Well, I did my best. I don't like writing – it's too much like homework – but I knew that if there were other young werewolves out there who didn't understand what was happening to them and why they kept waking up naked in strange places, they needed to know about werewolf-traffickers before the traffickers found them. So I dictated my story, and my friend Nina typed it up when she had time – quite slowly, because she's tired and ill a lot of the time, and she's got her own writing to do as well – and sent it off to her publisher.

It took so long to get an answer that I'd nearly forgotten about it. I was busy just living my normal life from one full moon to the next, and trying to get through full moons without eating anyone. At least I was fitter than ever, between dance practice and earning pocket money walking four pit-bull terriers who were traumatised by losing their master and being sent off to four different foster homes, so that they only got to see each other when I came to collect them for walks. I didn't even know anything about dog-training to start with, but their master had been a werewolf, and I suppose I smelled right to them.

So anyway, I was just starting to think that considering how much more energy I had, I ought to be the one typing up my memoirs after all, and wondering how long it would take Nina to finish and send the manuscript off, when I had an email from the publisher. It turned out Nina had already emailed the completed Word file off to them months ago. I'd set up a new email address specially for writing to the publisher, using the name toby_vandevelde (because that was what I'd called myself in the book) instead of my real name, and making sure the address ended .net instead of . so that if there was anyone at the publisher who was anything to do with the werewolf-fighting rings, they couldn't be sure if I really did live in Australia. Nina had sent a covering letter explaining that this was a new novel by a friend of hers who wanted to be a writer, and telling them to reply to my new address, but she'd tried to make it sound as though I might be Nina writing under a different name.

The email was pretty short:

Dear Mr Vandevelde,

Thank you for your manuscript. Unfortunately, we feel that this novel is unlikely to hold the reader's interest in its present form. It would benefit from more description of what turning into a werewolf, and being a werewolf, feels like. Using first-person narration, and having the narrator black out and be unable to remember what he does in wolf shape, will disappoint horror fans who buy werewolf fiction because they want to read graphic descriptions of the agony of shapeshifting and the ecstasy of experiencing the world with a different set of senses.

[But I DON'T KNOW what it feels like! I'm not there when it happens! Do they expect vampire writers to describe what it feels like to be dead during daylight hours?]

In addition, your main character was a bit too inconsistent for our target audience to relate to; he seems too mature at some moments, and too childish at others, to be a believable thirteen-year-old.

[But I AM thirteen! (Well, was – now I'm fourteen). How was I supposed to be a more realistic teenager? Did they mean they wanted me to say my hobbies were smoking drugs and getting into knife-fights, instead of grass-surfing and making toy rockets?]

When it got dark and Nina would be awake, I rang her and told her the news. She sighed: 'Yeah, when I tried writing a book about what it's really like being a vampire, they didn't want to publish that one either. They agreed to do it in the end, cos people who've read all my Zadia Bloodstone books might buy this because it's by the same person, but it didn't sell many copies.'

And Nina's been a bestselling author for way longer than I've even been alive. She's fifteen, only a bit older than me, but she's been fifteen for thirty-seven years, which is long enough to get pretty good at being a fifteen-year-old vampire thriller writer, even if you don't know many modern teenagers because you don't know many people who aren't vampires. Well, apart from a few werewolves, that is.

'Then again,' Nina said, 'if you're not bothered about making money, you could always just post it on the internet.' And then she started telling me about this writers' site she's found, for horror fiction, where people can post stories and get feedback. It's called How's Our Work Looking?, but most people just call it HOWL for short. Most of the people who use it are probably human, and probably most of them assume it's all fictional, but – there's no reason why some of them couldn't be real werewolves or real vampires or their carers, wanting to find out whether there's anyone like them out there.

