About the Author:
I've been researching my Scottish and Irish roots for some years now. Even in my own family there was political intrigue, ties to royalty, romance, and tragedy that inspires me to write medieval stories set in England and Scotland.
When I'm not writing, researching, and making bears, I enjoy gardening, when it's not too hot!
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I love to read historical and paranormal books, garden, teach online writing courses and judge writing contests.
Bio:
Award-winning author of urban fantasy and medieval historical romantic suspense, Heart of the Wolf named in Publishers Weekly's
BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR, NOR Reader Choice for
BEST PARANORMAL ROMANCE.
Terry Spear also writes true stories for adult and young adult audiences. She’s a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves and has an MBA from Monmouth University and a Bachelors in Business and Distinguished Military Graduate of West Texas A and M. She also creates award-winning teddy bears, Wilde and Woolly Bears, to include personalized bears designed to commemorate authors’ books. When she’s not writing or making bears, she’s teaching online writing courses.
I am so excited to host Terry Spear in a guest post here at Paranormal and Romantic Suspense Reviews.
Terry is currently touring to promote her new book Heart of the Highland Wolf.
Thanks so much Sourcebooks and Terry Spear for connecting me on this blog tour!
Please take it away Terry!
The Suspenseful World of Werewolves by Terry Spear
I love romantic suspense. I love the paranormal. But I also love humor and adventure and mystery. So that’s how I write my werewolf series. With all of the above.
I also love to add real snippets of life, which help to make the stories seem more real. And I do a lot of research so that the wolf nature of the werewolf equation seems as though they could live among us. That’s the fun in writing urban fantasy for me, making it real.
I also write pure fantasy, which is fun also. For me, writing totally fantasy worlds is really easy to do. It’s all made up—mostly based on my enjoyment of classical Greek mythology and tales from around the world. But writing urban fantasy takes a lot of work to make it feel real while combining unreality with reality.
I’ve always loved the paranormal since I was little, having been an avid fan of ghost stories, of Dracula, my first experience with him, *sigh*, when my mother took me to see him in a college play when I was a teen and
I fell in love with him. I wanted to run up on stage, push “the other woman” out of the way, and offer my own neck to him because he was so handsome and suave, and what was not to love?
With werewolves, I always felt badly that the wolf was a beast and just killed without reason, and when he was a man, he didn’t remember what he’d done. Just like I felt badly that Dracula was portrayed as a monster and had to die in the end, as all monsters do.
I also loved wolves from having read “The Call of the Wild” and “White Fang” by Jack London. And from my love of his wolves and the fact that I don’t believe everyone of any nature can be all bad, I began writing about werewolves and vampires, who could either be very bad, or darkly good. It seems that vampires and werewolves just can’t ditch their darker personas to be completely sweetly innocent.
Still, who doesn’t love a darkly sexy paranormal character? So the good guys are darkly good.
A Scotsman once said that he was surprised to see the Highland games in the States where everyone enjoyed being together—all clans mixing with no antagonism, because it wasn’t like that where he was from. I don’t know if it was just his experience or not, but the notion stuck with me and when I wrote HEART OF THE HIGLAND WOLF, I included a feud that has existed for centuries between two opposing clans. Now, since my werewolves live long lives, it’s understandable they might hold a few grudges since they’re not just revisiting old slights that their great-great grandparents might have had with other clans, but something much closer to home.
What modern Highland story would be fun without a good old-fashioned sword fight while the sexy Scotsmen wear their kilts for the occasion? But where is the paranormal fun in that? So it’s teeth gnashing of the wolf variety that comes into play also.
And what self-respecting Scottish castle doesn’t have a ghost to call its own? So Ian’s cousin haunts the place. Remember how much I love ghost stories? I didn’t experience any ghostly apparitions at the castles that I visited in Scotland last year even though some were purported to have ghosts. But when my friends and
I stopped to take pictures of woolly Highland cows, I heard Scottish pipe music playing on the breeze. It was beautiful in the green wooded area next to a river, no houses for miles in any direction. I envisioned Scottish lasses and lads celebrating some special occasion, wearing kilts, playing their music—like fairy music in a glen — somewhere nearby.
But when I reached the fence to take my first picture of the cows, the music stopped. When my friends joined me, I asked them, “Didn’t you love the music?”
Both looked at me with surprise. “What music?” they both parroted.
“The pipes? It was over in that direction.” I motioned with my hand. “But it stopped just as suddenly as it had begun when I reached the fence. Didn’t you hear it?”
No, neither had heard the haunting melody. And I thought of how it had been some ghostly music caught on the breeze from some ancient celebration. I felt as though I had been welcomed home by some distant clan in the past.
You see now why I love the paranormal? It’s as real as it can be.
Have you ever experienced anything paranormal? How did it make you feel?
Thanks so much to for having me at Paranormal Romantic Suspense today!
Terry Spear
http://www.terryspear.com/
http://www.facebook.com/#!/terry.spear
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/tspear
Heart of the Highland Wolf
Sourcebooks
June 2011
Book 7
Ian McNeill, laird of Argent Castle finds his capital squandered through unwise investments and the wolf clan's home that has been theirs for centuries is in danger of being forfeit for nonpayment of taxes. When a movie producer contacts him with the notion of using his castle to produce a movie, Ian abhores the idea, but it's his only salvation. Even worse, his people become extras in this epic Highland movie. But when one American werewolf romance author, Julia Wildthorn, slips into the castle under the guise of being with the movie company, except she is trying to jumpstart her muse with writing a book set in old-world Scotland -- specifically about his castle and his people as the characters in her newest book venture -- she and Ian tangle.
