc Savage pulp stories, only set in an earlier period (interestingly, the characters in that series had backstory that they'd fought in WWI). I began to think about the characters, initially, in terms of their roles. To help my thought process, I polled my friends on which types of characters I should include. All of the characters in what eventually was titled Moonlight Mistress began as types, such as "a world-weary nurse who might shoot someone if they interfered with her patients" or "a cranky French soldier who is an expert in something useful." Once I'd narrowed down the most popular of the types I'd brainstormed, I then polled again, on possible pairings. The answers I received were different, in some cases, than the choices I'd made myself, but after some thought, I realized in those cases my friends were smarter than I was. Also, the whole process of polling was a lot of fun, for
both me and my friends, and got my tired brain started working on the new story. Once I had the types, I gave the characters names, and began to figure out who they were by writing scenes. I didn't complete a synopsis of the book, to turn in to my editor, until I had a significant amount of draft completed. Unlike the duchess novel, I never completed an outline, though I did make a list of scenes I wanted to write or felt I needed.

For a historical novel, the research is the best part, because mostly it involves reading. I searched out various bits of data online, but for the most part I read books, or read the parts of books that I needed. However, I didn't have time to do all the reading before I began writing. And no matter how much I knew before I began writing, I would definitely need to research more things as I went along and saw what the story needed.

The best research tool I had was a sheet of tiny stickies, which I used to mark pages in books that held useful information. This saved me from having to spend time making notes, and I could read whenever I was unable to write (for example, while riding the bus). The second best tool I discovered was keeping a list of research questions, as they came up. I wouldn't stop my writing session for research on these tiny items; I would make a note and go on, and later look up several answers at once. Examples of these questions are "list of period Anglican choral composers" and "car available with self-starter in 1914?" and "area of chemical study appropriate for time period."

The details go by in an instant when reading, but they contribute a lot to the historical feel. If a detail is needed, I always try to make sure that detail is one that points up the differences between now and then, just enough to snag the reader's attention and show them the book's world is different from her world, but not enough to make her feel I've been dumping information for the sake of showing off my research. I hope I was successful! I guess I'll find out in December 2009.


You can have a look at my personal research library at LibraryThing.

You can find Amazon links for some of these sources compiled on this page of my website.

Related post:
Some examples of line edits in The Moonlight Mistress.

Werewolves in Moonlight Mistress

The first thing I like about werewolves is that, unlike vampires, they are alive. And they will eat you. All up.

Second, I like the fur. Who wouldn't? Warm, furry werewolf to snuggle up to at night? And when they purr...oh, wait. That's cats. Well, you get the idea. Can any romance heroine resist digging her fingers into her werewolf boyfriend's plush pelage?

Third, I like that erotic wet dog smell...no, wait. The rich odor of raw meat...wait. Oh, yeah. That wonderful scent of pine forests and crisp mountain breezes.

Really, none of those things show up in Moonlight Mistress. What I like about werewolves are the same things I like about wolves. Wolves love their families. Wolves can be playful. Wolves put females in charge of many important duties, such as locating suitable dens with adequate nearby food supplies and controlling the pack's matings and thus its future genetic health. For that reason, I'm rarely fond of werewolf heroes in romance who are overwhelmingly dominant.

Those are the traits I borrowed for my werewolves in Moonlight Mistress. The first werewolf character is female, and though so far her attempts to start a family have been disastrous, it's an important goal for her; in their world, werewolves are rare, and must be born rather than made. The second werewolf character, male, is a bit of a rake but that behavior is related to his search for another werewolf with whom he can create a family. He's playful, and willing to let her control him in certain things. Their shared goal leads to her accepting a marriage of convenience, so they can have children who are also werewolves. Someday, I'd like to write a novel about their marriage of convenience and how it progresses, which wasn't within the scope of Moonlight Mistress.

Related post:

Of Wolves and Men.

Of Wolves and Men

This post includes some of my research on wolves, for Moonlight Mistress.

I particularly liked Of Wolves and Men by Barry Holstun Lopez, because it featured a lot of observations he and others had made in the wild. The book is from Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1978.

Some quotes:
p. 53 "Wolves do not get hungry in the way we normally understand hunger. Their feeding habits and digestive systems are adapted to a feast-or-famine existence and to procuring and processing massive amounts of food in a relatively short time. They are more or less always hungry. Wolves commonly go without food for three or four days and then gorge, eating as much as eighteen pounds of meat at one sitting." Digestion then takes 2-3 hours.



"A Russian record reports a wolf going without food for seventeen days...."

p. 54 "Wolves consume an average of 5-10 pounds of meat a day and wash it down with large quantities of water to prevent uremic poisoning from the high production of urea associated with a meat diet. The wolf has a large liver and pancreas to aid digestion...."

p. 59 "If the prey runs, it is almost certain to be chased. If it refuses to run, or approaches the wolves, it may be left alone...signals, perhaps, between predator and prey."

p. 67 ."The wolf seems to have few relationships with other animals that could be termed purely social, though he apparently takes pleasure in the company of ravens."

Crystal Jordan Guest Post: How To Make The Mating Instinct Work

Today's post is by Crystal Jordan, author of On the Prowl and many other works. You can visit her blog here: http://www.crystaljordan.com/blog/ and her website here: http://www.crystaljordan.com/

Welcome, Crystal! It's great to have you!