So Nina emailed me the address for HOWL, and I had a look at it. I typed 'werewolves' into their search engine, and got 43,263 stories. Most of them were rated M for Mature or E for Explicit, which meant I had to confirm that I was over sixteen to read them. I could have lied, but – well, most of those were about gay werewolves, and I don't see why I should be gay just because I like dancing, so I don't want to read gay werewolf porn.

So I scrolled down to see what some of the others were, and found one by a guy called Frog called My Heart Is Heavy With Things I Do Not Understand, which was marked G for General and tagged 'Adoption, Identity Issues, Fantastic Racism, Angst, Revenge, Growing Up, Family'. The summary read, 'Barewolf had always known he was different from the rest of his pack. His teeth were too blunt, his clever paws could do things that no other wolf could do, and not even his best friends could bear to look him in the eye. But when the pack drives him out of the forest, he discovers that humans fear him because he is a wolf as much as the wolves fear him because he is a human. Is there anyone he can trust?'

I thought that didn't sound like a werewolf story exactly, so I read it, and it wasn't. It was just a story about a boy who'd been adopted by wolves. But it did sound like Frog was doing the same thing as Nina and me, telling his own story with the names changed. And when I looked at some of the comments underneath, other people thought so, too. Someone called BearHugs wrote: 'I can identify with this; being an adolescent wolf whose adoptive family are humans is just as confusing as the other way around.'

Someone called Bull wrote: 'I feel for Barewolf when first the wolf-pack, then the villagers, drive him out. I was placed with a human foster family for a while as a child, but they dumped me back in an institution when I became too difficult for them to control, and after that I was just passed from one dumping ground to another.

'I'm glad Barewolf manages to accept his identity, and find a place as part of a family, in the end. Are you planning to write a sequel about Barewolf as an adult, looking for a job, and perhaps getting married and having children? As he is a genetically normal human, this could be a possibility for him.'

Bearhugs posted a reply to Bull's comment: 'You don't have to be a genetically normal human to have a partner and a family! My partner is human, and in the long run, either or both of us might decide to have children, either by adoption or producing genetic children with members of our respective species. When we first met, I worried about whether we would be comfortable with caring for each other's children, but I now think that, once we are ready to be parents, growing up in a mixed-species household would probably be the best way to socialise our children.'

Bull came back: 'That's all very well if you've got a long life ahead of you. My boyfriend is human, too, and he desperately wants to get married and start a family. Unfortunately, I am genetically programmed for a much shorter lifespan than a human's, and he needs to find a life-mate who is both human enough to be genetically compatible with him, and healthy enough to see the children through to adulthood – and besides, much as I love him personally, I wouldn't feel at all safe in his home culture.'

I clicked on Bull's and Bearhugs' accounts, and read their stories, too. Both of them write about (or actually are, or pretend to be) wolf-women created by secret genetic engineering experiments, rather than having a natural mutation like mine. Then again, they set their stories in space in the future, so 'genetically engineered life-form' might just be the version of 'werewolf' that they think works in a science fiction setting. They seem to be best online friends, and comment on each other's stories all the time. Bearhugs is an engineer, and Bull is a soldier (at least, these are the jobs their characters have in the stories, but they sound as if they know what they're talking about, so those could be their jobs in real life, too). One of Bearhugs' recent stories was about campaigning for robot rights, and one of Bull's stories was about a raid to rescue a group of trafficked clone children, but the way the stories were written made me wonder if what they were really doing was rescuing werewolf kids like me.

Anyway, I posted my story, a chapter at a time (since my email from the publishers was a reply to Nina's email to them, it contained the Word document, so at least I didn't have to write it out again). And I read a few more stories, by GermanShepherd (who is another friend of Bull and BearHugs) and Moth (who is German and my age, and posts stories online to practise writing in English), and BrerRabbit. Unless they're just making it up (but I don't think any of them are – their stories just feel too personal), there seem to be lots of different types of werewolves out there.

