I enjoy books where one of the two main characters is a different species, alien or paranormal, something other than vanilla human. I particularly love it when that species is shown to have a different culture, different goals or expectations, from human ones. That creates a kind of mirror, where the absurdities and the good parts of being human can be reflected.

One of my favorite authors for this is Lyn Gala. Her Claimings, Tails and Other Alien Artifacts gives us the Rownt, a species whose cultural priorities are very different from ours. In the process, the author says things about respect and diversity, greed and negotiation. Her Earth Fathers Are Weird shows a very different future, where humans are an ignorant backwater. And in the progression of the story, she brings out how important, and how difficult, communication across language and cultural barriers is. Something just as true here on Earth.

In paranormal too, I always enjoy when the culture of the other species has logical, unique, and non-human elements. In Matthew J. Metzger’s Walking on Water, the merfolk species of one MC refer to ships passing on the surface of the ocean as “clouds,” remote, nonsentient, something to avoid if they happen to fall to the bottom. In Eli Easton’s Howl at the Moon, the dog shifters prioritize play, and scent, in delightfully doggy ways.

As I write the fifth of my werewolf books right now, that’s an element I work on including. What would those wolves value, or want? What would they sense, or feel, that ordinary humans would not? And yet, they are human too, and so the men who are wolves have very human priorities too. Making those choices is part of the fun of writing werewolves.

I particularly enjoy the culture clash stories— the human-meets-alien MCs who sometimes fail in a meeting of the minds. I have those in this series, but this new book is not one of them. My main characters are both wolves who met back in WWII. But as my wolves as a species come out to the human world, there is a conflict of cultures there. My wolves are the heroes, but they have to keep some of the wildness and practical ruthlessness that make them other than human.

And I’m always interested in reading those stories, from the humor of Clutch by Piper Scott and Virginia Kelly, where quasi-humans and dragon-shifters collide, to the dark vampires of the M/F Those Who Hunt the Night by Barbara Hambly. We learn a lot about being human, by setting human characters and human society up against the warped mirror of other species. So much fun.