Werewolves, steampunk, and the zombie apocalypse-- My first vlog!

Where wolf? Mythology, waxed chests, and lycanthropy

I spend way too much time thinking about werewolves. Yeah, that's partially because I write werewolf books (and All Hallows' Moon is coming out very soon), but I've always had an unhealthy fascination with it.

You can find a lot about the mythology of werewolves on the internet these days, but when I was a child back in the dark ages, I used to comb my library for books on the paranormal. I spent many a sleepless night reading about wolfmen and witches under the covers with a flashlight. (It's totally normal for fifth graders to read about mass murdering monsters... right? Right?)

The modern story for werewolves goes like this: You get bitten and turn into a wolf on every full moon thereafter. There's an obvious parallel between the monthly cycle of the werewolf and the monthly cycle of a woman, which the feminist part of me finds irresistible, but werewolves in pop culture are usually men. Better yet, romantic men.

Pictures of this guy make me feel dirty.

So you may be surprised to learn that werewolves did not start out as teenage boys with an eight pack and a body waxed so smooth you could use his pecs as bowling balls.

There's a million different ways that legend says you can become a werewolf. Some range from the simple (drinking rainwater-- seriously) to the downright absurd (wearing an enchanted girdle and sleeping in the moonlight). Most myths agree that werewolves are deadly. They were especially well known for eating children. The sexy thing is a pretty recent addition.

In fact, it's generally theorized that werewolves in legend appeared as a convenient scapegoat for mass murders. If Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian shooter, had committed his mass murder in the 16th century, we might look back on him as a werewolf instead of your run-of-the-mill madman. People used to be executed as werewolves, much like how so-called witches have been burned at the stake. Back in the 1500s, French peasants were killed for it all the time. Those wacky French.

Innocent people might have been cast in the werewolf light, too. Conditions like porphyria (which makes the sufferer photosensitive with red teeth and psychosis) or hypertrichosis (also known as "Tribble-osis") could be mistaken for lycanthropy, and rabies has "supernatural" written all over it (if you're an idiot).

Taylor Lautner pre-waxing.
(Just kidding, this is hypertrichosis.)

The fact that so many completely innocuous circumstances (including Down's Syndrome) may have been historically mistaken for werewolves probably accounts for why they're so prevalent in myths worldwide. Just about every culture has their own kind of werewolf, skin-walker, or shapeshifter.

The most interesting thing I learned about werewolves, though, is that they're mythologically connected to vampires. But I didn't find a rivalry, a la Kate Beckinsale and That Other Shirtless Guy.

OH GOD HE WAXED OFF HIS BELLY BUTTON

In medieval Europe, they believed werewolves could become vampires. Whoa. It's likely that peasants with a taste for children, like Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun (who did not wax their chests), would have been burned at the stake to prevent them from coming back as our favorite fanged blood-drinkers. Some cultures also believed werewolves were undead.

It's all pretty cool, even though digging deep into mythology is equal parts intriguing and disturbing. You have to have a heart of steel to stomach some of the horrors committed by so-called werewolves through history. Just wait until I tell you guys what the vampires used to do.

Fortunately, werewolves are pretty benign these days, but they still might make you throw up in your mouth a little.

Lycanthropy: A huge sausage fest

Writer vs. Bugs

I am a little bit afraid of bugs.

You could say I find them a weensy bit disturbing... or you could say they make me wet myself and curl into a sobbing, hysterical ball. (Let's not get too picky about words here.)

I write heroic characters. Rylie faces divorce, displacement, death, and deformation and comes out the other side whole. She confronts terror with spunk. Werewolf mauls her and goes on to eat half the people at camp? No big deal. In The 19 Dragons, the Second Dragon races against impending oblivion with a swig of beer and a toss of the dice. Her cousins are killed in front of her eyes. No big deal.

And then there's me. Who shrieks and flails when a moth lands on her keyboard.

Having any creature with more than four legs in my proximity basically turns me into a panicked lunatic. I've been known to leave the ENTIRE HOUSE and run down the block because a daddy long legs invaded my office.

Since I'm a jibbering idiot around bugs, I've enlisted help in the fight against these horrible minions of hell. These are my weapons:

You may not think they're much of a defense against evil, but you'd be wrong about that. If there's a bug in my vicinity, these critters will leap to my rescue, snap the bugs up in their mouths, and swallow them right on down.

Well... usually.

Since my fear of bugs originates from the number of legs (seriously), the more legs a bug has, the more terrifying they are. My fear scale of animals has this at a zero:

Aww, look at the ickle baby snakey!

And centipedes/millipedes at a horror factor of 99 to the power of a jillion. In fact, they're so terrifying to me, I won't even post a picture of them here. I would go insane at the sight of them. Probably literally.

