Jennifer deBie's Blog

I am lucky… in a lot of ways, many of which I’ve talked about here, but today I’m going to tell you that I am lucky to be a mildly professional book talker.

Before I became what I am today, I was an enthusiastic amateur book talker, and then I went to school and became an educated book talker (able to use key words and tricky phrases like Proustian, liminal spaces, and bathos with aplomb), and now I get to stand in my classroom a few times a week and act as an educational book talker.

I get to come here, to my blog, and talk about books and all sorts of other stuff. I get to write reviews and go on other people’s blogs and gush about the books I’ve enjoyed recently and give other authors a little boost in the process.

I get to go to Bantry, way out on the wild Atlantic coast of Ireland, and talk about books there – with the people who wrote the books!

And it’s amazing.

A few of my current reads, all delicious in different ways.

I love having the opportunity, the true and unmistakable privilege of doing that. Of having these conversations and connections with authors and enthusiasts all around the world.

Then, sometimes, marvelously, I get the opportunity to talk about my own books.

Now all authors have to learn to talk about their own books at some point. Maybe in a writing group or a workshop, or even with their families and friends. Eventually, they might have to learn to talk about it with prospective agents, publishers, editors and cover designers.

Then, when you wade through all that, you talk for publicity. You ask people to read your book, to review it, to buy it, and the line between talking and begging starts to feel fuzzy, draining. It feels less and less natural, like talking at someone rather than with them.

There’s a whole world of entertainment out there, and getting people to take a few quiet hours to read your book, or even a few quiet minutes to consider your book, can be difficult.

And you get tired.

Many thanks to Sara for the push!

Or, at least, I got tired.

And once the excitement of having a freshly published masterpiece out in the world wore off a little, and the I just… kinda… stopped.

But, I’ve been lucky all my life, and in this, I got lucky too. I’ve got a friend who pushes.

I’ve actually got several friends who push in a variety of ways, all of which I need, but in this case, a fellow author told me about a podcast. About these two lovely chaps who interviewed her in the wake of her first novel coming out, and how much she enjoyed them, and that I should get in touch…

and I put it off…

and I put it off…

and she asked again…

and I put it off…

and she asked again…

and I sent them an email and got a prompt and friendly response…

that I in turn didn’t answer for over a week because (you’ve heard this one)…

Comfy interview chic

I put it off.

Because as much as I like talking about Heretic, who wants to hears about a book that’s almost two years old? Who wants to hear from an author who hasn’t managed to crank out a sequel in that much time?

But I did it anyway, because I knew I needed it. Because interviews require practice and practicing from the comfort of my own home, while wearing fuzzy green pajama pants just off camera probably is about as laid back as practice is going to get.

And because I’m a mildly professional book talker.

Sometimes I need to be reminded of that.

Chase thunder,

JdB

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Huge thank you to Terry and Steven as Greenhills Chats for a truly lovely interview. It’s been a while since I talked about Heretic like this, and you guys really made it easy. Check out their YouTube channel here or find them on Twitter @GreenhillsChats, and if you are interested in Heretic, you can find it here.

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The summer of 2015 was a big one for me.

I graduated from my undergraduate institution, was preparing to move overseas for my first postgraduate degree, flying hither and yon as my sister did her own graduating and preparing for an international hop (in the other direction), and somewhere in the middle of that, in the middle of an airport, my Mom asked me about a book.

More specifically, she asked me if I’d heard about this little (what do you call it? An internet comic?) that was being published as a book, Nimona.

I had not heard of the webcomic by ND Stevenson that had apparently swept a corner of the internet I did not then live in by storm, been turned into a physical, purchasable object by Quill Tree Books earlier that summer, , which my mother listened to while driving one day not too long before we found ourselves in that airport.

Stevenson has since transitioned and now publishes as NB Stevenson.

The airport newsstands did not have copies of Nimona for immediate purchase, and I wasn’t very “into” digital books at that point, so the copy that I purchased, read once, enjoyed, and then promptly put on my bookshelf and forgot about came from the Texarkana Books-A-Million rather than anywhere as exotic as Glasgow, or Dublin, or even the DFW airport.

Nimona hasn’t really crossed my mind much in the years between then and now. It was a quirky story about a girl, who’s more than a girl, becoming the sidekick to a notorious villain (who isn’t so villainous) and the regime they work to topple. The art is cute, and deliberately a bit rough, the chapters are short, the jokes tend toward slapstick, the big questions are “What makes a monster?” and “Who decides?”

