I was just on the verge of writing a werewolf piece for NaNoWriMo. Right at the last moment I changed my mind and decided to go back to Clash of the Animal Kings, something I had outlined a few weeks back as a means to practise the techniques in Take Of Your Pants by Libbie Hawker.

I figured it made sense to work on the story while the revised version was fresh in my head and that I was fed up thinking about it (I also thought that it would be nice to start on my epic fantasy piece, but, frankly put, that is such a MEGA undertaking, that’d rather wait for a time outside of NaNoWriMo which, let’s be honest, is usually manic).

So . . . no werewolves in my latest WIP.

But that does mean I get to talk about them here instead! ^_^

What Are These Bad Boys?

In short, people who turn into wolves by the light of the full moon. There are all sorts of variations on this, but that is the jist of it. Men and women that, after a bite from another werewolf are able to change into one of two forms (or both!): a traditional quadrupedal wolf, or a bipedal, half man-half beast form. They are susceptible to silver and generally very fast, very strong and often bad-tempered.

I’ve read some great werewolf books and seen some great werewolf movies in my time (I’ll go over them in detail over the coming weeks) and they are a fantasy creature I’d love to do more with.

As this part of my ‘Fantasy Creatures’ series continues I’ll try to pin point the origin of the myth as well as discussing other recent incarnations (and yes, unfortunately, this will probably include those in Twilight -_-).

Credit: feraliminal