Author Lilith Saintcrow on TAKEN…or “Weasel Boy”

by Lilith Saintcrow, author of Taken (Harlequin Nocturne, February 2011)

“I like werewolves, but I want something else.”

My long-suffering writing partner rolled her eyes when I said that. Wise of her. Generally, it’s the sort of statement that means a plot bunny is about to explode full-fledged into the walled garden of my mind, eating all the carrots, digging everything up, propagating like mad until I can speak of nothing else and my friends all have to plug their ears against Lili’s Next Greatest Novel Idea She Won’t Shut Up About.

But it was an interesting question. Wolves, cats, big birds of prey—we all know those were-animals. I wanted something different. Something out of the ordinary, something with some possibilities.

What I ended up with…was weasels.

Well, not so much weasels as wolverines, part of the weasel family. They’re like the uncle nobody ever talks about in that smart, agile, ferocious, and furry tribe.

“The French-Canadian term for them is Carcajou,” my writing partner supplied helpfully, and the word sounded so lovely I was instantly hooked. (Their Latin name is Gulo gulo, which means “glutton,” but I didn’t care.) Carcajou. It just rolled off the tongue and made me quiver with apprehensive pleasure. Solitary, intelligent, fierce, adapted to deep winters and downright nasty-tempered, who could ask for a better animal to Were up?

Plus, I was a Marvel X-Men fan in my teens; my adoration of Chris Claremont and Jim Lee’s Wolverine sat up and made the temptation irresistible.

So I started writing. The working title was officially Carcajou, but…well, I won’t lie. On my hard drive, the unofficial working title was Weasel Boy. I liked Zach, the hero, much more than I usually like most of my heroes. He was fierce and pushy and didn’t know when to quit, but also surprisingly vulnerable.

The more I wrote, the more fun I had researching wolverines. Odd things began to happen—magazine articles would show up, lovingly clipped by my friends and sometime-research assistant, an REI catalog with a large picture of a curious, wary wolverine on a sheet of ice arrived, books on the legends surrounding these fascinating creatures fell into my hands. And the possibilities—the weasel family is known for its musk, which just delighted me to no end, being a wonderful sensory “cue” to give a hero; the wolverine doesn’t back down from a fight; he seems to have an understanding of revenge—oh, they just made the whole book a series of delights.

In the end, of course, my creation has about as much in common with real wolverines as, say, a movie has to real life. (Which is a fancy way of saying, not very much.) But the research was a joy, writing the book provided me hours of pleasure and absorption, and Weasel Boy—aka Carcajou, aka Zach of Taken—will always hold a special place in my heart.

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