For those of you who have missed the many, many hints I drop all over my research and creative work – those are questions I am very interested in. Questions I did not connect back to Nimona until my re-read earlier this summer.

After eight years, a Masters, a PhD, many years living abroad, a little heartbreak, a lot of love, a global pandemic, a minor existential crisis about my own version of monstrosity, and Nimona brings a lot more to the table than I gave it credit for back in 2015.

What prompted this reevaluation?

Nimona’s a movie!

Nimona’s a good movie!

And it is so, so much more itself now than it was when it was first published.

Let’s do a little history – the initial premise for Nimona was a college class project, a few-panel comic that went viral, as the kids say, and turned into a full-blown story. It was the work of a very young creative (Stevenson was born in 1991, making them a young twenty something when Nimona first started publishing online in 2012, and not much more than that when the book came out in 2015), who had not yet wholly come into their own because no one is wholly themselves at 21 or 22.

So the original book is fun, asks the kinds of questions I’m interested in, and explores some deeper themes than I originally thought, but the movie? The adaptation?

The adaptation is gleeful.

Gleeful without being glib, there is real heart in the story and hard decisions were made when it came to adaptation (in particular a helpful lady scientist with an oblivious bent was lost in the shuffle, and I am sad about that), but what came out after all those hard decisions?

It’s pure, bubblegum joy.

It is unabashedly queer, and if a couple of pretty boys holding hands on screen is enough to put you off a delightful kids’ movie then that’s your business.

My business is storytelling and when it comes to character backgrounds, world building, setups and punchlines that land, logical story-beats, and a truly dire conclusion that feels earned… Nimona does it all.

And does it all in a brisk hour and forty minutes.

Not to mention, it’s beautiful!

Visually stunning.

And yet, incredibly, they have not lost the bones of the original comic. The art is far more refined, but Nimona on the page and Nimona on the screen are still recognizably the same character, as is Ballistar (the supervillain Nimona hitches her wagon to) and the world itself.

There’s a lot of nuanced, and not so nuanced, debate on adaptations vs originals. I take them on a case by case basis, and in this particular case – Nimona is a property I’m very happy to see adapted.

If it hadn’t been, if this little movie had died somewhere in the production process, the richness of my life would not have been noticeably lessened. But now that it’s here, now that it’s available and out in the world… I’m just happy it is.

I am happy these stories are being told.

Stories that wouldn’t, couldn’t, have been made, and made to this quality, when I was a kid.

I’m happy that we can have a gay couple and an action adventure story and the conflict isn’t about the fact that they’re gay.

I’m happy that we can have a delightfully brutal, shapeshifting, outcast girl as a protagonist, who is also a beautiful and blatant trans metaphor.

I’m happy that found family is what this story is built on.

I’m happy there’s a whale that falls through the ceiling at one point.

Right this instant there is a battle being raged over who can create what for Hollywood. There are real people who create the things we love, people who are necessary to create great art. Yes, the Nimona comic could have been fed into a computer and an AI writer could probably crank out a “workable” adaptation.

But workable shouldn’t be what we strive for in our art.

It shouldn’t be what we want, it shouldn’t be what we desire, or pay to see.

We should want heart, complexity, expansion.

We should want to think a little bit about the world created on the screen, and how it reflects, or effects, the world we live in.

We should want glee.

…

Nimona is out now on Netflix. Rated PG. 100 minutes. English.

…

Thank you for your patience in the year since my last post. My life did a thing and things changed and I’m still working on finding my balance as a member of society, and a creative.

If you like my writing, check out my latest novel, Heretic (Wild Wolf Press, 2021). There’s a sequel in the works, I promise.

A friendly round of late night beach volleyball at Angelo State University, circ. 2012

When I was in college, we played intramural soccer on these awful practice fields – half dirt, half gravel, half patchy grass raised just enough to catch a cleat and send you sprawling. Our referees were also students and biased as hell when it came to calling plays or watching time, and the lines on our pitch were prone to being erased when the dust kicked up.

Because teams were all student organized, there was little coordination on what color the opponents would be wearing on a given night. More than once my Athenians (we were the honors program squad, of course our name was Athenians) showed up in royal blue only to be facing another team in blue.

When that happened the only recourse was to rock-paper-scissors over which team would wear the never-washed pennies provided for communal use by the intramural league.

