Monday, March 10, 2008

F,F&F Post

I also posted over at Fangs, Fur & Fey today. The reader question of the week is: how do you pick the supernatural creature you chose to write about? Check it out there, or read it here:

How do you choose the creatures that you use?

I'll be honest. There are a lot of creatures that show up in urban fantasy that I have a hard time stretching my own personal "suspenders of disbelief" for... and a lot of those creatures are extremely popular with readers and writers. Take werewolves, for instance. I think shape-shifting is cool, but I've already had my main vampire scoff at the idea that they exist in Garnet's universe and mutter something under his breath about the law of "conservation of mass."

Of course, with a snotty attitude like that, I had to prove him wrong, didn't I?

In my May release Romancing the Dead, Garnet comes face-to-snout with someone named Micah Cloud who just *might* be a werewolf. I don't want to give away too many spoilers for the book, but nothing about Micah is what it seems. But I will say I chose to bring Micah into the story precisely to get a chance, as a writer, to play with the reader's assumptions about werewolves and what they do. I even have Garnet ask Micah about that old bug-a-boo the law of conservation of mass, to which he laughs and says, "Yeah, that'd be a problem, if it wasn't MAGIC."

So the short answer is that sometimes I pick the creatures that show up in my urban fantasy in order to comment on what other writers have already written about the subject. I picked werewolves this time, because I'd never written about them and had something about them that I thought I could add to the public dialogue, as it were.

Um, plus, they're fun, and Micah is way hot.

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