How To Make The Mating Instinct Work

So, I saw a list of plotlines an author "has to work extra hard to make me accept" on Victoria's blog the other day, and when I read this quote:

Destined Love and/or reincarnation and/or Genetic Mating or scent-marking or whatever that makes the relationship instantly gel

I took it as a challenge. You see, I write shape-shifters. Often. Some of them have this destined mate thing, some of them don't. I like to mix it up from one imaginary "world" to the next. Mostly so I don't get bored--I have to admit, that one isn't for my readers' benefit.

I do think it's possible to pull off the "destined love" and "genetic mating" thing. However, I completely agree with Victoria that nothing should make a relationship instantly gel. If that's why a writer uses the mating instinct, then I think it's a contrived plot device that's as annoying as any other that readers encounter. I'm not saying my work is always perfect on this front, believe me, but I do think there are ways for the mating instinct to be part of the plot without seeming forced.

First, I think destined mating should cause more problems than it solves. Yes, the mating instinct should not be seen by either or both (or all, in the case of menage or more) parties as a good thing. In fact, it's usually something they want to avoid, manipulate, control, or run away from like the hounds of hell were nipping at their heels. An example from my own work: Antonio and Solana are the main characters in one of the novellas in my newest book On the Prowl. He's the newly minted leader of a Pride of panther-shifters. One of the biggest problems for these shifters is keeping the population up because they can only breed if they are mated, and not everyone is guranteed a mate. Antonio tracks his mate down only to find she's a non-shifter--someone who will never be able to breed, someone who was kicked out of his Pride for just this reason before he came home to assume leadership. So the fact that the two of them are mates is something that makes neither of them very happy. They don't want it, they fight against it, and they have to come to terms with how being together will negatively affect their lives.

And that's where I come to the second must-do on making mating work. I think the writer needs to make it obvious that these people would choose to be together even without the mating instinct. The instinct may be what makes them completely unable to walk away from the person they see (at first) as being the least-acceptable partner for them, or the worst possible choice they could make, but it can't be the only common ground they have to stand on by the end of the story. In other words, the romance has to be believable even if you didn't have the mating instinct going on in your book.

However, I do think that having that mating instinct is just an extension of most people's desire for a "soul mate." That one person (or people) that was fashioned just for you. That perfect match. With shape-shifters and destined mates, it's a more culturally recognized institution for that kind of species, but that doesn't mean the people involved don't have as much (or more) work cut out for them in making the relationship work. Plus, for me, the mating thing? Is hot. I love the instantaneous connection (and, in my books, that means sexual connection with a heat-rating that's off the charts and orgasms that register on the Richter scale), but insta-connection should never, ever equal insta-relationship. Everyone has to grow and earn their happy ending, mates or no mates.

Related Posts:
Why I Love the Marriage of Convenience Plot.

Intricacies of the Marriage of Convenience Plot.

Where's the Sexual Line in Paranormal Romance?

Types of Paranormal Romance.

Why Werewolves?

This post is a recap of my guestblog for the Full Moon of Werewolves at Lori Devoti's blog.

My Harlequin Spice December 2009 release, Moonlight Mistress, is an erotic novel set during the early days of World War One. It also happens to feature two werewolf characters, one male and one female.

The werewolves aren't the main characters; their presence generates plot because an evil scientist tortures them with his experiments. It's the human characters who rescue them and send them off to what I hope will be another story, their own story.

So why have werewolves at all? It's not as if World War One doesn't provide enough plot all on its own. However, I realized pretty quickly that World War One is not the most ideal setting for an erotic romp.

World War One supplies plenty of conflict, but it all revolves around soldiers, refugees, the wounded, and the dead. Despite my deep interest in reading about the war, I didn't want this book to be grimly realistic. There are plenty of memoirs and other works of nonfiction where those details can be found. I chose to use enough details to give the reader an idea of the time period, but not so many as to give them nightmares.

Adding a werewolf plot meant I could inject a little fantasy, to let the reader rest from the unrelenting horror of war. The werewolf element could open the door for further thoughts of fantasy, thoughts of erotic fantasy. Not only are werewolves fantastical, they can be sexy, too.

It was a tricky balance of realism and fantasy. Too much realism, and the book isn't fun anymore. Too much fantasy, and the book loses plot tension. I balanced the two elements by giving my werewolves realistic characterization.

One werewolf is a soldier, the other serves as a spy. Their werewolf attributes are more science fictional than fantastic. I didn't want to travel too far from a "realistic" or "mimetic" approach, so I decided their transformations would not be linked only to the full moon, and that the full moon would not force a change. I also decided that being a werewolf was hereditary, and though interbreeding with humans was possible, the trait rarely passed down in its entirety. I didn't go into the actual mechanics of transformation, but described it as a physical process rather than a magical one. I wanted the werewolves to seem as if they belonged, as if they, too, were part of the historical setting.

I hope it worked! You can find out in December of 2009.

Related post:

Of Wolves and Men.

guest-blogging today over at Lori Devoti's place

You can find me today at Lori Devoti's blog, as part of her "Full Moon of Werewolves":

http://loridevoti.com/blog/