A warm welcome to author JL Merrow joining us today to talk about the re release of Camwolf
Check out the post on Alpha Wolves and don’t forget to enter the giveaway!
Welcome JL 🙂

Alpha Wolf

Hi, I’m JL Merrow, and I’m delighted to be here today as part of the blog tour to celebrate the release of Camwolf, my student/teacher werewolf romance set in my alma mater, Cambridge University.

 

Wolves, as everyone knows, are pack animals. And with a pack, comes a hierarchy. At the top is the alpha male, supported by his betas as he fights off attempts by young, upstart alphas to unseat the king from his throne and take over the reins of power. At the bottom of the ranks, we have the omega: lowest of the low, dominated by all.

 

Ranks are reinforced by fighting and, more commonly, ritual posturing: the alpha will expect all other wolves to show submissive body language to him, and will behave in a dominant fashion.

 

Except…real wolves, living in the wild, aren’t actually like that at all, researchers found in 1999.

 

The notion of the alpha male, and the pack structure of rigid social dominance, came from earlier studies that were conducted on wolves living in captivity—in other words, in an unnatural environment. Wolves living in zoos and national parks do so in packs that are forced together by their captivity, comprising many wolves of similar age.

 

Wolves in the wild, however, are typically seen in close family units. Yes, there is generally an older, mated pair as leaders, but they’re not the alphas. They’re just Mum and Dad. Moreover, when the cubs grow up, they don’t fight the alpha male for leadership of the pack. They leave home and start their own family units.

 

(Discovering this apparently came as somewhat embarrassing to one of the 1999 researchers, given that he’d written a book a few decades earlier which took off like a house on fire ad popularised the view of hierarchical packs and the term, “alpha wolf.”)

 

But what about werewolves?

 

Well, until the first scientifically proven werewolf steps forward to tell us how it’s actually done, I think authors have a little leeway in how we structure our pack dynamics. But also, I rather like the idea that werewolves would behave like captive wolves.

 

After all, what is a werewolf, if not a wolf with a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of humanity? 😉

 

 

Question: what’s your favourite werewolf trope? Fated mates? Alpha/Omega? Mpreg? Or something different?

I’m offering a prize of a $10 Dreamspinner Press gift certificate to one lucky commenter on the tour, who will be randomly chosen on Wednesday 25^th July. Good luck!

 

A race to save his lover—by becoming his own worst nightmare.

 

Dr. Nick Sewell has it all. Good friends, a career as a Cambridge academic… and recently, a tendency to turn into a wolf every full moon.  When a new student arrives from Germany, Nick is horrified by his visceral attraction to the troubled youth—not to mention his violent jealousy when he sees Julian with another man. He’s floored to find out Julian is a werewolf too.

Unlike Nick, Julian has spent his life among other wolves, and in this subject, he’s the teacher and Nick the student. Nick struggles to adjust to this reversal of roles, especially since he’s an alpha and Julian a natural submissive. That dynamic just adds to the attraction smoldering between them, whether they’re in human form or wolf.

But Julian’s pack and the abuse he suffered isn’t far behind him, and it wants to reclaim him. For Nick to hold on to his lover, he’ll have to embrace the monster within.

Available in ebook and paperback from Dreamspinner Press

AMAZON

 

Camwolf was previously published by Samhain, but has been completely re-edited and given a lovely new cover for this second edition by Dreamspinner Press.

 

JL Merrow is that rare beast, an English person who refuses to drink tea.  She read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, where she learned many things, chief amongst which was that she never wanted to see the inside of a lab ever again.

 

She writes (mostly) contemporary gay romance and mysteries, and is frequently accused of humour.  Two of her novels have won Rainbow Awards for Romantic Comedy (Slam!, 2013 and Spun!, 2017) and several of her books have been EPIC Awards finalists, including Muscling Through, Relief Valve (the Plumber’s Mate Mysteries) and To Love a Traitor.

JL Merrow is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, the Crime Writers Association, International Thriller Writers, Verulam Writers and the UK GLBTQ Fiction Meet organising team.

 

Find JL Merrow online at: https://jlmerrow.com/, on Twitter as @jlmerrow, and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/jl.merrow