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This week M.D. Massey interviews Camilla Ochlan and Bonita Gutierrez, co-authors of The Werewolf Whisperer urban fantasy series. Click the play button to find out more about what this dynamic writing duo has in store for their readers in their latest release, Blood & Bones.
Find Out More About This Week’s Featured Authors
Latest Release: Blood & Bones
Camilla’s Website: https://camillaochlan.com/werewolf-whisperer
Bonita’s Website: https://bonitasgeekyblogfu.wordpress.com/
Transcript of This Week’s Author Interview:
(Note: This is a machine generated transcript, so please excuse the typos. ~MDM)
M.D. Massey:
Hello everyone. This is MD Massey, and I am back with another author interview for the urban fantasy author podcast. Today I have a co-writing team with me Camilla Ochlan and Bonita Gutierrez. Camilla is the owner of a precariously untamed imagination, and a scuffed set of polyhedral dice. And Camilla writes fantasy and science fiction. An unapologetic dog lover, and cat servant, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband, actor, audio book, narrator and dialect coach, PJ Ochlan, with three sweet rescue dogs and a bright orange Abyssinian cat. I flubbed the Ochlan there. Did you catch that?
(Inaudible discussion and laughter)
I got it right once and then I got it wrong. And you just told me that. And okay, so let’s move on to Bonita’s bio. She found a way to the stage at the early age of five after college, she moved to Los Angeles to get into the biz. Over the years, she’s played many roles from actor to producer, screenwriter, to filmmaker, and now novelist with a background in Jeert Kune Do, Bonita holds a black belt in kickboxing, MMA and trains in Kali and Escrima, which is stick and knife, fighting. An avid runner, student of film and lover of music, Bonita is a self-proclaimed hamburger connoisseur with a passion for all things Star Wars and Buffy. Camilla and Bonita, welcome to the show.
Camilla and Bonita:
Hi. Hey, thanks for having us.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. Glad to finallychat. I can’t remember how I stumbled across your books, but I remember seeing them and thinking this is pretty interesting. So I downloaded the first book and I started reading it and I was like, “Oh, this is really good.” These ladies know how to tell a story. I can’t remember if I reached out to you or what, but yeah, we’ve been kind of communicating back and forth for a while. So it’s a pleasure to speak with you.
Camilla and Bonita:
I know it’s been, yeah. And then we had the whole martial art thing in common.
M.D. Massey:
That’s right. Yeah.
Camilla and Bonita:
We’re talking quite a bit. So no, it’s great to finally put a voice to the face.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I get to use my radio voice for the podcast, so, Yeah. So, so let’s start off with a little bit of background from you both. If you could if each of you could share a little bit about you know, how you get into writing urban fantasy your writing background, other than urban fantasy writing and so forth.
Camilla and Bonita:
Well I think the urban fantasy came really natural to both of us because we really love the genre. And that’s one of the things we, you know, we bonded over, you know, really early on. I’ve been writing for a long time. I did have a you know, I was writing more Epic fantasy and I was one of those writers who never finished anything. And some something finally something finally changed. I think I read someone or was all these writing books and someone that really stuck with me that, you know, the more you do it, you will get better. You will get better. And it’s something about that just took away that fear of, Oh my God, this is going to be so awful. And people are going to hate it and I’m not worthy. I’m not worthy.
Camilla and Bonita:
I’m like, well, if I keep doing it, I will get better. So I wrote a, I wrote a screenplay off of an idea I had had, and that was I call it a suburban horror story. And that gave me something in that gave me the idea for the world was for, and I shared that idea with Bonita and we were off and running. So yeah, I know that was for me it was well I acting or both doing acting two at a time. And Anna, the thing that I was doing was just trying to get my own work out there. So I was writing screenplays. I was writing my husband’s a screenwriter and he taught me a lot about screenwriting and gave me he kept saying, you should, you have such a good voice. You should get your own ideas out there and you get your own ideas out there. So I wrote a short film called Cantar awhile ago and produced it and shot it and went to film festival. And so that kind of gave me the feeling of go, okay. Yeah, that’s cool. I can, I can keep doing this. And then Camilla comes along with this idea and she’s like, Oh, could you read my script? And it was so good. I got to take, I can’t even tell you it was so good.
