Part #2 of our chat with author @MariaVale LUV: Can you tell us about The Legend of All Wolves. What inspired you? Maria: I’d been reading a shifter romance which was great but the characters were lone wolves who were desperately trying to keep their ravening beasts under control. At some point, I felt that this wasn’t really fair. It ignored their close family ties, their shyness, their importance to the land. I decided to try to flip it around and emphasize their vulnerability and what it must feel like to go from being an Alpha predator to being a nuisance species that can be killed at will. LUV: The world building in the Legend of All Wolves is unique, specific and complex. Did it come to you full-blown or did you discover it as you wrote? How do you keep track of it? What advice can offer other writers are they create their worlds? Maria: I was a medieval studies major which was useless for everything except for trying to think of the world as a whole. Not just as reigns and wars, but as the combination of literature, trade, religion, art, science and everything else that goes into making a time and place. It was during my Beowulf class that I first heard Old English and thought to myself, if wolves talked, this was what they would sound like. Then when the idea of the Legend of All Wolves came to me, I thought such a desperately secretive community would be very conservative, fiercely committed to laws and rituals aimed at protecting the Pack. So I decided to look back to that pre-Christian era for inspiration. Not just for the language, but also for law, social norms, punishments and the like. It was also a great source for legends, as there were many early legends involving wolves—Fenrir, Garm, Skoll & Hati--but it was fun to flip those around and make them wolf-centric, wolf-positive. Clearly there were other things that had to be unique to my world, like the Year of First Shoes, which is the first year—somewhere around six or seven--that the wolf pups have to learn to be in skin. They have to learn how to wear clothes, to stop sniffing each other, to use their tongues to talk. It’s a horrible, horrible time for them but also fun to write.

Posted by LUV Team at 2024-04-10 19:00:03 UTC