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Today, I spoke to two-hundred women and told them about how I'd sold four of the series, that the book received a great review in Publisher's Weekly also, but I didn't tell them exactly what I write. Just showed them my hunky Heart of the Wolf book cover. :) Still, I signed several today, and one lady is adding me to a 4-star website, so that was pretty exciting. Maybe I'll have to write about werewolves in Texas. :) And I got a request from a book club in Minnesota to come visit their group if I was ever in the area. My Wilde Germans initially settled there and so I thought that was pretty neat.
But back to the wolf series, I research the areas where I have my wolves live, because they need to be where real wolves live in their native environment. That way if the lupus garous are seen in their wolf coat, they'll not arouse too much suspicion. Although in Heart of the Wolf, Bella gets caught anyway for being a red wolf in Oregon, when only grays are in the area, sneaking out of their preserve in Idaho. :)
I love to do research, and so one of the things I was looking into for the beginning of Heart of the Wolf was the clothes they wore in the 1800's. After someone read Heart of the Wolf, she remarked that women did not wear crotchless underwear...I guess she believed that that's only something that's erotica fashion today and if I hadn't researched it and found this to the contrary, I would probably have believed the same thing. It's amazing how one's fashion can be one's great grandmother's earlier fashion. My daughter was going on about her hip hugger pants like they're something new, the same with the capris...My mother wore capris when I was a baby, and I wore hip huggers when I was a teen.
But back to crotchless underwear in the Early Victorian Era, can you imagine trying to relieve yourself, wearing multiple petticoats, and the like in an outhouse? So crotchless underwear was a necessity, not a sexy, fashion statement.
Pantalets - Pantalets were crotchless underwear of about mid-calf length. They could be of cotton, silk or linen and often had lace trim at the bottom. Sometimes they were even flounced.
When I'm reading stories, I love learning new things, so I hope that readers will enjoy learning more about real wolves and they areas they live in as they follow along in the stories.
Terry Spear
Heart of the Wolf, Don't Cry Wolf
