Category: Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat

There’s Something In My Eye…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I’m currently working on the first draft of Sorry About the Seitan (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 8), and yesterday I wrote a scene that almost made me cry. I guess it’s good if I can elicit that kind of reaction in myself; it might mean my readers will like the scene too.

I can’t say what the scene is, because it would be a spoiler. Even though the book won’t be out until July, by which time most people who read this will probably have forgotten, I want to avoid spoiling it as much as I possibly can.

What I will say: The book takes place at Christmas time, and the scene takes place at the Christmas get-together Tobias and Kyle throw in their new home. The tears are happy ones.

I’ll also say that Quinn is still working for Tobias and Kyle at this point in the series timeline, and Malachi makes a guest appearance.

(If you have no idea who I’m talking about, read any of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books, especially Take Some Tahini, along with Ebb and Flow.)

I might not get a lot of writing done over the next couple of weeks, because it actually is Christmas time and I have to do family stuff. But I’ve made a lot of progress in this book (I started it two weeks ago, and I’m on page 66), so I’m hoping to keep the momentum going.

If my darn characters would stop making me have something in my eye.

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It Was a Long Week…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

When I’m not writing books, I work at a daycare center. I’m usually only there about 15 hours a week; my job is to cover the lunch breaks of the full-time staff. But this past week, due to staff members being on vacation or out for other reasons, I worked 26 hours. Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was more than I’m used to. (I have chronic health issues that impede my ability to work; I can’t manage full-time at all, which is why I took a part-time job.) And I haven’t been sleeping well the past several days, so today, I’m completely exhausted.

On the plus side, though, I got through December 1. Two awful things happened on that date, in 2022 and 2023 respectively, so I was a little worried about how things would go. But I got through the day, and this year nothing awful happened. (Though arguably, the U.S. presidential election was an early horrible thing for this year…)

And despite having to work more this week, and spending a lot of my time at home trying to sleep, I managed to get a solid start on writing Sorry About the Seitan (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 8)! I’m very happy about that. So far, a lot of what I’ve written is backstory, which I’ll wind up removing when I edit the book.

A very short excerpt (unedited):

Some time later, I realized the room was a lot brighter than it had been. I’d slept so deeply I didn’t remember any dreams, which was probably a good thing. My nightmares didn’t affect me as much as Kyle’s and Quinn’s affected them; I’d had decades to get used to them and to work through some of the trauma that spawned them. But that didn’t mean I enjoyed having them, and a night without any that I recalled was a good night.

Beside me, Kyle still breathed evenly. Either he was still asleep or he’d chosen to pretend he was. I didn’t need to know which. During the night, we’d rolled away from each other. I debated waking him for some cuddling—and possibly the enactment of his promise—before we went downstairs for breakfast, but a glance at my phone showed that we didn’t have time. The fact that the sun was up on a December morning when sunrise was after 7 a.m. should have clued me in to the fact that I should have already been downstairs.

I rushed through cleaning up in the bathroom that adjoined our bedroom and pulled on slacks and a sweater. Ordinarily, what I wore in the morning didn’t matter much. I kept things as informal as I could, especially at mealtimes. But with Justin scheduled to arrive within a couple of hours, I had to look more official.

I wasn’t a fan of “official.” But it was part of the cost of being the Anax.

The Best-Laid Plans…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I try to plan in advance what books I’ll be working on and when.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that those plans often get changed.

This is partly on me. Sometimes I bite off more than I can chew, so to speak, and plan too many projects in too short an amount of time. That was the case this year, when originally I’d planned to release 6 books. Accidentally deleting my Amazon account back in May and having to republish everything slowed me down. So did struggling to write the first draft of Bring On the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7), since having to scrap most of the original draft and start the whole book over ate into the time I’d set aside for a different project. Which is why Ebb and Flow, originally intended as a September release, ended up being released in October instead.

Another thing that contributed to the change in plans was that two of the books I’d originally intended to release this year weren’t actually paranormal romance. I wanted to rerelease my Can’t Drag Me Down series, three contemporary romance books originally published between 2013-2016. The series was another example of changes in plan; I’d spoken with my editor at the publisher where these books were being published (Loose Id) and discussed at least two additional books in the series, but right about the time I started working on book 4, I started having panic attacks when I sat down to write anything romancey. Then Loose Id closed its doors, so Can’t Drag Me Down wound up being only three books, each of which follows a different drag queen from a club in Boston.