One night we tried to convince the refs that we’d rather play shirts and skins, instead of dealing with those jerseys and their stink. We even volunteered to be the skins, but alas, I didn’t attend a school progressive enough to allow co-ed intramural soccer teams to field one team half-naked.

Or maybe promiscuous is the word I want, not progressive…

Whatever the phrasing, we played late into the night, we played with flexible rules, and we played full-contact with no cards thrown unless there was also a flat-out punch involved. I hazily remember one particular midnight game that rattled my head hard enough to worry my friends. When we left the fields after the match, they had me set an alarm to call them every other hour for the rest that night, just to reassure them that I wasn’t bleeding out my ear.

Honors and intelligence don’t always go hand in hand.

But boy did we have fun.

There’s a mystique around sports, athletes, coaches. We make prestige documentaries about them, nominate them for awards, we devour sports memoirs and mythologize the greats of the past.

We canonize the rules, the laws of our given game. We boo bad calls and rewind milliseconds of footage to scrutinize the lift of a foot, the angle of a ball, the distance of a throw.

We pay a lot of people a lot of money (too much money? Maybe. This isn’t the place for that discussion) to play and coach and narrate and analyze these games. We pay support staff maintain these athletes and their stadiums. We pay to tour the modern-day coliseums that we’ve built, true monuments to the weight of our rapture with the great game.

Whichever given game you choose to call great.

And there is beauty in that.

I might think people get a little too serious about their sport (I’m guilty of that too, you don’t want to sit next to me at a game I’m invested in because things can get ugly…), but there is beauty in the way a team can bring a community together.

But then, can’t it also be fun?

Baseball was never the go-to sport in my house growing up. We watched football on TV and in person on Friday nights. As a kid I played soccer in the peewee leagues, and then transitioned to running track as a teenager. Occasionally a volleyball got beaten against the shingles of my father’s roof, but I never served well enough to make the team.

photo credit to Shawn Brackbill, NYT

Volleyball would have conflicted with cross country, marching band, and FFA anyway.

Living in east Texas, I made the pilgrimage to Choctaw Stadium in Arlington a few times for Rangers games as part of various school and church outings. Senior year of college a few friends, the same ones who’d worried about my rattled head that time, realized we had free entry into home games and attended a couple for the heck of it. I have a certain, inherent American fondness for the sport, but no particular love of it.

I think it dramatized nicely in the tragically short-lived series Pitch (2016-2017), I will always have a soft spot Chicago Cubs because of a very specific, very warm memory from the 2016 National League Championship Series, if one day there are children in my orbit who play baseball, I will attend their games and wear their colors gladly.

But I never thought I’d tune in to a baseball game from my home for anything other than background noise to a nap.

But this week I discovered Banana Ball.

A minor league team—maybe not even minor, what’s the step below minor? – out of Savannah, Georgia is out to make baseball fun.

Now, it should be noted, this is not exactly my discovery per-se. Thank you to the New York Times for finding them first and spotlighting them on Instagram. If you have a NYTs subscription, you can read their article on the Bananas here, or see their Instagram blurb here>>>

Even as I write this, I’ve got the Bananas v. Party Animals match from April 1st of this year up on another screen, and half an eye on the boys in yellow. I might be a bit of a convert.

They have a strict two-hour time limit, a whole batch of rules designed to make play faster, and a team of serious athletes who don’t take playing too seriously. They’re there to have fun, and make sure the crowd does too.

That’s an ethos I can get behind.

Sports can be serious business, sure.

They can be a career for a few people. They can bring acclaim on a national and international stage. They can be an opportunity to go to college, to see the world, to lift the spirits of a community when they need it most. They can be the inspiration for great art.

But they can also be barely clothed midnight soccer matches, and Hail Mary passes to the endzone, and they can be a bunch of off-season college athletes in yellow making sure that a night out at the ballfield is exactly as fun as it should.

Peanuts and Crackerjacks and all.

Chase thunder,

JdB

PS: Heretic is currently available in paperback! No clue why (there were internal reasons why we published in digital first), or how long it’ll last, but get your copy here:

US Amazon

UK Amazon

In the opening chapter of his Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres, music critic and journalist Kelefa Sanneh makes the observation that

Musicians, I have learned, generally hate talking about genres. And reasonably enough: it’s not their job. Virtually every music interview I have conducted has elicited some version of the sentence “I don’t know why it can’t just be ‘good music.’ ”

And that’s been rattling around in my head for two days now.