Camilla and Bonita:
It really was. It’s a great story. And we, and then originally we since we were both coming from screenwriting, we wrote it as a web series. We wrote it as, yeah, that was just for the world whispers. Like after we worked at, we worked on Camilla short film. And we, over that summer, then she’s like, Oh, I had this idea. And she wrote out like three episodes, three, three minute episodes of and then said, Oh, and had me over for dinner. And her husband’s a phenomenal chef. And we like had this amazing seven course dinner and it was a great, and then she was like, here, look at this. And so I started reading and she just said the title and I laughed so hard. I was like, I am so in on this. And we started sitting down that summer and we just print out like a whole season 13 episodes. And we had such a blast so much fun and we’re like, Oh, we can act in this and we could do this. This will be great. And then a friend of our friend, Stephanie Thorpe, who’s a she’s a media content producer. She’s like, Oh, let me look at it. And she was like, Oh, you know, this is going to cost probably about 50,000 an episode.
Camilla and Bonita:
Maybe not
Camilla and Bonita:
Since we had worked on it all summer, we were already developing so much more to the story and the world. And that’s when we thought, well, we could write a novel. That’s what Camilla thought, what do you think about writing this as a novel? This is all coming from our brain. I was like, I haven’t ever written a novel before. And I went, okay, sure. Let’s do it. But you’ve read about a million. I’ve read a million novels. I’ve read, I read I’m a voracious reader, but I was like, okay, all right. All right, let’s do it. Let’s do it. I can do this. And so
M.D. Massey:
And then you found out it was super easy, right?
Camilla and Bonita:
So easy to write. I’m one of the, one of the super cool things taking, doing the novel after having written the season or season and a half, we had an outline. We had quite the outline. So filling, filling that out was a lot of fun. And it was a, it was a lot of fun. It was fun writing the first book, just kind of explaining and making this world so much bigger than we, even than we even initially had thought it would be. And, and, and coming up with things and, and, and we’d come over to Camilla’s house and she lives up in the Tarzana Hills and we don’t have, we have a, well, she has a giant pack of dogs. They’re giant dogs. And I haven’t, I have a tiny little pug, so I’d bring my little tiny pug over with her giant dogs. And we walked down the neighborhood and start plotting out things. And as we walk the dogs, we plot out the werewolves.
M.D. Massey:
Nice. And you have to tell me, so these giant dogs, what breed are they?
Camilla and Bonita:
Well, they’re all rescues. One of them, I think we just call it LA Brown dog. So there’s have, and Elliott dogs all have pit bull in them. If you get them for a rescue and just a bunch of stuff, her name is Zuzu and she’s wonderful life. And she’s sweet. I have a house Siberian, Husky, half golden retriever he’s white. He looks like ghost from, from game of Thrones, he’s Lammy. And he has a very Lammy personality. And then we have the monster. We have a 90 pound Ridgeback Weimaraner mix, she’s awesome and a lot of work and a lot of fun. She’s great. She’s a horse. She’s very needy. They’re great. Bonita has her sweet little pug.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. My wife is a, she’s a small dog person. I’m a large dog person. And so when we got our dog, which we lost last year, unfortunately it was time for her to, you know, she was sick. So we had to put her down, but a sweet, sweet, sweet dog. And she was 110 pound American bulldog and looked mean is, is, you know, the day is long, but she was just a sweetheart. Just the sweetest dog. Yeah. We miss her so much. So I love large dog breeds. That’s why I had to ask.
Camilla and Bonita:
I mean, yeah. I don’t care how large or small they are. They’re just, you know, sweet. But we got, we, I live in an apartment. So for me, it’s It’s easier to have a smaller dog.
M.D. Massey:
Oh yeah. If you hear the clinking, that’s, low-key drinking some water.
Speaker 4:
Nice.
M.D. Massey:
That’s good. No problem. We are dog lovers on the show. So I get to ask you both you know, cause I know you you’ve both worked in the entertainment industry to some extent. So what is it like working in Hollywood?
Camilla and Bonita:
Well, one, one of the things that brought me to writing and writing novels and being happier than I’ve ever been, it is it is all mine. It is all, it’s all my decisions. It’s all, there’s a great independence to being an independent author. And you know, the other side of, you know, then you have to market it, but the actual creating what I found with Hollywood as a, as an actor, you don’t get to act, you know, other people decide whether or not you’re allowed to work. So you spend all of this, you know, time training and this is your passion, all this great stuff. But the, and nobody works. You know, that’s the other thing it’s, you know, you’re, you’re not alone in your, I just can’t, I don’t, I don’t know what’s going on. You just don’t have control.
Camilla and Bonita:
And then as an actor, you know, film, the director has the control. The actor does not. And that’s also something I came to find out that for me, I don’t really want to say other people’s words as it turns out, I want to, you know, write my own. So that’s not a good thing for an actor. So that’s where sort of transitioned very happily. But I think it’s a really, it’s a fun to, I love LA it’s a fun town to be in the industry. You know, there’s so much creativity and everyone who’s involved in, you know, in whatever way. So many people make all of this happen. That it’s, I find it really exciting for me, for me. I don’t know. I, I love the, I, I, I don’t mind it. I don’t, I hate the auditioning process. So that’s the thing I hate the most.