GermanShepherd (who writes police procedural thrillers about her work as a policewoman and as a police dog) is a werewolf by birth, like me, but in her family it isn't just seventh sons who turn into werewolves. She's one of four children, except that her sister and one of her brothers are dead now. She and her parents, and the brother who died, were werewolves who can't help turning into wolves at full moon (except that they can keep their minds, instead of turning into a crazy killing machine the way I do), but they can change into wolves any other time that they want to as well. Her other brother always looks like a wolf, and her sister always looked like a human.

Also, GermanShepherd looks like a normal wolf when she's in wolf form, but she's friends with a couple who both turn into hairy wolf-people at full moon, but the rest of the time one of them is human and the other is a wolf, so they have to pretend to be dog and owner. Well, I don't know what I look like at full moon (I tried to rig up a hidden camera once, but in the morning I found I'd chewed it to pieces), but from what Nina says, it sounds as if I look a lot more like a tailless wolf-boy-monster than like a real wolf.

Moth and BrerRabbit started off as humans. They got infected with lycanthropy by being bitten, the same way Nina and her friends got infected with vampirism and a couple of other people I know got infected with zombiehood. Moth only turned into a full wolf once (though he said it came on gradually for a full week, not just all at once for one night), but he says he always knows the wolf is still there inside him.

BrerRabbit turns into a berserker werewolf every full moon and has to lock himself up, the same way I do. His type of lycanthropy can be controlled by medication, but he says he 'can't get it prescribed on the NHS' because it's a herbal remedy. The only person he knows who knows how to make it is someone who hates him because they were at school together and BrerRabbit's so-called 'friends' once tried to feed this guy to him while he was in wolf-form. His friends sound like even more trouble than my friend Fergus. At least, I hope Fergus wouldn't try to feed someone to me – or that if he did, Amin would stop him in time.

I haven't told anyone apart from Nina that I've been posting my story on HOWL. All the other werewolves I know are paranoid, and some of the vampires are way too old and stuffy, especially Dr Plackett, and I just didn't feel like getting nagged about it by everyone. But I did tell all the people I could trust – vampires, werewolves, and humans – that I'd been reading stories on HOWL¸ and that I thought quite a few of them might be true, and if so, there seemed to be different kinds of werewolves around. Dr Plackett sounded really interested, and said we probably just represented one point on the werewolf spectrum, just as there are different grades of zombies among the ones we know.

Nina's boyfriend Dave even brought round a yellowing newspaper cutting from decades ago that he'd kept ever since he was human. It was about a foster-family who had been looking after a boy who they thought must have been brought up by wolves, but the kid had run away back to the forest, and then, years later – by this time, the foster-parents had moved to a town probably a hundred miles away, they'd had a baby, then the husband died and the wife was struggling to work and bring up a baby at the same time – her foster-son, who was now about seventeen, just turned up out of nowhere and moved in with them. There was a photo of them – mum in a pretty sari and with neatly braided hair, young man with wild hair who didn't look happy about having to wear even a loincloth for the photograph, and the baby sitting on his lap.

So, it looks as though Frog's story is true, at any rate – though I still don't know whether Frog, the guy writing it, is the guy it actually happened to or not. But I'll keep a lookout for newspaper photos of odd-looking women who might be Bull or BearHugs.

We – the people writing on HOWL – can't tell each other our real names or even what countries we live in, of course, just in case someone posing on the internet as a werewolf is actually a werewolf-hunter. Nina told me about how a vampire she used to know got murdered last year by someone he'd met on the internet. So we have to be careful. I'd guessed that Frog was probably Indian, even before I saw the photos, and I think BrerRabbit is British, despite the name (his writing sounds more like Australian or British English than American English, and he's posting at weird times of the day if he's Australian). BearHugs sounds American, and you can tell Moth doesn't speak English as a first language. But we don't confirm anything about our details.

It doesn't matter. We know that there are other werewolves out there, and we can encourage each other. And we know that we're teaching any humans who might be reading these stories. That's enough.