Why do we separate music, art, books, by genre?

Now the thesis of Major Labels is that essentially, genre helps the audience identify and define itself, and assists those who actually sell the music in marketing to said audience. It’s both practical and emotional, largely wrapped up in the history of modern music and its evolution throughout the 20th and 21st century.

But what about literature?

Hellmouth, c. 1100

Arguably fantasy, even dark fantasy or horror (which incidentally is what Heretic is being marketed as), is the oldest genre in the western canon. What is Beowulf (c. 700-1000AD) if not a fantasy, revenge tale? What are the medieval parables of hellfire and damnation told to faithful on the straight and narrow, if not horror? What are our most ancient fairytales, if not warnings of what waits in the dark?

But genres evolve.

At some point, people became the monsters we write myths about.

From possibly the first cat-and-mouse crime caper in English, Caleb Williams (1793), to Poe’s evolution in mystery, thriller, and perspective with masterworks like “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), “The Purloined Letter” (1845”, and “The Black Cat” (1845), to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s inescapable Sherlock Holmes stories at the turn of the century, into the modern masters of the 20th century and today.

Some are cautionary tales, some are logic puzzles, some are explorations of deranged minds, and many fall somewhere in the middle or wander outside entirely, but there are bloodlines that can be traced here.

June is “National Crime Reading Month” in Ireland and, while I’ll tell you that crime isn’t really my genre in the same breath that I disparage genre and ask “Why can’t they just be good books?”, I’ve decided to make the effort. I had the pleasure of going to one of the first crime reading events of the month last night, hosted by two of Cork’s modern greats (dear friend and fellow UCC MA alumni Tadhg Coakley, and the excellent Catherine Kirwin), and it got me inspired.

They were giving the audience their “Butchers Dozen”, six favorite crime novels each and then a thirteenth that they both put forward. Everything from Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (as great as the movie, but the gender politics have aged poorly), to Catherine Ryan Howard’s The Nothing Man (do not read in the dark), to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl with the impeccable “cool girl” monologue read out for good measure.

All are pretty much universally recognized as some sort of crime novel, but genre is what you make it, right?

So, Fiona Watson’s Dark Hunter? That’s a crime novel set in 14th century Scotland, just as surely as Tadhg Coakley’s Whatever It Takes is a crime novel set in 21st century Cork, and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, The Serial Killer is an equally modern crime novel set in Nigeria. All equally crime novels, and equally different in tone, in narrator, in crime committed and justice served or withheld. I’ll read my June crime novels, but they’ll be crime my way. Win, lose, draw, or die.

I’m just in here for the good books anyway.

Chase thunder,

JdB

All my life I have been lucky to have creative friends. Authors, poets, essayists, academics, bloggers, incredible writers who I have known in person and met online. Fascinating, wonderful people who I admire greatly, and who have made me a better person and writer through connection.

Someday I’ll tell you more about them.

But for today, lets talk about art.

I’m bad at it.

I know there are strong artistic genes running through me, there’s evidence of it on both sides of my family tree that there’s hidden potential lurking in all sorts of mediums just waiting to be unleashed but… There’s a very good reason I use words to paint my pictures.

Fortuitous then that my oldest friend in the world is an incredible artist. You’ve seen her work already, it’s dotted all over this website, and her progression in creating Heretic’s cover was detailed in a post from a few weeks ago.

But, did you know she did more than just Heretic‘s cover?

Okay, if you know me personally, you probably did know this because I’ve been showing her art off for ages, but for the rest of you this will be new material.

She keeps calling it fan art, but she’s the official Heretic artist. I commissioned the cover from her, soooo…. official art? We’ll call this the official art.

Anyway, lets start with the basics.

Here, again, always and forever, is the cover for Heretic, created by Hope “Silver” Bobb. A cover that I am deeply, madly, and passionately in love with. Heretic is a novel that was written because I was going stir crazy in lockdown. It’s dark and action-packed and steamy and makes jokes about cannibalism and I love it dearly. It’s available on Kindle now for roughly the cost of a cup of coffee ($3.99, €3.55, or £2.99 depending on your currency country). Please buy.

Now for the rest of it.

By now some of you will have read at least part of Heretic, but many of you have not. I’m going to try to give at least a little context for these images without spoiling the story, but we’ll just have to see how that goes.