Camilla and Bonita:
And of course that’s how you get jobs. But the thing I like is when you’re, I love being on set, I love, I don’t care in what capacity that is. I just love, it was just like how I was in theater. I love being in theater, whether it was on stage or behind the scenes. It’s just something I love being around that energy and being a part of it. I think that’s the kind of addictive thing of it. The thing I like Camilla says is you have no control over anything that you’re doing even, and even in the higher echelons or even the mid-grade echelons, it’s like, you are always looking for the next job which is not a bad thing, really. If you can be comfortable in being uncomfortable, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just the way it is.
Camilla and Bonita:
The thing with me is I love that collaboration and I think that’s why working with Camila. I mean, we’d known each other for many years and to me it’s the same as collaborating different medium, but collaborating in a play or profiting on a film it’s, it’s coming together and creating something, which is what I love. And that’s the thing that drives me. I like telling stories, whether it’s as an actor, whether it’s being a producer or whether it’s you know, shooting the thing or writing the thing or all of the things. To me, it’s just, for me, it’s just part of who I am as an artist. So whatever capacity that is, I’m happy to do it. There are things that, of course, in the Hollywood biz that just, you know, they work for some people and not for others, or it happens for some people and not for others.
Camilla and Bonita:
And I think the idea is to just keep finding your voice and keep putting it out there. And that’s what at least we tried to do and found, find a place to be happy. It’s almost, it’s almost like LA itself. There are so many different parts to Los Angeles to live. And, you know, people, when they first, when you first get here, it can be really depressing because it’s so different than anywhere else. You know, you may have come from, and until you find your corner of LA you’re, you’re going to feel unsettled. But after a while, everyone sort of finds their place, whether it’s, you know, downtown or the Valley, or, you know, silver Lake or, you know, all these different places you can go and you find yourself home. And it is home in this great, big, crazy place called LA. Yeah. Which is kind of cool.
Camilla and Bonita:
Why we, you know, made the wearable force for the virus that takes over happens in LA the backdrop for a fantasy story. That’s for sure. Oh yeah. Yeah. And there’s so many, you know, we wanted to we want it to show those places that we knew about. We know, you know, unless you’ve lived here for a few years, you know, you’re not going to know much about, and I’ve actually heard from other recent transplants that are like, Oh, I’m reading about them that I didn’t know about yet. And so I’m going to check that out. It’s in your book. I remember. Yeah. I remember. And I was reading Mercedes Lackey had, has urban elves series. This is before I moved to LA and she had the big confrontation take place in this place called Griffith park.
M.D. Massey:
Oh my God. There’s a park in the
Camilla and Bonita:
Middle of LA. So it was that same thing. Like, Oh, actually we have some stuff happening. Thank you, Mercedes Lackey.
M.D. Massey:
Well, you know, I find that you know, cause by books are set in Austin because you know, you write what you know, and yeah. So do I, I’ve been here
Camilla and Bonita:
Barbecue. Oh my God. I would fly in her . And just to go to,
M.D. Massey:
Hey, if you guys, Oh, let me tell you something. If you guys ever come out here to Austin, just look me up and I will take you out. I take all my friends out for the best barbecue. So,
Camilla and Bonita:
Well, I actually really want to visit Austin. My son, really, the only place, you know, a lot of people say my brother lives in Texas. So, you know, I have to go to Texas sometimes. No, I love Texas. So he’s up in Denton. So outside of Dallas though.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. I, you know, honestly of all the large cities in Texas, Austin is the only one that I really care for. But what I, what I find is I find that people that are from the area or have lived in the area, you know, they’ll, they’ll readers will contact me and they’ll say, Oh man, you know, I really love your books. And it’s so much fun reading, you know, different scenes and trying to figure out exactly where they’re taking place and you know, people like that, they like those kind of geographic references and those reference points and their stories.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. I grounds it. And reading and reading the beginning of, of your book that I was like, Oh, wait, he’s big. He’s there. Oh yeah. I can totally picture that. That’s really great. That’s fun.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. Well, I, you know, someone, I want to talk about it, switch gears a little bit. Because co-writing is like all the rage in urban fantasy lately and Epic fantasy and science fiction and science fiction fantasy. I see others teaming up all over the place to co-write novels, but it seems like you to kind of did it from the start and almost did it like before it became cool.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been doing it since 2012.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. So you guys were ahead of the curve now. I’d like to know how your writing process works between the two of you. How does that, how does that arrangement work? You know, who does, who does the bulk of the writing? Do you switch back and forth? Who does the editing, you know, in outlining and et cetera?
