What do you think of when someone says "werewolf"? I know, it’s probably not a question you’ve ever given much thought, but humour me. Picture a werewolf. What does it look like? Whichever movie representation you remember, it’s probably half-man, half-beast, the beast part usually resembling an ape or a bear more than a wolf. While werewolf legends often depict humans turning into full-fledged wolves, Hollywood prefers to stick actors in generic beast-like costumes. Kind of a waste, don’t you think? Why have a wolf-human hybrid if it looks and acts nothing like a wolf? That’s what I thought, watching The X-Files first-season werewolf episode, "Shapes". I looked at the decidedly non-canine monster and thought, "That’s not how I’d do werewolves."  I needed to write something to share with my group that month and, after seeing the show, I decided to try something with werewolves—my kind of werewolves.

The resulting short story, Truth & Consequences raised more questions than it answered and I wanted to go on, to explore the possibilities. But I didn’t. A novel about werewolves? Forget it. I hadn’t written horror since my high-school Stephen King worship phase. I was married now, with a child, and damn it, I was going to be a serious writer. Well, maybe not serious, but at least mainstream. I was never going to break in as a novelist by writing about werewolves.

There was only one problem: I liked writing about werewolves.  I liked it more than I liked writing mysteries or thrillers or anything else I'd tried.  So when I finally got up the nerve to submit some stories to literary magazines, I included the werewolf one and sent it to Lost Worlds, a magazine picked at random from the horror/fantasy section of the Writer’s Guide.  This would be my litmus test.  If I couldn't get the short story published, I'd know werewolves were out of the question.

When I didn't hear back, I decided this was my answer—werewolves weren't even worthy of a rejection letter.  Then I got a call.  Not a photocopied acceptance letter, but an actual phone call from the editor. She’d loved the story and wanted to publish it in their next edition. Sure, it only paid in copies, but for an amateur writer, such praise was a bigger payoff than any cheque. Better yet, it allowed me to justify starting that novel.