Hey y'all! Karenna Colcroft has a new MM paranormal romance out, Real Werewolves Don't Eat Meat book 1: Salad on the Side. We've got a lot to cover today including an exclusive guest post with the Author, and, there's a giveaway.
Since moving to Boston, Kyle Slidell has met only a few of his neighbors, including Tobias Rogan. Kyle is very interested in Tobias, and is ecstatic to learn that Tobias wants him, too.
But his neighbors have a secret: They're a werewolf pack, and Tobias is their Alpha. When one of the wolves attacks Kyle, he learns the truth in a hurry--and in the most painful way. Now he's a werewolf too, and as a vegan is at war with his wolf aspect, who craves meat.
With Tobias's help and love, Kyle must adjust to his new life. But can he protect the pack and his lover from a werewolf seeking revenge against Tobias?
Warnings: References to sexual assault.
This is a rerelease.
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Karenna is giving away a $20 Amazon gift card with this tour:
Excerpt
No! Oh, God, anything but this!
That was the first conscious thought I’d had since the wolf had bitten down. I didn’t know what it meant at first.
Then I opened my eyes. Nothing looked right. Everything around me appeared flat and muted. I definitely wasn’t in the garden anymore, but since I couldn’t see things properly, I couldn’t tell where I was. Inside, somewhere. Not my apartment. I was lying on a floor; that much I could tell.
When I tried to stand, my legs didn’t want to cooperate. Then I caught a glimpse of my foot.
It was covered in fur.
Shit. Wolf bite. Wolves didn’t live in Boston.
Maybe werewolves did. Even though as far as I knew those didn’t exist.
I tried to see my body. Fur, check. Pretty off-white color, or at least I would have thought it was pretty if it didn’t cover me. Snout protruding out far enough to see, check. Four paws with claws sticking out from the end of each… finger? Toe? Didn’t know what to call them. Check, anyway.
Shit.
At least my head moved the way I wanted it to. I glanced around, trying to gain some sense of place. This time, I spotted two humans crouching nearby. One of them was Tobias. Even as a wolf, I recognized the regret and sadness in his expression.
Tobias was there, and that meant he knew what had happened to me. My brain refused to go any farther than that.
The other human… After a second, I recognized her too. The hair color gave it away, perfectly matching the color of the fur on the wolf that bit me.
Fucking Melia. She eyed me with a contemptuous smirk which vanished quickly when Tobias glanced at her over his shoulder. He turned back to me, and Melia glowered. “He should be dead.”
“Fortunately for you, he isn’t,” Tobias snapped. “I thought you’d learned better control than this, Melia. Clearly I overestimated you.”
Melia bowed her head. “I’ll do better in the future. He could have died.”
As a wolf, tone of voice wasn’t quite as obvious to me as it was when I was human. But something in the way Melia spoke caught my attention. She meant what she’d said. I should have been dead, because that had been her intention. Maybe I was wrong, but the fury and contempt in her eyes confirmed it.
I snarled and tried to stand, but I couldn’t quite figure out how to get those four legs under me. Tobias raised his hands and took a couple steps toward me. “Kyle, easy,” he said softly. “We aren’t going to hurt you.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Melia said. “Tobias, I didn’t mean—”
“Shut up, Melia,” Tobias ordered without taking his eyes off me. “You’re here to see the results of your poor control, not to make apologies. I don’t think Kyle will accept your apology easily.”
I managed to move my head in something resembling a nod. Fuck if I’d ever forgive the bitch! It hadn’t been my fault I’d wandered into the path of a frigging werewolf. Like I’d even known there would be a wolf in the garden. It wasn’t the sort of thing people usually considered when going out to pick strawberries. “Oh, I’d better be careful; there might be a werewolf out there.” Right. Not outside horror movies.
Hopefully they’d figure out soon how to change me back so I could get things ready for my dinner with Tobias the next night. I’d be sorely pissed if that had to be put on hold.
The next night. Except I didn’t think it was “next” anymore. I had no clue how long I’d been unconscious. The sunlight streaming through the window beside me pretty clearly told me that it wasn’t night any longer. But if it wasn’t night, why was I still a wolf? Didn’t werewolves only shift when it was dark?
I blinked at Tobias and he caught the question. “It’s your first shift, Kyle. You changed while you were out cold and it’s going to take your body and mind a little while to coordinate so you’ll go back to human. That’s how it works for all of us our first time. And we can shift whenever we want.”