My two protagonists are a pair of immortal mages named Sira and Jana. Sira is what I’m calling a Lightkeeper, he wields the power of sunlight in many forms (cue dated Doc Ock reference: “The power of the sun in the palm of my hand”), while Jana is a Hellmage and feeds her powers through pain, blood, death, all that good stuff.

Because their powers are diametrically opposed, Sira’s touch burns Jana’s skin. This makes things difficult, because Jana desperately wants to jump his bones, but you’ll have to read to figure out how they get over that hurdle.

It also means Hope got the chance to draw pictures like this, gorgeous piece over to the left.

Now, because Jana’s powers are so intrinsically tied to the body and its workings—or perhaps more accurately, how to dismantle those workings— she is always, acutely, aware of bones, blood, organs and where they all sit in those closest to her.

Which leads us to the idea, and image, of Jana and Sira lounging quietly together like so:

Though, there’s really not much time for relaxation in Heretic. Jana and Sira have places to be, things to kill, research to conduct. Yes, research is involved in my globe trotting, magical adventure. Did you really expect anything else from a PhD in literature?

C’mon

My two mage frenemies need to search the depths of Pandemonium for some of their answers, and the Duke of Hell who keeps Pandemonium’s library isn’t always gentle. His archives through?

They’re pretty damn sweet.

I love the details down the spine on this one, by the way. Look at the jagged lines of her spinous processes (the sticky-outy bits on the vertebra), and the runes etched through her bones.

Brilliant work.

And get a load of that book Jana’s reading – what is that all about?

Yes, there are loads of books around her, but that page she’s looking at. What are those critters she’s reading about?

Over the course of their travels, Jana and Sira will encounter multiple beasties and baddies of the more mythical persuasion. The book Jana is holding? Those are just two such monsters they, and you, will meet in the pages of Heretic.

Taking inspiration from medieval bestiaries and other illuminated manuscripts, Hope created a little illumination of her own.

Here’s a better look at them:

What kinds of monsters are they, where did they come from, and are they helpful or hinderances as Jana and Sira work to complete their quest?

What are there names? Names are powerful things in a world of mages and magic.

You’ll just have to read and find out all about them.

Whatever they are, they’re not beasts to be taken lightly.

Not lightly at all.

Cue Jaws theme… dun-duh, dun-duh, dunduh dunduh dunduh dunduh dunduh dunduh daaaaaaaaaahhh!!!

Who is about to get eaten? What is that monster of the deep?

Those eyes!

Sick, right?

And the teeth!

Gotta love a good set of chompers.

Now, some of you out there will be saying to yourselves, Jenni, I know Hope Bobb. I’ve known her for years. She’s a sweet person, a good person, and who are you to corrupt her by forcing her to read your macabre, raunchy, book, and draw things like this?

To which I would laugh, and show you this bit of foreshadowing, circ. 2010:

Hope has been my creative partner in crime for decades now, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s also been a bit darker and twistier than you might think for almost as long, and I wouldn’t change that either. She gave me far more art than I could comfortably fit into one post, so I will be creating a Heretic Gallery page this coming weekend to feature her art properly.

In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed her work, I pray that you enjoy Heretic, and I wish that you always chase thunder.

JdB

If you are curious about Heretic and these characters, click here to read the first chapter.

If you would like to buy Heretic (for the cost of an average cup of coffee) click here.

Well that was quick!

Heretic is officially available on Kindle through your favorite Amazon marketplace.

For those of you who prefer hard copies (I do too), my publisher doesn’t print physical books until 200 ebooks are sold. I’ve bought mine, so it’s only 199 to go, team!

Below you can read a sample of the first few chapters. I hope it intrigues and entertains you. I hope you aren’t off-put by a little (or a lot) of blood.

I hope you always chase thunder.

Thanks guys!

Jdb

The Hellmages, outcasts who feed on the deaths of friends, enemies, and each other, are shaking the earth, killing powerful mages, causing the kind of destruction the Mages’ Council was created to stop.

Siraj, a Lightkeeper who wields sunlight as a weapon and carries purification in his hands, is the only one who can meet with a Hellmage, find out who is upsetting the balance, and walk away unscathed, but there’s a problem.

The Hellmage he meets doesn’t know the earthshaker and magekiller either, but now she’s curious and if there’s anything worse than a curious Hellmage, it’s one who doesn’t fear being burned to death by a Lightkeeper’s touch.

We have a cover, and isn’t she a beaut?