Camilla and Bonita:
Well, I’d have to say that there’s not a word in any of the books that doesn’t have each of her fingerprints on it, between the outlining and the writing and all of that. So, you know, I, 50, 50 right down the line we do flip chapters and character point of views. But then the way we, you know, we outline, we talk about the story, then we go away ride whatever chapter, and then we bring the chapter back and together we go line by line. And yeah, we read, we read aloud, we read what, whoever wrote, what chapter, that person, the chapter, and then we’d go, okay, well I have this, that, and the other note. And then we, we make sure that the voices blend each chapter because you know, even to the, you know, now it’s, it’s really also come to the point where, you know, chapters and Lucy’s point of view and, you know, I’ll ride whatever and I’ll put into, you know, our, the chapter that I bring back.
Camilla and Bonita:
And so she says something because I know, you know, Bonita will have the perfect thing that’s so she says, or I can, you know, I can write the thing, whatever line and or whatever or whatever. So she would say, she’ll say she said something in Spanish. We figure out what she says. So yeah, so we, we sort of really worked through the entire book together and it wasn’t, I know a lot of people are teaming up now because they want to write faster. And I, you know, I totally, I totally understand that, but for us the process I, I would not have written this book on my own. I love working with Bonita. I love working with Bonita in the genre and it just, it wouldn’t have been possible. It wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. So so yeah. And the other side of that is we, we work hard to, I don’t want to use the word please, but I’m going to, I’m going to say the word please.
Camilla and Bonita:
The other person’s ear and sensibility, like, it is important to me when I’m writing a chapter that the Nita likes it, same here. I hope she likes this. So we have tremendous respect for, you know, for each other’s vision and, you know, to once in a while, you know, stuff doesn’t work. And yeah, we, we we’ll have moments where we like pitched each other ideas and we’re like, Whoa. And then you have to kind of either honor the idea or go, yeah, that probably doesn’t work. Or, but I think it’s about really having the other person on board and we’ve been doing it. I think when we first started way back then we were just trying to figure out how to do it together. You know, how to work that out together. But now I think it’s just kind of second nature in a way.
M.D. Massey:
It’s very, it’s what I find refreshing about this. The way you’re explaining your working relationship is that you actually teamed up to write a better story. And I’m not saying that other co-writing authors don’t, but, you know, as you were saying earlier that a lot of authors team up to write faster to, you know, prank stories out. And sometimes I do think that quality kind of gets lost in the shuffle because people are trying to feed the Amazon algorithms first instant, right.
Camilla and Bonita:
And they’re, you know, more power to them. I totally understand. But I, you know, I feel I want to be in this for decades, you know, this is the law, this is the long game for me. So, you know, whether it’s, and I, and I, I honestly can’t crank things out. I mean, I, for me, it’s, I just, I bleed over every chapter, especially the chapters I’m writing right now. I’m bleeding over these chapters and, and I’m, you know, I don’t know how people write you know, 15 books in a year. I know think that this series can be written that fast. It’s just, it’s a much denser series than I think you’d normally find in the urban fantasy in terms of, in terms of, we’ve got a lot of, without a lot of moving parts going on in, in, in, in the story we, as you’ve seen with gut dual timelines going, we have multiple points of view going on. We have this, the pic, the little world picture between our main characters of Lucy and Xochitl, but then we had this big world thing going on. And so, and that’s being that progresses throughout the series. And, and so there’s a lot of puzzle pieces to stick together. And I just died personally. I couldn’t write this, like within, we actually wrote the first book pretty quickly. But that’s yeah.
Camilla and Bonita:
And then even the second book, but this we’ve really been, just really mapping out and really working the story through and making sure everything works cohesively, but also you know, continuity has to be there. You have to make sure, Oh yeah. Where were we here when we were doing that? And, you know, and you just really have to keep those, all, everything every puzzle piece together. And it’s, it’s a long, hard process.
M.D. Massey:
Let’s talk about that real quick, because I want you guys to get a little bit you know, into the world of The Werewolf Whisperer, because it’s a, it’s a pretty interesting premise. So if you could share a little bit about that…
Camilla and Bonita:
Everything starts for the main characters, Lucy and Xochitl, when Lucy’s partner a cop turns into a werewolf-like creature right in front of them during a raid. So there’s, you know, there’s SWAT everywhere and it’s all, it’s a giant mess. So Lucy and Xochitl, this crazy thing just happened. And there’s fallout from, from that event. What they do not know is that all around them, this virus is affecting everybody, you know, et cetera, setters in LA sort of spreads out from there. And the way we were looking at the, the world, the world changes and nobody notices very, very quickly. There, there are three categories of how people are well, four really, either not affected at all. Or you turn into something that it’s still looks human, but it’s very, dog-like, you know, very, you know, happy puppy, you know, then there or ones that are, which we call a hound.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah, exactly. Then there are ones called ferals. They’re more like, you know, wild coyotes. Again, they look human, but they might have, you know, some, you know, fuzzy ears or a tail because yeah, they might have some sort of, but they, they go run and, you know, live in the Hills or, you know, dig through garbage cans. People try and, you know, keep their loved ones that have turned into these barrels in their house. Right. It doesn’t always work out. Then there are the where beasts, which are, you know, the full-on werewolf type, huge change. So Lucy and Xochitl eventually start trying to help people to, like Bonita said, you know, if your loved one has a hound, you know, the kid just turned into a hound or grandma there, you have to just like, you know, you know, you get dogs, you have to train them to be able to get along.