All of us. Now I couldn’t prevent myself from grasping the truth. The truth Tobias and Mrs. Frelich had been so damned determined to keep from me. Tobias was one of the wolves. And he’d probably made sure none of the other neighbors would ever see anything he didn’t want them to. Tobias, the man I lusted after, was a fucking werewolf. I didn’t even know what to think about that.
“You have to eat something, Kyle,” Tobias said. He crouched low to look me in the eye. “You’ve been unconscious for three days, since Melia attacked you. You don’t know how sorry I am about this. I wanted to protect you from it.”
Even in my current form, my heart and a couple other things responded to his words. He did care about me. Maybe at our dinner he would have admitted all this to me. Though I certainly understood why he’d been reluctant. Without seeing it for myself, I probably wouldn’t have believed him.
He might have told me the truth, though, and if I’d believed him, if I hadn’t thrown him out, who knew where things might have ended up? I knew where I would have wanted them to end, whether Tobias was a werewolf or not.
Karenna Colcroft lives just north of Boston, Massachusetts, and has been in love with the city since childhood, though she has yet to encounter any werewolves, vampires, or other paranormal beings in her travels. At least none that she knows of. Though since in her non-writing life, under another name, she offers services as a channel and energy healing practitioner, it could be said that she herself is a paranormal being. The jury’s still out on that.
Karenna is a polyamorous, nonbinary human who splits time between the home she shares with her husband and the one she shares with her committed partner. She also has two adult children and a bonus son, three grandchildren, and two and a half cats. (Half in terms of time the cat lives with her, not in terms of the cat itself…)
Author Website: http://www.karennacolcroft.com
Author Facebook (Personal): http://www.facebook.com/riverlightbearer
Author Facebook (Author Page): http://www.facebook.com/KarennaColcroft
Author Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Karenna-Colcroft/e/B0031HAOUK
Author guest post with Karenna Colcroft...
Retcons and Revisions
In 2011, I introduced the world to Kyle Slidell, the world’s only gay vegan werewolf, and his mate Tobias Rogan, the pack Alpha. Over the next few years, four additional books featuring those books were published, along with two heterosexual romance novels set in the same world and paralleling the events of two of Kyle and Tobias’s books.
And then for various reasons, in 2016 I asked my publisher to pull the books off the market and return the rights to me.
For the next several years, “Karenna Colcroft” went dormant as I dealt with some personal life things. I didn’t write. Any books of mine that remained on the market were pulled. And I tried to make peace with not being an author anymore.
But then Kyle decided he was tired of being dormant. Figuratively speaking, of course.
During summer of 2021, mostly out of boredom with a side helping of curiosity, I decided to reread the books that had once been published. And I fell in love with Kyle and Tobias all over again. Those books were good! The characters were fun! And I decided they needed to be back out in the world.
Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as just slapping on a new cover and putting the books up on Amazon. When I first wrote Salad on the Side, I wasn’t planning a series. I thought it was just going to be a one-off novel. It wasn’t until I saw the reception Salad got from readers and reviewers, and discussed it with my editors, that I decided to continue Kyle and Tobias’s story.
That meant that a few things in Salad were inconsistent with things in the later books. Mostly very minor plot points, but there were also aspects of my werewolf world that changed when I started actually building the world for the rest of the series. And there were a few inconsistencies and plot holes in the book itself. Salad on the Side was my first male/male romance, and I had only been writing for publication for a little over a year when I wrote it, so my skills were still evolving.
In addition to that, as the TV Tropes website puts it, “technology marches on.” I wrote Salad on the Side in 2010. Kyle and Tobias had flip phones. Tobias’s desktop computer had a clunky hard drive tower. And they took taxis around Boston.
All of those things needed to be addressed before I could release them back out into the world. Taxis still exist in Boston, of course, but people are more inclined to take Lyft or Uber. (Since I support my writing habit by working as a Lyft driver, I can attest that a LOT of Boston-area residents use rideshare services.) Since Kyle and Tobias both work in technology, they needed smart phones and top-of-the-line computers.
Those were fairly minor changes. To address the plot holes, inconsistences, and changes in worldbuilding, I had to do some retconning, and some of that went pretty in-depth. But it was fun. It had been a long time since writing was actually fun for me…but getting back into Kyle and Tobias’s world was fun!
And now I’m thrilled to reintroduce wise-ass Kyle and too-serious Tobias to the world!
Thank you!
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