Some friends on Dreamwidth were ‘playing’ with a meme where if you answered a post they chose three of your interests for you to write about for them. I answered, and the friend who was finding interests discovered I’d only listed two very general ones, travel and writing. So they looked at my tags and chose the following:

Being Human

Politics

Fantasy

I’ll write about them in three separate posts. If I try to do very long blog posts I end up with less time for my fiction writing. I also end up with nothing to blog about another day!

Being Human was a very British TV series between 2010 and 2013 featuring a ghost, a vampire and a werewolf who became flatmates and attempted to live in the mundane world. I loved the concept of the three trying desperately to maintain a ‘human’ facade, and I thought the acting was extremely good. The scripts, in the first season especially, were excellent. Once the original three characters had been replaced because of various events, I lost interest in the storyline so I didn’t follow the series through all its seasons. I had talked about the series at some point so the tag (only used once) was still there. Let’s just stress that: once! A fleeting though genuine interest, abandoned some years ago but kept on file by my social media account.

I am not particularly interested in ghost stories though I have read some very good ones. Nor do I usually like vampires. I do, however, love werewolves and shifters of any kind. I will seek out shifter stories but will only read ghost and vampire tales if they’ve been specifically recommended by people whose general tastes I trust or share.

However, in the series, I really liked the way the ghost and vampire characters were explored, with the idea of ghosts being unable to move on into the light until they had dealt with unresolved issues, and the way vampires coped with age, the need for blood and vampire politics. I also liked the interactions between the different types of paranormal beings.

I have to admit I would watch Aidan Turner in almost anything – though I didn’t watch Poldark since I didn’t like the books. In Being Human he made a very attractive vampire.

I loved the werewolves, particularly the way Russell Tovey’s main werewolf character tried so hard to be ‘good’ and not hurt anyone. He was so invested in ‘being human’.

In my own writing (in my Living Fae series) I have a werewolf character who interacts with the fae and is not in the least bit dangerous to those he cares about though he is fierce when dealing with anything that threatens his extended family. He tries, quite hard at times, to ‘be human’, or perhaps to be fae.

For anyone else who loves shifter stories I can recommend Eli Easton’s Howl at the Moon series which features the town of Mad Creek where many of the inhabitants live a double life as dog shifters.