In my previous post I talked about what motivated me to tackle a paranormal romance (PNR, in the lingo of genre writers) that is polyamorous, to boot. This post is about what actually inspired the characters and plot line of Wolves of Harmony Heights.

Simply put: Teen Wolf, the television show on MTV.

To be clear, Wolves of Harmony Heights is not Teen Wolf fanfiction with “the serial numbers scratched off” and, ironically, I have never watched more than a few clips and half the pilot of the show. What I have done, though, is read a metric fuck-ton of TW fanfiction. It’s a fun fandom and has some great writers and stories, including possibly my most favorite fanfic of all time. But one thing that really bugs me is a reflection of the fact that I am definitely not the teen/young adult audience of the TV show: those high school kids were always out after curfew! They skip class all the time! They are going around carrying guns and getting injured and hanging out with very sketchy grown men and SERIOUSLY WHERE ARE THEIR PARENTS?

It occurred to me that those parents, of whom there are a few on the show, would in reality not be quite as conveniently oblivious as the show (and, lordy, nearly all the fanfic) makes out. The show caters to high school fantasy tropes and the fanfic, by and large, does too, with the added element of often being written by very young fans (by my standard, anyway, because I’m old) who still think that yes, parents are just that dumb. (That’s not a criticism so much as simply acknowledging that for a show like that to work and to appeal to that demographic, then that’s just the way the adults have to be presented. Responsible adults behaving sensibly and with compassion never makes for great teen angst.)

I am not a parent but I’m old enough to have watched friends raise kids from cradle to college, and I know what it looks like on the other side. Realistically speaking, for the kids in that show to have gotten away with all those shenanigans, their parents would have had to simply not care. I wondered what it would look like as a show if it was still about the kids getting into supernatural drama, but presented from the perspective of the adults around them who do care.

I could have gone for “Grown Up Adult Wolf” be done with it (and there is an amazing fic that has done just that, which I highly recommend!). But no. I wanted the crux of the supernatural drama to remain on the kids, while seeing how that plays out for the adults who have to deal with them.

And thus, I dreamed up Liz Hart, a single mother of a teenager who somehow finds herself wondering “what the everloving fuck has my kid gotten himself into????”

Being me, of course, it got wayyyy more complicated than that. And, since it is not TW fanfic, I could not conveniently lift the supernatural “rules” of that show wholesale (I kept the eye color flip, though, because I like it). I needed a backstory and a bad guy (or two or three) and, most importantly, I needed an actual plot to hang the set-up on.

At heart, though, it’s still about a group of adults who are dealing with a group of teenagers who might (or might not!) be, well…teen wolves. 🙂