Book 2 of that series, Last Chance Tattoo, takes place in Ludington, Michigan, but the drag queen main character came from Boston. If I’d rereleased the books as planned, I intended to rewrite Last Chance Tattoo to take place in western Massachusetts instead. I also would have ended up doing some rewrites to the other two books to accommodate Remington Real, the drag queen character introduced in Fill the Empty Spaces. The main characters of Can’t Drag Me Down make walk-on appearances in Spaces, and I’d justified rereleasing CDMD by the fact that the series is now directly tied to Fill the Empty Spaces, which *is* paranormal.

But I ultimately decided against doing those rereleases, at least this year. There were several factors in that decision: First, as noted, Bring On the Broccoli took much longer for a workable first draft than I’d anticipated, which took away time I’d budgeted for doing the CDMD rewrites. Second, CDMD is not a paranormal series, despite the tie-in with Fill the Empty Spaces. When I was writing for publishers, a decade-ish ago, I wrote both paranormal and contemporary romance, though even some of the contemporaries had minor paranormal elements. But when I relaunched as Karenna Colcroft in 2022, I planned to focus only on paranormal.

Also… werewolves.

Fill the Empty Spaces is the only book I’ve released since 2022 that *doesn’t* have werewolves, and even that actually does. (Suzannah Daigle, the Boston North Pack healer who appears in some of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books, makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo appearance in Spaces, in the scene where Del breaks down in Piers Park. In the original draft of Spaces, there was even more of a tie-in with RWDEM characters, but I cut that out in the final draft because it was bogging down the story.) Of the other books, 6 are directly part of Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat; the Chance Met duology is connected to RWDEM since one of the main characters of Chance Met is a secondary character in RWDEM; and Ebb and Flow is an intentional spin-off from RWDEM. Hooch and Howls is now also connected (loosely) to RWDEM because the main character of Hooch is also one of the main characters of Ebb and Flow.

Because I am apparently completely incapable of not creating connections and threads between books, whether I intend to or not.

But the point is that of the 11 male/male romance books I’ve released since 2022, 10 of them have werewolves and are either part of or connected to the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series. Fill the Empty Spaces is the outlier, despite Suzannah’s cameo appearance, and its sales seem to reflect that. (A Fighting Chance, book 2 of the Chance Met duology, has sold more poorly than Spaces, but that in large part is due to it only being out for 10 days before I deleted my Amazon account, so it didn’t have as much time to gain an audience. And I’ve slacked on promoting it since I republished it.) So I’m kind of thinking that I need to embrace the werewolfery of it all and keep my books focused on those characters, either through continuations of RWDEM or books that are somehow connected to that series.

Which rules out Can’t Drag Me Down, at least for the time being. It also rules out Dawn Over Dayfield, my suspense-with-romantic-elements novel, which I’d slated for rerelease in April 2025. Dayfield is also not paranormal, but because of the historical aspects of the story, it *feels* paranormal to me. It’s also one of only two of my books to have won an award, first place in the Mystery category of the 2016 Florida Authors and Publishers Association President’s Book Awards. (The other book to have won an award is, somewhat ironically, Fill the Empty Spaces…) But if I’m focusing on werewolves, Dayfield doesn’t have a place. And also, after I released Ebb and Flow, the main characters Quinn and Malachi started whispering in my mind’s ear about a sequel… which I’m currently working on.

I don’t know if all the changes in plans I’ve made over the past couple of years means I need to try harder to stick to the plans I make… or means that I need to stop planning more than a couple-few months in advance. But either way, werewolves.

Progress and Process

Posted on by karennacolcroft

For far longer than I anticipated, I’ve been working on Bring On the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7). I wrote a draft that took me over 3 months to complete, which is nearly twice as long as my drafts usually take, and then realized that that draft was mostly unusable. There wasn’t enough action, and Kyle Slidell, my vegan werewolf who narrates this book, was almost entirely just narrating instead of being part of the story. Some aspects of the story didn’t work, and some either contradicted or ignored plot points from the previous books.

So I started over.

I spent about a week doing a brainstorm/outline of the book, which isn’t something I typically do, but this time it felt necessary so I could make sure the book actually proceeded as planned. The brainstorm came to 15 pages, longer than some short stories I’ve written.

And within the first week of working on the new draft, the outline was pretty much out the window. Because my werewolves are oppositional cusses.

I kept working on the book, but after a while decided I needed a new brainstorm/outline so I could keep track of what was going on. I spent about 3 days on the new brainstorm.

And now half of *that* one is out the window.

On the plus side, the book is proceeding much more smoothly than the original draft. Even though the werewolves keep throwing me curveballs. I hope to have this draft finished within the next week or so.