Camilla and Bonita:
So Lucy who has dog training backgrounds somehow has like the dog was for, she’s really good with these hounds. She’s good with the ferals. But she has actually, she has this ability to make them do what she wants and nobody else has that ability. So, yeah. And it’s one of those things where, okay, so the, I mean, the book, like I said, the books is in it’s this, the first book is kind of an origin story of how they come together as a team. And it starts out with them already as a team. So then you see how they come up, become a team through the, through our alternating timelines. But yeah, it’s this idea that here’s this woman who has this ability that nobody else has, and the world is just moving on as if nothing weird has just happened.
Camilla and Bonita:
And she is sort of trying to make normalcy out of the abnormal because she can do that because she has this ability in Xochitl, her best friend is kind of there to be the muscle. We’ll try to help her support her in, in, and also what they start running is, you know, the, there, the violence comes quickly. You know, if you want to go help someone to try and the family member to, you know, not pee on the rug and you get there. And it’s really a full-on, werebeast, that’s trying to eat, everyone’s face off, you know, there, there, there are only a few ways of dealing with that. So they, werewolf removal, rehabilitation and removal.
M.D. Massey:
So I I’m curious, can, can these creatures, are they able to shift back and forth between human form and, you know, they’re werewolf or semi-werewolf form, or are they stuck, or how does that work?
Camilla and Bonita:
That’s one of the things you come to find out. We don’t want to spoil that. Yeah. I mean, it’s not really a spoiler thing. It’s, it’s, it’s Lucy and Xochitl think things are one way. And as we learned throughout the book and the story, and as any, even into the series, what they think isn’t really necessarily the truth of everything and what is really going on and things evolve and change faster than anyone is really aware of. But you know, you also have, the rest of the world is trying to deal with what’s going on in the best way. So there was a lot of misinformation. There are a lot of people who think they know what’s going, going on and they don’t, but it is, you know, one of our tasks as welcome to the world, Wolf, apocalypse, hope you’re locked and loaded. It’s going to go one way. And it’s that whole idea that especially in book one it’s, it’s, it’s so absurd it’s that these people, you know, are having these two women go out and train their werewolf isn’t and companies are coming out with werewolf food called hound chow. And, and it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s this idea that the world can still go on as it is when chaos is really erupting.
M.D. Massey:
So, so there’s, there’s no masquerade. Then, then everybody knows this is like an, an out thing. Everybody knows that werewolves are happening.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. Everyone knows. And they think that’s that’s, that’s it, everyone stems in LA, it moves through California. California is quarantined off from the rest of the world. I don’t want to go too far into that, but that’s, what’s happening. That’s where you’re at in the beginning of the book.
M.D. Massey:
Gotcha. All right. See this, this is kind of cool. It’s, it’s, it’s a different take on werewolves and I like it.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. It’s not. I defy anyone to read a werewolf book and think that it’s the same as any other werewolf they read. I really do. I also then focus on the micro story of these two women. They both have, they both have things happen to them because of what is going on. And it’s, it’s their story and their friendship. And that’s it’s, that’s really the heart of it. This relationship between Lucy and Xochitl, it’s really the deep bond that they have, and that no matter what they have each other’s back because they’ve been through so much together and they know each other so well, and maybe they’re a little abrasive to everyone else, but they allow each other to be their best selves. And in this case, most capable selves because they need to it’s life and death for them. And every day is life and death for them. So and one is dealing with one of those days.
Camilla and Bonita:
No too, that we, that, that we have three out right now that are kind of what we call our highway to hell series, which is just sort of like they’re on the road. When you, when you get to book one, they’ve already been on the road for two years and doing this and, and they’re just coming back to Los Angeles for another seminar that Lucy’s giving and the other books are Beast Navidad No Beast So Fierce and Beast Out of Hell are all about stories that happen on the road. Stories first started this the, the web series, our, our sort of thought, what was that? This is a cross between supernatural and Shaun of the dead.
