#rihannsu

A little over three years ago, I started writing on a Star Trek fan sim with some friends. I was nervous as all heck to push out of my comfort zone and tell stories in prose instead of as a comic, but with a lot of help, I found my footing and my own voice as a writer.

We told a TON of stories with out characters on our made-up little ship, and I fell in love with writing just to write. I fell in love with setting the scene with words and making the characters breathe that way. I still love drawing, but in those little fan adventures, I discovered a different way to express myself I hadn’t before truly considered.

Of course, they WERE “Star Trek” stories, and I couldn’t really do anything with them. I had all these characters, themes and ideas I was going nuts with, and writing far more than the other writers were in the group, but they lived and died there, in a world I couldn’t really DO anything with. As such, after I had decided I was done with the sim, and we put the ship in proverbial drydock, 

I sat on the ideas for a bit. Then, last October, a few different ideas met in the back alley of my mind and had a weird baby. 

Now, to throw a flashback awkwardly into the middle of my story and confuse things even more, about 6 years ago, I was starting to get laser hair removal. See, I’m a transgender woman and that is kinda a big part of this story. As such, I was considering the frustration of the process and technical side of transitioning, along with the social issues and medical ones. 

So, during all of that, an idea that had never found purchase in my life planted a seed. Why do werewolves in movies always grow all of that hair, and then it just… vanishes? How do they get their haircuts back after transforming? Seriously, how do well-cropped bangs just… come back after they were just a very large dog-creature?   

All those questions suddenly had a new context in my mind as I was paying someone to shoot me in the face with science to get rid of my own “fur”, and that seed began to sprout. Just a tiny little idea about a woman trying to deal with life as a werewolf. I figured out little details like that, since hair is dead tissue, it wouldn’t just grow back in, so it would have to be shed. And hair would grow every time she transformed, ruining her haircuts. 

They were details, but no story. So, jump back to the end of my experience writing Star Trek fan fiction. I had, in that time, created a bunch of Romulan characters, using the amazing “Rihannsu” novels of Diane Duane as the basis of how I managed the culture and language. I put my conflicted, emotionally torn little Romulan woman in Starfleet and used the stories to work through some of my own issues coming out as Trans by making her Romulan identity a metaphor. Her journey was one of self-acceptance between two cultures that did not always get along. I loved writing her stories, but they had ran their course. 

Now, I still had these idea seeds for werewolves, but no story to frame them on. I also had a realized character torn between to cultures and two families, old and new. Eventually, I realized I could mush the two ideas together, and that I had already done a “first draft” of that story out in the Final Frontier. All I had to do was swap metaphors.

Now, these novels aren’t just re-writes of those stories, but the DNA of that is all in what I’m working on. Rihannsu culture inspired a secret world of werewolves with their own government and history. Alienation and self-acceptance traded green blood for fur and a tail. I had a road map to look at to inspire me to tell all new stories, and I was off to the races.

I’ve always loved werewolf stories, but never felt they told the angle I wanted to. Eventually, it took warping to Romulus and back to discover that what I needed to do, was tell my own story through the wolves. Hopefully, it’s a story you all will enjoy. :)