Bring On the Broccoli will be available in January. (Unless the werewolves have other ideas.)

New Month, New Projects

Posted on by karennacolcroft

Well, technically one of the projects I’m currently working on isn’t new. After spending a week going through my universe bible (the document in which I try–and sometimes fail–to keep track of all the details of the world in which my books are set, plot points of the books, characters, and so on) and previous books, and writing a brainstorm that’s longer than some short stories I’ve had published, I’m now working on the rewrite of Bring On the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7). I wrote a draft of this book previously, but because of personal life stuff that was happening, I wasn’t able to focus on it as much as I needed. I also hadn’t done a sufficient amount of brainstorming and planning. I wound up with a draft that left out a couple of really important plot pieces that needed to carry over from previous books, had one character acting far more out of character than could reasonably be explained (even though his acting out of character is an arc in the next few books of the series), and had Kyle Slidell, the narrator, acting more as a narrator and less as a participant in the story.

It needed a LOT of work. So I’m pretty much starting from scratch. This time, because I did the necessary preplanning, I have a better idea of where the story will go and how to get it there. This draft is already going better than the previous one. Bring On the Broccoli will be released in January.

I’m also working on the cover for Ebb and Flow, my next release, which will be out in October. I’m hoping to put Ebb and Flow up for preorder this coming week, and I would really, really like to have the cover done before that.  (A cover isn’t required to put a book up for Amazon preorder, but I would *like* to have the cover when I set up the preorder.) So far, it hasn’t been exactly easy. Finding stock photos of models who fit my mental image of Quinn and Malachi was difficult at best, especially when there are certain aspects of their appearance that are stated in the book and so needed to be on the cover. I’ve seen some people say that models on book covers don’t have to look exactly like the characters, it’s more important that they fit the “vibe” of the genre, but honestly, as both an author and a reader it bugs the hell out of me when the model(s) on the cover of a book don’t match the in-book description of the character(s) they’re supposed to represent.

I think I’ve gotten the right models. I’m a little worried that people will assume the one representing Quinn is underage; he does look young to me. (Then again, now that I’m in my mid-50s, anyone under 40 looks young to me…) But going by some of the other pictures of the model available on the stock site, he is an adult, even if he’s a young-looking one. And Quinn looks young; he’s 22 and “far too thin,” according to the description.

I’m even more concerned about being able to put together the cover the way I envision it. I do make my own covers, because I enjoy doing it, but I’m far from professional and there are some tricks and intricacies of the program I use (GIMP, which is a free program similar to Photoshop) that I haven’t learned yet or am still figuring out how to use. I will end up with a good cover, but it might not be the exact cover I’m seeing in my mind.

So that’s what I’m working on as we begin a new month. And this is the background I’ve chosen for the Ebb and Flow cover. It’s from a picture I took from the ferry between Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia; somewhat fitting since most of Ebb and Flow takes place on a private island in Nova Scotia.

New Newsletter Thank You

Posted on by karennacolcroft

When people subscribe to my newsletter, they receive a free gift as my thank you. For the past several months, it was a free PDF of the young adult novel Fresh Meat, which details the origin story of Tobias Rogan from the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series.

I like to swap things out occasionally,  so I was planning to put up a new thank-you, but was having trouble figuring out what to use. I wanted something connected with my existing books, which meant that most of the short stories and previously-published novellas I have were out. (Some of those are set in the same universe as my current books, but they aren’t *connected* to those books.)

After spending enough time reading and learning about newsletters and marketing to make my eyes ache, I had an idea. Which I have now implemented.

The first 3 books of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series are told in first-person narration from the point of view of Kyle Slidell, the vegan werewolf. Which means that in those three books, we only see Kyle’s side of the story. Including in the first chapter of the first book, Salad on the Side, where he is still human, heavily crushing on his neighbor Tobias (who he doesn’t know well yet), and completely confused when Tobias strips in the garden between their apartment buildings–and then a wolf appears.

I got to wondering: What was *Tobias’s* take on that? How did he feel about having a human moving into the pack’s midst? Was he crushing on Kyle as much as Kyle was crushing on him? And what did he think when he realized Kyle saw him in the garden?

So I wrote it. And it is now available to new subscribers to my newsletter; current subscribers were sent the link yesterday to download it if they choose.

To sign up for the link to “Side Salad,” Tobias’s version of chapter one of Salad on the Side, go to my Free Story page and fill in the form. This will add you to my newsletter list, but you can unsubscribe at any time.

New Project Underway

Posted on by karennacolcroft

After going back and forth with myself about it, last Tuesday I started a new book.