M.D. Massey:
So why don’t you tell me about your latest book in the series in The Werewolf Whisperer series?
Camilla and Bonita:
This you know, wraps up a bit of the story that, you know, started with book one, the character as Lucy and Sochi have had quite a journey. And I think, you know, taking the reader on this ride that starts out in LA a mysterious virus hits LA. How funny is that? That wrote that in 2014. Yeah. And predicting that 20. Right, right, right. And LA prescient. Yeah. California is locked down because, you know, people are, are turning into these Wolf creatures, which they don’t call werewolves. They’re called where beasts. And then we come to find out that there’s the machinations behind why this happened. And we delve into history and mythology and and genetic engineering and all sorts of stuff. So the characters really start in LA end up traveling all over California. And then this latest book, book three actually takes us to Russia.
M.D. Massey:
Wow. Yeah. So changing you know, changing you know, landscape, background settings, et cetera. How exciting was that? I mean, what did that do for you as far as your writing process, you know, did it help to kind of change things up a little bit? Or was it more difficult?
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah, it was always the story was always meant to grow from the personal to the, the world reaching and the characters sort of, no matter what, no matter what happens in the world, you always can really just deal with what’s right in front of you, but their involvement and what happens to the world is is undeniables. So they find themselves in situations that they were not at all planning on being in and yet it’s, it’s inevitable. And then, yeah, not at all prepared for, you know, not always prepared for it.
M.D. Massey:
It’s always good to stick your protagonist, like in, in, you know, deep, hot water, you know, that’s always fun.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. Yeah. We do. We tried it, we tried it. We tried to make it very difficult for them. Yeah. They’re they’re they, they live hip deep in alligators, so yeah, but I’m, I’m thrilled. I, when all of this first started, I had a, I had an idea of where this book three would end and with all the things, as, you know, he ride along series a lot happens, but it, it brought it back to me being really, really thrilled that, yeah, this, this was the vision. Oh my goodness. So so, and, you know, we hope just so we’re giving people a really good, fun, exciting ride with, you know really rich tapestry of, you know, stories and characters and plot in action. Then the mystery, lots of history,
Camilla and Bonita:
And it takes, it takes the story from something small to something big and then changes everything. So, so where we end up here at the end of this book, without giving anything away will change everything for the remainder of the story that is yet to be told. So it’s a, it’s, it’s one of those things that, that yeah, I mean, I’m excited for people to read it, cause it is very different than I think anybody would expect to happen. I think you agree to that up to the last, I mean, we’re, we knew when we were going to the last day of writing, there were things that surprised us, like what, Oh, Oh no, this totally makes sense. You know, you come up with these, you know, these things happen, you don’t even know where they come from. And then it ties, it ties up loosens. You didn’t even quite realize were loose. Yeah. And it’s just, it’s one of those things where you’re just like, yeah, we, we had crumbs from book one that we we’ve, we tie up here in book three and we went, Oh, I think that’s just in the back of our mind, it’s just part of our consciousness. And we did it without even realizing we did it. But yeah,
M.D. Massey:
I think readers who don’t write I think often they don’t understand just how much of that I’m plotting, you know, and, and longterm story arcs happens in the subconscious of the writer’s mind to the author’s mind. And it, it happens to me quite often where I’ll even forget about a detail from the early books and then be like, Oh, I need to add that in, in this book, that’ll fit in. Perfect. It somehow always works out.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. And that’s where, you know, all the research, you know, there probably were avenues of research we did that did not make it and it’s really time consuming, but it gives you something else that somehow sparks another idea or takes you in a different direction. So stuff that we researched years ago that things have changed so drastically in science, because we do a lot of science research and then we make our, what we call off science. It’s like, we turn into our wolves. So it’s like, you know, we, they, that the science has evolved so much since when we first started writing that we had, we were, Oh, we could actually go this direction. And it would, you know, we worked through, I mean, a whole section of this book is just about this virus and, and you know, it took years of research and then we were still changing, making sure and going back and going, does that really still fit? Does that really still work? Oh, look, this little thing just happened in the world. We could, Oh, that actually works with what we’re doing, you know? And it’s just like, it’s kind of crazy how, how it all evolved in, in the story.
