(NOTE: This was originally posted on my Facebook profile on March 1, 2025.)
With everything that’s happened in the U.S. in the past couple of days (well, since January 20, really), I’m extremely thankful for werewolves.
Yeah, that paragraph is a bit tongue in cheek. Anyone who knows me, knows I have a bit of a warped/dark sense of humor. I inherited it from my dad; blame him.
But here’s the thing… (Story time, long post ahead. Mild content warning for mention of bullying and self-unaliving ideation, and allusions to domestic abuse.)
I grew up getting bullied a lot. At home and at school. I had undiagnosed depression and PTSD, along with what is still undiagnosed (formally; I’ve had multiple professionals confirm my suspicions) autism. I had few friends. Little to no social life.
But I had my imagination. I had my stories. I started telling stories before I learned how to write; as soon as someone taught me how to hold a pencil and form letters on paper, I started writing those stories down.
I still remember the first story I completed. It was about a five-year-old girl named Maria who was sent to Canada to live with her uncle. Complete wish fulfillment. But I–at age five–wrote it. It was mine. It came out of my brain.
Growing up, writing literally saved my life more than once. There were times I definitely did not want to be alive, but I poured that pain, the anger toward the bullies, all of those emotions into my stories. I wrote about a dozen book-length stories from grades 6-12, all handwritten in spiral notebooks. (I typed a couple of them, but this was before word processors were common, and my typewriter annoyed me.) I still have all of them. They aren’t great, but for a kid between 11-17 years old, they aren’t bad.
When I married my kids’ father, I stopped writing for over a decade because it pissed him off, and it was safer not to piss him off. But it got to the point where the voices of the characters in my imagination overrode the fear. I started writing again. From 2005-2010, I wrote 40 young adult novels that were all part of one overarching series broken into four sub-series. I no longer have all of the originals of those, but that’s because I started rewriting them a year or two ago hoping to publish them, before I realized I didn’t have the mental bandwidth or time right now.
In an indirect way, writing the first book of those 40 led to me being able to get out of that marriage, but that’s another story for another time.
While I was still in that marriage, a friend challenged me to write something “depicting sex in a positive light.” (He was my friend, but also my energy healing mentor, and that was sort of an assignment.) I did. I was actually pretty impressed with it. He helped me come up with the name Karenna Colcroft to write “that sort of thing” under. (He actually suggested Cockroft as the last name, but I thought that was a little too obvious for an author of erotic fiction.)
The friendship ended in 2007, but the writing didn’t. Not then, at least. In fact, through posting stories online, I found my first publisher. Through trying to connect to other authors, I found friends and my second and third publishers. I kept writing. When I met my current husband, he not only didn’t mind that I wrote but actually bragged to other people about it.
From 2009-2017, I had over 80 novels, novellas, and short stories published. The majority were under the Karenna Colcroft name, fairly equally split between heterosexual romance and male/male romance, which I started writing after encouragement from one of my online friends, a man who wrote male/male romance. Some books during that era were young adult fiction under the name Jo Ramsey.
And then my brain fell apart. Not literally, of course, but major burnout led me to start having full-blown panic attacks any time I sat down to write. In 2016, I stopped writing. My last Karenna Colcroft book was published in spring of that year. My last two Jo Ramsey books were published in 2017, but one of those was a rerelease of a book originally published in 2013.
I missed writing. I felt like I wasn’t me anymore without the stories. But until 2020, I couldn’t even contemplate sitting down to write without having a panic attack.
Then I started with some metaphysical nonfiction connected to the business I had. And then, starting in 2021, I wrote some kids’ books, fiction, about a girl in a Pagan family. That was the first fiction I’d written in 5 years.
And later that year, out of boredom, I started rereading some of the Karenna Colcroft books–and decided it was time for some of them to see the light of day again.
The first male/male romance *novel* (as opposed to short story) I ever wrote was Salad on the Side. A novel about the world’s only gay vegan werewolf and his mate, the sexually submissive Alpha. One book became a 5-book series. Kyle and Tobias, the vegan and his mate, were among my favorite characters ever. So when I decided to self-publish rereleases of my previously-published books, I decided to start with Salad on the Side.
I updated all five of the books in the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series, because they were originally written between 2010-2013, and that showed in the technology and some slang that wasn’t really appropriate back then and definitely wouldn’t be acceptable now.
And then I started writing new things. New romances, even though the romance writing was the first thing to go when I burned out.
And Kyle and Tobias said, “What the hell were you thinking, only giving us five books? There’s a lot more to tell!” So I started expanding Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat, with book 6 released last summer and book 7 released on January 9 of this year.
Book 6 of their series led to two new characters, one of whom literally came out of nowhere. I needed an inciting incident for the story–and there was Quinn Boucher, a 22-year-old recently-changed werewolf who not only captured my attention but rated mentions in every review done of that book, Take Some Tahini. So I spun Quinn and his mate Malachi Powers–a 130-year-old lone wolf who really didn’t want a mate, let alone one as young as Quinn–into their own series. Book 1, Ebb and Flow, came out in October; book 2, Future and Past, will be out next month.
For a little while in 2022 and 2023, I wrote a couple of books that weren’t werewolf-related… but the werewolves won, and there are so many stories flooding my brain that I’ll probably be writing them for a good long time.
When I was growing up, and in the waning years of my first marriage, writing saved my life on multiple occasions. And now, with everything happening in this country and the world, it’s saving my sanity, because being able to spend a few hours a day plunging into a fictional Massachusetts (in Real Werewolves) or Nova Scotia (in the Ebb and Flow series) gives me the breathing room to come back and face the real world.
So, with everything that’s happened since January 20… I am thankful for werewolves.