Bring On the Broccoli (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 7) picks up about three months after Tempeh for Two and Take Some Tahini (both of those books take place in the same month). It’s in Kyle Slidell’s point of view and involves discovering that some alphas, including a Massachusetts one, are even less ethical and invested in their packs’ best interests than previously realized.

I haven’t gotten very far into the story yet, so there isn’t much to share at this point, but I’ll add updates here weekly until the book is done. Bring On the Broccoli is planned to release in January 2025.

I Have a Migraine…

Posted on by karennacolcroft

I was going to write something profound-ish, or at least interesting, but I have a migraine and can’t think about anything other than the funny jagged colors dancing in front of my eyes. So instead, I’m sharing this picture  of all of the books I’ve self-published, as Karenna Colcroft and under other names, since May 2021. Lex Valentine did the covers for Salad on the Side, Alpha Receptor, and Messages from Shiva vol. 1; I did the others.

 

2023 In Review

Posted on by karennacolcroft

2023 has been over for just past a week now. Last week, I talked a little about what I have planned for 2024. Now I want to take some time to celebrate what I did in 2023.

I released two Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat novels. Even though the original plan was to release three, that didn’t work out, but I did release two. And I’m proud of myself for that.

I changed my release schedule when life stuff got in the way of what I’d originally planned. This is definitely cause for celebration, because in the past, if I’ve said I was going to do something, I’ve felt like I had no choice about doing it. Even when it wasn’t possible to actually follow through. In 2023, the book I’d slated for a March release took longer to revise and rewrite than I’d anticipated, especially since I wound up almost doubling the length of what had originally been a novella. Expanding the story took time, and I was trying to do it while in the thick of dealing with the fallout from my mother’s passing and my father’s health issues, among other things. Instead of forcing myself to stick to the release schedule I’d set and risking putting out a shoddy product, I chose to delay the March release by a couple of weeks, which then resulted in delaying the May release (which would have been Try the Tofu, Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 4) to July, the September release to October, and not planning to have a November release at all. I felt a little guilty about that, and also dealt with some “people will forget I exist if I don’t release books often enough” fears, but ultimately it turned out to be the right choice, both for my books and for my mental health. And I did end up having a late November release with my Christmas short “Snow on Christmas Eve.”

I wrote two novels. Fill the Empty Spaces was started in December 2022, but I wrote the bulk of it in early 2023. I also wrote Take Some Tahini (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 6)… and then rewrote the first few chapters of it. I also wrote a few short stories and started a new novel, Ebb and Flow at the end of November. (Ebb and Flow is a spin-off from Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat, and will probably be released in fall 2024.)

In addition to the two Real Werewolves novels, I released two other novels and a short story (or short novella, depending on how you look at it).

I dealt with family issues, health issues, and life issues, including one that knocked me for a severe loop at the beginning of December 2023. I’m still dealing with that one, but I’m doing much better than I was at first.

Like I mentioned last week, I have plans for 2024, and hopefully this time next year, I’ll be celebrating a lot more!

2024 Here We Go!

Posted on by karennacolcroft

It’s a new year. Which is a little mind-boggling. December went by way too quickly.

It’s now 2024, and I’m still kind of wrapping my head around that. Usually I spend December, and sometimes start as early as October, planning the upcoming year. My goals, my hopes, my “if there were no objects in the way” dreams. It’s a month or more of daydreaming, brainstorming, Tarot and oracle cards, and various other means of sorting out what I want to do, what I’m capable of doing, and what I would really love to do if I could figure out how. I didn’t do that this year. At the beginning of December, something hit my life (and the lives of a number of others in my social circle, as well as my family) very hard, so I didn’t have the bandwidth to do much more than process, grieve, and figure out how to reconstruct my day-to-day life.

However. I do have some plans for 2024. It might be worth noting here that I don’t do “New Years resolutions.” For me, personally, resolutions are the “I should do this” things that usually get put aside because either I can’t figure out *how* to do them or because I only decided to do them because I thought I “should.” I don’t deal with shoulds anymore. As one of my past therapists was fond of saying, I stopped shoulding all over myself. I make goals and plans, not resolutions.

For 2024, tentatively, I’m planning:

1.To release Tempeh for Two (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 5) on January 11. This book is already up for Kindle preorder! I’ll also be releasing Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 6, titled Take Some Tahini, in July. Take Some Tahini is the first brand-new Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat novel since 2014; the previous five, including Tempeh for Two, were originally published between 2011 and 2014. (All the rereleases have been revised, updated, and re-edited, and some have been expanded with new content.)

