Jack and Teague and Katy

 So, I've got Kermit Flail on Monday to remind you all about this, but since Kermit Flail should be mostly about other people, I thought these guys should get their own post!

Some of you know that I took two breaks from the Little Goddess series. There was the big-ass long one between Rampant and Quickening, which was punctuated with The Green's Hill novellas to keep me from missing the place too much, and there was a shorter, two year gap, when I wrote the two colossal Bitter Moon books. (These books were later split by Harmony Ink into four volumes.)

The Bitter Moon books were epic fantasy-- there were a few love scenes, of a very mild variety.

Frankly, I needed to write sex.

So, Supernatural had just come out and while I dabbled a little in fanfic, I needed my own world, and I needed the guys to be MY guys and not Sam and Dean, and I needed the Little Goddess people because I missed them.

So I wrote five novellas--just shorts, that I put up on my old website and told people about.  Originally intended to be a one-off, the five books formed a plot arc of Jack and Teague and Katy--three people desperately in need of redemption. I finished Rampant just about the time I started writing for DSP, and I realized hey, there might be someone out there who would want to pick these guys up.  Now, at the end of Rampant I had left Teague, well, half dead, mostly, and in an unlikely place, the private fairy hill of some friends of Green. When Torquere (a now defunct pub) picked up my werewolves, I offered to write an unreleased novella, to finish out the plot arc.

When I wrote Quickening (which, like the other books of the Little Goddess, had been written as one volume and released as two because when I have worlds enough and time, I write hella long books) I included the adventure in Monterey because it related to Cory's pregnancy.  She'd jumped out of a helicopter without knowing the risks, and that was a sore point between her and her lovers.

For those of you wondering about The Green's Hill Novellas, those were the three shorts I wrote after Rampant--Guarding the Vampire's Ghost, Litha's Constant Whim, and I Love You, Asshole. Sprawling, yes--but I really had in mind a supernatural Melrose Place--yes, we have our main players--Cory, Green, Bracken, and Nicky--but everybody has a story.

So these are the stories in The Green's Hill Werewolves. 

YES, they can be read independently. But if you want to know the order, it goes as follows:

Vulnerable

Wounded--1&2

Bound--1&2

The Green's Hill Werewolves, V1, and the first story of V2

Rampant--1&2

The Green's Hill Werewolves, second story of V2

The Green's Hill Novellas

Scorched Haven (a short on my website)

Quickening--1&2


Now, I feel like I need to say a word about Katy here.

I was writing this book while I was teaching in a diverse area, nearly ten years ago. Representation wasn't a thing then--and the kids had read my other Little Goddess books. They liked that I had Arturo who was from South America, and that I had Mario who was Mexican and La Mark who was gay and black. They asked me to write more characters who were, in their words, "like them."  I wrote Katy with those kids in mind--and her original accent was quite thick. I had stunning, strong Latina girls in my classroom, going back and forth between English and Spanish as they spoke--I loved that sound. I thought it was wonderful--I wanted to capture it, make it real. Katy's backstory had already been imagined when I sat down to write, before her ethnicity. So in case anybody was wondering--no, I don't think all Mexicans are high school dropouts and drug addicts--I just wanted THIS character to have a miserable backstory.  In fact, if you look at a lot of my guys in my gay romance, you'll see a lot of similarities between them and Katy. She's just a tiny, lovely woman instead of a muscular hot guy.

I toned down Katy's accent in future edits--I didn't want people to be distracted by fears of appropriation or stereotyping. I simply wanted her to sound like the kids I loved--but when these books were recovered and re-edited for Dreamspinner, I hadn't been in the classroom for over six years. (My daughter's classroom will have the same accents in it--her best friend speaks English and Spanish and this makes me happy :-)  But I kept her background. Katy and Teague are real to me--they're survivors of a quiet class war, and their inclusion of Jack, spoiled rich kid with a lot to learn is one of the central conflicts of the story.

So for those of you who JUST picked up the Little Goddess series this summer--this is the massive werewolf backstory. For those of you who have been asking me, "Hey! Where did Jack and Teague and Katy go?", now you know. They've just been waiting their chance to come out pretty and gussied up and shiny.

Volume 1 is out on Monday.

Volume 2 is out about two weeks later.

I hope you enjoy their stories.