M.D. Massey:
I did that with my first series, because there were some some gene splicing and some other stuff going on, that was that I was using to explain you know, different things in the story, different, different characters in their powers and so forth. And then by the time I got to about, I’d say the third or fourth book in my current series, I was just like, ah, I’m going to do this because magic, you just get tired of doing the research. I was like, I interpret fantasy. I can do what I want. So, but but yeah, I think when you do that much research, it definitely adds a depth to your storytelling that you wouldn’t normally have. So I think it’s worth it to do that research for sure.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. And then we had to research a lot of stuff. I mean, you know, the Russia stuff, we, you know, everything has, it’s like so much research. And then for a moment, you know, you have to be careful not to, you know, be saying, I did all this work. I want all of the, to be in that.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. No would always read input dumps. Yeah.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. Not at all. They want to know how it works. They just want to know that it works. Yeah. It’s like so yeah, and it’s just kinda fun to take something that like watching a video on how to do something and there’s something that I had to learn and then having to describe it, you know, in a way that’s more exciting and not just boring. And, and so you take all the details and you just go with the, with the description of what it would feel like or sound like, or, or, or if it’s within conflict between two characters, that’s where you get the information, not, not in, okay. Picks up this and he puts that into it and then it creases. And you know what I mean? It’s like, it’s one of those things you have to sort of take all that information and filter it through your imagination then, and then put it down, which is fun and, and quite challenging at the same time.
Camilla and Bonita:
And I do feel like this book of it really does give us a nice, nice, I don’t want to say ending, cause it’s not the ending of the story, but a nice encapsulation of this one aspect, aspect of the story. Yeah. This, this, this is like to be continued and this is part one. And now we’ll go on to part two. The other thing of living with these characters for a, you know, a number of years and so many adventures that they’ve had, we know them very, very well. So when they are confronted new and
Camilla and Bonita:
Crazy situations, we know how they react, we know how they feel. And that was one of the, you know, one of the pleasures of working, you know, through the arc of these characters that they change and they have to change, you know, that’s yeah, one of our, our little tagline there evolve or die, it is, it is. So it is so important that they’re able to make certain changes because there, there is no choice. So
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, well, I think it’s interesting to me at least that it was much easier to engineer ident, a dynamic character arc over my first three books than it has been over 12 books. And and I think, you know, it gets harder and harder as your, as your series gets longer and longer to show you know, some sort of a, you know, a character arc scene or some sort of an evolution of your character. And you know, I’ll be honest with you. I kinda miss that early stage of, of writing the series because that’s so exciting to do. I think it, you know, when you’re developing characters, it’s, it’s a lot of fun and it’s a lot harder to do with more established characters. So, so I think it’s cool that you guys are having so much fun.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. Well, in your case, your, your readers have an expectations of the characters you know, who the character is like, you can’t really change James Bond very much.
Camilla and Bonita:
So yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. It’s really interesting. Yeah.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah. So I know that my readers were, they really took to your books when I introduced the them, the, my readers to your books and my newsletter. And I know they’re going to be excited to hear about this new book dropping, and they’re going to hear about that before this podcast actually hits the air, but I would like to hear about what you have planned for the future. Well, so what do you have planned for the werewolf whisper series? And are you considering any other collaborations and fantasy between you or doing projects separately?
Camilla and Bonita:
Well, this like Benita mentioned, there’s a certain aspect of this story that has concluded, but there will be more Werewolf Whisperer tales because now they’re facing something that, wow, what’s going to happen next. So we have, we have plans for the next few stories. But we’re very much in a, in a planning stage. This third book took, took a while to get back on this one. So, yeah. And I think our, you know, the way we work has changed quite a bit. So it’ll, it’ll, it’ll be a different process to be perfectly honest. Every book I’ve written has been a slightly different process. So so yeah, there definitely is more coming of this, of these stories. And I think it’s also an interest and I am still interested in these characters. So I want, I wanna know what happened.
Camilla and Bonita:
There’s still more to tell, but we do have plans for a whole new set of books that we’re where we want to start. Focusing on a little bit, come next year as a whole different set of, I don’t know, how do you wanna explain it? Cause it’s like a universe of like, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of thoughts dancing around and a lot of you know, possibilities for projects. So I think probably, you know, we, we are, as we speak in November now, and so we have the rest of the year to kind of sort things out, but there’s, there’s, there’s plenty to be. So so yeah, I’m, I’m really looking forward to what’s next with, you know, with other series and other stories and other characters.
M.D. Massey:
Okay. So definitely more books in the werewolf whisper series and potentially a different series. And will that be also urban fantasy or will it be a different, but related John rhe?