2. To figure out the timing of the rest of my release schedule. For 2023, my original plan was to release books in January, March, May, July, September, and November. But my March release, Chance Met, got held up because of personal life stuff as well as issues with expanding it, so instead of releasing the second week of the month as intended, it came out toward the end of March. Because of that, I didn’t want to have a May release, because it wouldn’t have given me enough time to promote both books. So I skipped May, made the September release an October release instead, and then wound up doing a Christmas story in November after deciding not to release anything that month. Yeah, it was all as confusing as it sounds. For 2024, I’m currently planning releases in January, April, July, and October, with another Christmas story at the end of November/beginning of December, but that might change.

3. To make all of my books available “wide,” meaning through multiple retailers. This means they will no longer be available through Kindle Unlimited, which requires that books be sold exclusively on Amazon. I apologize to my readers who prefer KU because of finances or other reasons. There are multiple factors behind my decision, including a reduction in the amount Amazon pays authors for Kindle Unlimited reads and hearing from readers who would like to buy my books but won’t or can’t by from Amazon. After considering and talking with other authors, I decided it would be worth trying having my books available through other retailers in addition to Amazon, including Kobo and Barnes & Noble. I’ll be starting this change in February with Fill the Empty Spaces, followed by Chance Met in March. Tempeh for Two, along with the rest of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series, will be available through Kindle Unlimited until April, at which time the entire series will be released through other retailers. I’m still fine-tuning how I’ll approach new releases; my options are either release them through all retailers from the beginning, or make them Amazon exclusive–and available through Kindle Unlimited–for the first 90 days after release, then put them with other retailers. Stay tuned for announcements on that as I make decisions and see how releasing my books wide affects my sales and readership. Yes, I write books because I love writing books… but I also do it to help pay my bills, and sometimes that means needing to make decisions that benefit the bank account.

4. To start a subscription. A number of my fellow authors have Patreon or Ream accounts through which they offer readers bonuses and perks for a monthly subscription fee (which in some cases is as low as $1 a month!) I actually have a Patreon but haven’t done much with it because creating things for it and promoting it felt like a little too much. I’ve been following those other authors, though, and learning more about how to make it all work without breaking my brain, so I hope to either brush up my Patreon for a relaunch or set up a Ream subscription (Ream is like Patreon but exclusively for writers) by my birthday, June 30. If you read this and have thoughts about what you’d like to see offered through a subscription like this, please leave a comment!

5. To release the follow-up to Chance Met, titled A Fighting Chance. This book will probably conclude Trey and Jeremiah’s story, as it brings their romance to a logical happy-for-now ending as well as tying up plot threads introduced in Chance Met. I don’t really see anywhere for their story to go after this one. This is the only “I’m not completely sure yet” plan on this list; I haven’t decided whether I’ll actually release this one. If I do, it will be out in March or May.

6. To rerelease my novella Hooch and Howls. Originally published in 2012, this is a historical MMM novella featuring a crotchety hermit werewolf and two young men sucked into the rumrunning trade in 1930 Nova Scotia. I’ve rewritten a portion of this novella to address a plot point I found…we’ll say distasteful, and I’m looking forward to reintroducing Malachi Powers, the hermit werewolf, and his love interests Roger and Jonathan to the world. And speaking of Malachi…

7. To release a new novel, currently titled Ebb and Flow. This novel follows from Take Some Tahini, but is not part of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series. (You can tell, because the title doesn’t reference a vegan food.) In Tahini, Tobias meets a young werewolf named Quinn Bouchard, who had a traumatic entry into the werewolf world that reminds Tobias of his own. After Quinn’s pack ejects him for reasons beyond Quinn’s control, Tobias takes him in as one of his guards and brings Quinn with him and Kyle to meet with the Anax of Canada. While in Nova Scotia for that meeting, they meet Malachi Powers (yes, the one from Hooch and Howls, which is why I plan to rerelease that novella), a friend  of the Canadian Anax–and, as it turns out, Quinn’s mate, something which disturbs Malachi both because Quinn is mourning the loss of his partner and because of a major age gap; Malachi is somewhere around 150 years old, while Quinn is only 22. Though their story begins in Take Some Tahini, it’s fully formed in Ebb and Flow, which I’m currently in the process of writing and am very much enjoying. I hope to have this novel ready to release in September or October.

Other plans, particularly for book releases, are in flux right now. But the good thing about planning and writing and working for myself (and my readers) is that I have the ability to be flexible.

I hope your 2024 is off to a wonderful start! If you have plans you’d like to share, leave a comment!