Author Spotlight: Karenna Colcroft

Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.

Today: Karenna Colcroft lives just north of Boston, Massachusetts, and has been in love with the city since childhood, though she has yet to encounter any werewolves, vampires, or other paranormal beings in her travels. At least none that she knows of.

Karenna is a polyamorous, nonbinary human who lives in northeastern Massachusetts with her husband. She also has two adult children and a bonus son, four grandchildren, and an indeterminate number of cats, who are not at all impressed that Karenna writes about werewolves instead of werecats.

Find out more about Karenna online at http://www.karennacolcroft.com or https://www.facebook.com/KarennaColcroft.

Thanks so much, Karenna, for joining me!

J. Scott Coatsworth: When did you know you wanted to write, and when did you discover that you were good at it?

Karenna Colcroft: I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I *didn’t* know I wanted to write. Even before I knew how to put words on paper, I was making up stories and telling them to the people around me—or to my stuffed animals if the people wouldn’t listen. When I was 4 or 5 and finally learned how to make those funny little squiggles called “letters” on paper, I started writing down my stories. I still remember the first one I wrote, about a little girl named Maria who went to live with her uncle. (The hard copy of that, unfortunately, has long since vanished).

As for when I discovered I was good at it, I’ve gone back and forth on that multiple times in my life. For the most part, my writing is the one thing I’ve consistently been confident about, but at times things have dented the confidence a bit. Currently, given how I feel and react when I read my own stuff, I think I’m pretty dang good.

JSC: How would you describe your writing style/genre? 

KC: Ooh, good question. Taking it on a concrete level, I write paranormal romance/urban fantasy. On a more abstract level, I like to take tropes and either completely mess with them—how else would I write about a gay vegan werewolf with a sexually submissive Alpha for a mate?—or fully lampshade the fact that the trope is in play. My stories tend toward the darker end of the spectrum, with fights to the death between werewolves, characters unaliving themselves, and characters with serious PTSD from past abuse, but there are sparks of humor and hope throughout my books.

JSC: Do you ever base your characters on real people? If so, what are the pitfalls you’ve run into doing so? 

KC: In the past, I’ve had characters who were inspired by real people, but not completely based on them because I didn’t want to run into any pitfalls. However, I do now have a secondary character who is based on my younger kid (who is now in their late 20s). Dr. Aubrey Pyke was introduced in book 6 of my Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series, Take Some Tahini, as a nonbinary human who is a veterinarian and moonlights as the concierge doctor to the Anax (werewolf ruler) of Canada. They’ve played a larger role in the spin-off Ebb & Flow series, which takes place primarily in Canada.

I honestly wasn’t sure how my kid would feel about being the basis for a character in one of my books, but I created Dr. Pyke as my kid was entering their final year of veterinary school. I was incredibly proud of my kid and wanted to honor them. Fortunately for me, they did see it as an honor, and they’re the one who gave Dr. Pyke the first name of Aubrey, which in real life is the name of my kid’s cat.

JSC: Tell us something we don’t know about your heroes in Sorry About the Seitan. What makes them tick? 

KC: Tobias Rogan is the primary hero, and narrator, of Sorry about the Seitan, and shares hero duty in the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series with his mate, Kyle Slidell, the vegan werewolf.

Tobias doesn’t like talking about his past much; in addition to the traumatic way he was changed, he grew up in a household with a father who was verbally and sometimes physically abusive to Tobias and his mother. Among his friends, who knew very little about Tobias’s home life, Tobias was a leader, and even as a teen he was very aware of how having that kind of power made him feel. And he did not like it, because to him, having power meant being like his father.

Now, over half a century later, Tobias is the ruler of all werewolves in the United States—but part of him is still that boy, determined not to have too much power because he doesn’t trust himself not to abuse it, and abusing power would mean being like his father. As the U.S. Anax, though, Tobias has no choice about having power; he’s the most powerful werewolf in the country. His reluctance to accept that makes his role difficult for him, and that has a hugely negative impact on who Tobias is as a person.

JSC: What was the hardest part of writing this book?

KC: The hardest part of writing Sorry about the Seitan was continuity. This is the eighth book of my Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series, so I had to make sure all of that continuity was correct…but there are also two books in my Ebb & Flow series that include plot points that impact Real Werewolves, since the two series are somewhat intertwined. I have a fairly detailed series/universe bible that’s at about 80 pages and counting, but somehow I still manage to miss things, and I spend an inordinate amount of time while writing and editing going back to previous books to double-check information I forgot to put in the bible.

JSC: Who has been your favorite character to write and why? 

KC: You know, it’s really hard to choose a favorite character. It’s like asking a parent to choose their favorite child. But at the moment, I would say my favorite character to write is Quinn Boucher. Quinn is introduced in Take Some Tahini—and I have no idea where he came from. I’d written a draft of Take Some Tahini and realized over half of it was unusable; there wasn’t enough conflict, the plot kind of wandered, and there was romantic tension between two secondary characters who absolutely did not belong together. So I scrapped most of what I’d written and started over.

As I was sitting at my desk trying to figure out what sparked the actual plot of Take Some Tahini… there was Quinn. A 22-year-old recently-changed werewolf who had just witnessed the massacre of several of his packmates, including the Beta who had become his lover and the pack’s Alpha—and who was standing on the field where their bodies lay, calling Tobias Rogan for help. He quickly started stealing the show in that book, to the extent that even reviewers mentioned him, and in that book, he met his mate—who is a werewolf who’s 130 years old and emphatically did not want a mate as young as Quinn. Given my reaction to Quinn, and how reviewers talked about him, I felt like I had no choice but to spin him and his mate Malachi off into their own series, Ebb & Flow.