Camilla and Bonita:
That would be urban fantasy. Yeah, I do ride I write an Epic fantasy story about magic and monsters and talking cats and my writing partner and Carol just put out our books six we just I’m editing a short story that follows, and then we’re going to be working on our next book called Wildwood Fate, which will probably be next year, but that’s a whole, that’s a whole different, that’s a whole different genre. I’m also really interested in become very obsessed with historical fantasy. So I’m kicking some things around. We actually started something, this was just a little newsletter extra that we did a number of little short stories about one of the characters. And it, it took us all the way back to hundreds of years ago in China and this character. And we became really fascinated with the the secret history of the Mongols. And there was a long line about one of the founders being a blue wolf. And I know it’s very poetic and, but that’s sort of, you know, got, got my juices flowing. So I, I, I am hoping that we will return to that urban fantasy. There’s also like we did in this book, there is some, you know, going back in history kind of stuff, sort of, it sort of, kind of comes out naturally in what we’re doing anyway. Yeah, so, you know, we do have ideas and some new urban fantasy things that we were trying to develop and get, get going. And and meanwhile, you know, she’s writing her books and I’m writing. I keep working on my little blog. I got my little Bonita’s geeky blog food that I do movies and books. And, and I talk about martial arts, which is a big thing for me. So, which I know you Mike are a big martial artists too, and it’s really been killing me cause I haven’t been trained. I haven’t trained since February. It’s not safe in my opinion. So I I’m staying home and not doing it, but I’m, you know, I’m, you know, do my thing at home, but yeah, it’s not the same. Yeah.
M.D. Massey:
One of my instructors in Hawaii, we were supposed to do a big, and I’m getting off on a tangent, sorry. But we were supposed to do a big you know, like a gathering of the, you know, of the tribe and so forth. And we had to cancel it. He’s been doing a lot of zoom trading with his with his people, you know, doing his online and stuff.
Camilla and Bonita:
I’ve seen some people doing that too, and that’s kind of cool. I’d like to do that with, with Kali. I’m trying to convince my, my teacher is like, can we do some zoom Kali? So so anyway, but no. Yeah. So I’m kind of itching for that. Can’t wait for all this to be done so I can get back to it. But in planning, planning, planning, planning the next few months. Yeah. I I, yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know how you go about your planning for the next book or the next series. But I think that the end of the year for me is always that, you know, sitting down with a piece of paper, writing out all, all the, all the goals and you know, kind of going from there, but I think, you know, definitely a time you know, to figure all of that out for next year.
M.D. Massey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s actually, I tried to clear my desk before the holidays. I tried to do it before Thanksgiving, although this year, so that’s not going to work out. I think it would be writing during Thanksgiving actually. But yeah, I do the same thing and I think it’s really helpful to plan out your year ahead of time because you know, it kind of gives you some goals and that way you’re not just floundering and what you’re going to write in ocean. I write those. Should I write that? Cause if you’re like, if you, if you’re like me, I get shiny object syndrome really bad. So I have to make sure that I actually have a plan otherwise I’ll Oh, forget it. I won’t get anything them
Camilla and Bonita:
For me right now starts my corporate tax year. So I start taxes right now.
M.D. Massey:
Oh man, you may as well be like, that’s like you know, I don’t know. It’s like restringing your guitar or something.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. So March, so geez.
M.D. Massey:
Oh, okay. So tell, tell everyone let’s, let’s tell our listeners how they can find out more about you, where they can find your current release, all the information about you and any other projects you have going on.
Camilla and Bonita:
Well, we’ll, you can find the series werewolf whisper.com. You can find us on Amazon. We are on Kindle unlimited, so you can read all the books one right after the other. And we have our, at my website, CamillaOchlan.com and Bonita has Bonita’s Geeky Blog Fu, which is BonitasGeekyBlogFu.wordpress.com. So you can find all my, my geeky musings there. And you’re pretty active on Twitter at [inaudible] B O N I T Z M G. And I’m on Instagram at Bonita mg and I’m on Facebook. So yeah. And we’re on Facebook with The Werewolf Whisperer as well. And we try to do, you know, put fun things up there and urban fantasy related things, which by the way, tomorrow is a big day for all of us. I think you’re a supernatural fan as well. Yeah.
M.D. Massey:
Oh yeah. I am actually a couple of seasons behind. I’m trying to catch up in July. I live, you know, I live pretty close to the, the the brewery that Jensen Ackles and his family started and I’ve been over there several times and, and yeah, it’s weird, you know, cause you’ll be hanging out there and then somebody famous will walk by. It’s really strange. Yeah. I’m excited about this last season for sure. And a little bit sad.
Camilla and Bonita:
Yeah. So no, but I’m, I guess I’m watching Walker Texas Ranger.
M.D. Massey:
Oh, my wife will be watching too. She is very into those, as she calls them, the cutie boys, so yeah. Okay, great. Well, Camilla and Bonita, I want to thank you for coming on the podcast and yeah, absolutely. And I will make sure to put all your pertinent links in the show notes on the website at urbanfantasyauthor.com. And I want to encourage listeners to stay tuned for a reading from the first book in The Werewolf Whisperer series. So stay tuned for that.
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