Fortunately, millipedes don't live in my region.

Centipedes, however...

So the other day, I'm sitting at my desk, blissfully typing away at All Hallows' Moon. Cool stuff is happening. People want Rylie dead, and she's like, "Yeah whatever, how about being NOT dead?" So cool. What a gal.

And then something skitters across my desk.

Something with about a million legs.

A centipede.

By the time I've registered there's a centipede in my house, I'm standing on the toilet of our guest bathroom, wielding the plunger like a sword and shrieking at the top of my lungs. My husband can't come to my rescue, because he's taken the baby to his parent's house for dinner, and I'm alone with my Loyal Pooch and Somewhat Less Loyal Cats.

The cats don't care I'm screaming, but the dog comes running to save me. What a good dog. Yes you are. Yes you are.

"I want to be your very best friend."

I point my Loyal Pooch in the direction of the centipede, which makes him go nuts. He's so excited that I've bought him this HORRIBLE DISGUSTING SLITHERING toy, he immediately runs over and picks it up in his mouth.

And then brings back to me.

Centipedes aren't easy to kill, okay? They may look like they're mostly made of those ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING SPINDLY LEGS like little freaking HAIRS all over their BODY (omg wtf bbq) but they're actually more like this:

Million disgusting legs and sheer horror not pictured

So the centipede is squirming around, not even a little bit dead.

My Loyal Pooch drops it in the bathroom.

And it runs at me.

Now, if I was going to be like one of the heroines in my books, this wouldn't be a big deal. I would do something easy and heroic, go back to writing, and forget this ever happened. Books don't write themselves, after all!

But I'm not like one of the heroines in my books, so I jump over the centipede (oh god it was within feet of my legs) and find a cat.

Deadly assassin

I throw her in the bathroom with the centipede, shut the door, and find a corner to cry in for a little while.

This is the depth of my fear of centipedes: I almost vomit. I mean, very seriously, very literally, almost lose everything I have eaten earlier in the day. I'm shaking all over and covered in sweat. I'm sobbing. I've taken one of my swords off the wall and hugged it to my body, even though I highly doubt I have the hand-eye coordination necessary to actually stab something that small.

Then... doubt creeps in.

Aren't centipedes poisonous?

I creep carefully around the bathroom door (don't worry, I stuffed towels in the crack so the centipede can't escape), return to my computer, and do a quick Google.

As it turns out, yes. Centipedes, aside from being one of the unholiest terrors known to man, are poisonous. And it can be dangerous to children and other small creatures... including cats. Like the fifteen pound pudge I just locked in the bathroom with the centipede.

What if the centipede kills her? Then I'll have a dead cat, and a centipede that has feasted upon the soul of one of my beloved animals to grow stronger and even more evil.

My cat meows pathetically on the other side of the door.

So I grab my hammer. (I keep a hammer at my desk to kill little black ants. There's a knife in the handle.) I also grab a really, really heavy hard-backed book.

And I go in to save my cat.

When I open the door, she's sitting on the other side of the door. For a paralyzed moment, I think the centipede is gone. I don't see it anywhere. Not on the floor. Not on the sink. Not in the toilet. Not in the bathtub.

Maybe... just maybe... my cat managed to eat the centipede.

And then I see it.

Artistic representation

THE CENTIPEDE IS IN MY CAT'S FUR.

I don't even react on instinct. It's beyond that. It's as though I've been possessed by the righteous fury of Durga herself, slayer of gods and lover of Shiva.

I flick the centipede off my cat with the hammer (not touching the cat, of course), and smash it with the book.

Then I stomp on the book. (Just to be sure.)

Then I sit outside on my front step and cry for a few hours.

Which is how my husband found me when he got home, of course. I couldn't stand to go back inside and make sure the centipede was dead. Even the sight of its smashed legs would render me incoherent, and what if it survived? WHAT IF IT RETURNED FOR REVENGE?

My husband laughs at me (as all good husbands do) and takes a look while I squeeze the Helpful Baby to my chest.

The centipede... has been killed.

I did it. I killed the centipede to save my cat. I DID IT.

So maybe it's not like I'm some big awesome hero. I didn't save the world, and I probably didn't even save my cat (my husband says it's very unlikely she would have been hurt by it). But I got over my total, paralyzing fear of bugs to smash it with a book, which I had my husband throw out wrapped in its own trash bag just in case the mashed remains of the centipede came back from the dead. (I've written books about zombies. I'm not taking any chances.)

And you know how my cat thanked me for overcoming my phobia to save her? 

She barfed on my keyboard. 

(I love cats.)