I take zero credit for creating this character; he was just there, and in every book in which he’s appeared since, I feel more like I’m taking dictation for his scenes than like I’m actually responsible for them. Despite having his own series, he’s still a prominent secondary character in Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat, though that might change in a future book.

JSC: As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? 

KC: When I was about four or five, I said I wanted to be four things when I grew up: A teacher, an actor, a singer, and a writer. I’ve done all four, though not quite the way I envisioned: I taught special education in public schools for several years, was a substitute teacher for several more, and now work as an early childhood teacher; I minored in theater in college and have appeared as a background actor in several movies and TV series filmed in my area (and one filmed in New York City); I’ve written multiple songs and, with the help of a former friend who was a guitarist, recorded two of them; and obviously I’m a writer.

JSC: Were you a voracious reader as a child? 

KC: Oh, gods, yes. I learned to read when I was about 2 years old and pretty much never stopped. As an undiagnosed autistic child (in the 1970s-1980s, when my traits were just considered “weird” or “obnoxious”), I had few friends and virtually no social life, so books were my escape from reality.

JSC: What qualities do you and your characters share? How much are you like them, or how different are they from you? 

KC: Like me, some of my characters have slightly warped senses of humor. Also like me, unfortunately, the majority of my characters have some kind of trauma in their past and live with PTSD. Although it isn’t explicitly stated, I would say that a few of my characters also share neurodivergence, though theirs isn’t necessarily the same as mine. 

JSC: What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next? Tell us about it!

KC: Right now, I’m working on the first draft of a novel that doesn’t have a finalized title yet. Currently, I’m calling it Beyond and Within, but I strongly dislike that title and only used it because I have a quirk of not being able to start writing a story until it has some kind of title. This one is book 4 of my Ebb & Flow series, the series that’s a spin-off from Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat, and it’s targeted for release in April 2026.

The next book I’m releasing after Sorry about the Seitan is Shelter and Storm, book 3 of Ebb & Flow. Shelter and Storm starts simultaneously with the last third or so of Sorry about the Seitan, so there’s more crossover than usual between the plots of the two books. Shelter and Storm will be released on October 9 of this year; following that, I’ll be releasing book 9 of Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat, Much Ado about Muesli, on January 8, 2026.

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And now for Karenna’s new book, Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat book 8: Sorry About the Seitan:

Anax Tobias Rogan, ruler of all werewolves in the United States, has never liked Christmas. But this year, his mate, vegan werewolf Kyle Slidell, and their young guard Quinn Boucher are eager to celebrate, and Tobias is trying to find the holiday spirit. He’s even planned the perfect gift for Kyle, one he hopes will revitalize the relationship that has been frayed by Tobias claiming the rank of Anax.

A call from Jed Howe, the Alpha who took in Tobias after he was changed as a teen, changes everything. Jed has slipped into dementia and believes the Alpha of a nearby pack is trying to steal his rank. Although Tobias manages to calm Jed, he knows the time he has dreaded has come. Jed is no longer fit to rule a pack, and Tobias must intervene before he causes any harm.

But before Tobias is able to stop him, Jed takes drastic and dangerous action against the other Alpha. Now Tobias, battling his own demons, is faced with the most difficult task of his life: Removing the man he considers a father from his rank–permanently.

Universal Buy Link | Amazon

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Excerpt

Kyle appeared at the office door. Having glass doors was both an advantage and a disadvantage; I could see anyone who stood outside, but they could also see me. I motioned for him to come in.

He walked around the desk and rested his hand on my shoulder. “I heard some of that. Are you okay?”

“No.” Still seated, I wrapped my arms around him and pressed my cheek against his belly. “This is what I’ve been hoping wouldn’t happen. Jed has reached the point where he can no longer lead his pack. And I have to do something about it.”

“You don’t have to do anything today.” He cradled my head with his other hand. “Tobias, you don’t have to do it at all. I can. Or his Beta.”

“You can’t. We’ve talked about this. You are my mate, not my enforcer or my guard.” Reluctantly, I pulled away from him. “His Beta, maybe. But Jed trusts me, and I…I should have done something about this sooner. I can do something now.”

“I know. That’s one of the things I love about you, that you’re always willing to step in and make things right.” He leaned against the desk. “It’s also one of the things that worries me about you sometimes, but we aren’t going to get into that now. I didn’t come in here to argue with you.”

“You came in here because I told you to.”

He snorted. “Yeah, except for the part where I would have come in anyway. I know what Jed means to you.”

“Yeah.” I blew out a breath through pursed lips. “I wouldn’t have survived being changed without him. I literally owe him my life. I have to call Eloise. I don’t know if he’s made these accusations to her, but she needs to know what kind of shape he’s in right now.”

“Accusations against Justin. I couldn’t hear what Jed was saying, but I heard enough on your side of the conversation.” He hesitated. “Should Justin know about this? Jed might not actually be a threat, but obviously someone from City Pack talked to him. They might not have told him Justin’s going to yoink NH-Mass Pack out from under him, but they said something to him. Maybe Justin should know about that.”

“Yeah. He should.” I massaged my temples with my fingertips.

“With your permission, I’ll call Justin on your behalf and fill him in. That will be one less thing for you.”

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have delegated something this important to Kyle. But I couldn’t contact Justin and Eloise at the same time, and both calls were equally important. I nodded. “Yeah. Thank you. Tell him you’re acting for me at my request to inform him that his pack members have gone to Jed behind his back and might have gone to other alphas in the area as well. I don’t know what they actually said; Jed couldn’t remember.”

Kyle paused for a moment, then nodded. “Got it. I’ll go do that now and come back after I talk to him?”

“Yes. Thanks.”