There's a lot they don't tell you about the change: the 45 minutes you'll spend flossing the next morning. The big fat tips you're going to give the plumber for discreetly snaking your shower drain every month. Missing the midnight showing of the last Harry Potter movie. The minor fractures. The fleas. Nothing, of course, compares with the horror of spending spring break hunting with your family.

Movies and TV have got it all wrong. Werewolves are like the Italians. Or the Greeks.

I love beginnings. Catching the previews before the movie, a full plate, a first kiss. And when it comes to writing and reading novels, it's the same. I remember in a creative writing workshop as an undergraduate, we wallowed about in first lines for a solid week. The importance of pinning your reader in their seat from the very first wasn't lost on me, and I probably spend more time thinking about the first line than I do the next twenty pages (which is almost certainly a problem, but hey, that's what editing is for, right?)

Someone asked me once if I ever worried I would run out of ideas for novels, and I could've laughed. Not at them, mind, but at the notion that I'd ever have in my life time enough to write what comes after all of the beginnings I've already written. I'm no Joss Whedon.

Though I'm pretty sure just standing near him increases one's productivity.

So I've finished a revision of the endlessly-revised novel and already I feel like I ought to revise again, ought to revisit the next book in that series, should flirt a little more with YA science fiction, or maybe show this new adult werewolf a good time. WWJ(W)D? He'd say get on it, girl.

But not all at once.