Feel free to stop for a minute and soak it up, click over here to the new Hellmage Chronicles homepage, and here to read the first chapter, then scroll down further for the cover’s full story.

Cover design is a tricky thing.

Cover design with one of your oldest friends, an incredible, detail oriented artist is… a process.

It started with a conversation over breakfast a couple of days after the publisher accepted the manuscript, and then sending said manuscript to the artist for perusal.

Then there was the brainstorming and the inspiration hunting and the research stage. Does the publisher have a kind of unified “house style” across their covers (no), is there anything from our own lives, backgrounds, or personal experiences that we’d like to incorporate (sorta?), and how much do we know about anatomical illustrations (a lot)?

Inspiration hunting took many forms, and in the fun little montage to the left keen eyed readers will find Bronze Age ogham stones in a corridor at University College Cork, a few examples of DaVinci’s 15th century anatomical illustrations, Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting, “The Nightmare”, drawings from Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 film Howl’s Moving Castle, and the notes taken by my patient, lovely artist during the course of our first conversation.

Then there was the moment when I decided that I could do the cover myself and sent this picture >>

And then we had a good giggle over that silly notion and got down to work.

I say that like I had much to do with this process beyond being Hope’s eternal cheerleader and mostly agreeing that her ideas are awesome.

We started with the arm. We knew we wanted a flayed arm (it’s relevant to the story, I promise) and early on the thought was that it would be on parchment. A dissected arm on parchment with lines running to it indicating various features and describing them, sometimes in English, sometimes not.

Like the second gnarliest anatomical illustration ever. DaVinci gets first prize in that category, obviously.

They’re great, by the way! Check out Charlie Smithers if you’re looking for a throwback to the great, turn of the century adventure serials!

But then we remembered this series, also published by my publisher, and worried that the parchment might make it a little too matchy-matchy.

If we were going to make a gory cover, then by gawd it wasn’t going to be a samey looking gory cover!

So that’s where the stone came in, and the idea of laying the arm against a crumbling wall. Hope played with it, as she does, and came up with this stone pattern and flipped it around and replicated it a few times and my, poor, innocent soul said That’s Awesome! The Wall Can’t Get Any Better Than This!

Sweet, summer child in all her naivety. This is why I write the stuff, I don’t draw it, because no sooner had I said that then Hope told me she wanted to add some dimension and make the replication a little less obvious, so she played around and turned it into a room instead of a single wall.

What?

The audacity!

The Excellence!

Why didn’t I think of that?

I don’t think of these things, obviously. That’s why cover design is a project for the experts, not the authors. Obviously.

So we have our background.

Some of it anyway, we’ll circle back to it in a bit.

What about the arm?

For literal months my dear, patient friends and family have been shown a litany of slowly developing, skeletal arms and told to get excited about them.

Bless them, looking back, I get how hard it was to get excited by these.

“Yup, that’s an arm” was the general consensus, and they were right. It was indeed an arm. No arguing with that. But it’s what the arm would become, you see.

First there was the simple marriage of the room and the arm and a cool wolf skull Hope decided to throw in because why wouldn’t you throw in a wolf skull?

Again, there is thematic relevance, I promise!

Then there was adding details to the room ’cause it still felt like a big, empty, rock room, with nothing going for it but a ghostly skull and an a flayed arm.

The water was my idea, because I was an active participant in this process and not just a cheerleader.

At least that’s what I tell myself at night before going to sleep.

Then it was titles and type and choosing just the right font, and version of that font, and how big it should be and where exactly it should go.

Let’s just say that I, and my office mates, and podcasting friends, and a few random strangers have all seen many, many variations on the font and leave it at that.

So we’re to here:

And the title isn’t quite popping the way it could, but that can be fiddled with later, because now we’re playing with details.

These markings called glyphs are important to the version of magecraft that I have created for my novel, so now we’re playing with glyphs.

Or, Hope’s playing with details.

I looked at this version of the cover and said, That’s incredible! It can’t get any better than that! You’re the best Hopey!

Startling naivety, yes, that is today’s theme.

I’ve got a soft spot for the asymmetrical, but circular glyphs used in Howl’s Moving Castle, so Hope, (my genius) comes up with a few because she’s awesome and that’s just that.

What do they mean? What do they do? You’ll have to read the book and find out, for now can we just appreciate the artistry?

Then she does some fiddling with Norse and Anglo Saxon runes and decides to run a runic conversion on a few key words and tricky phrases from the novel, and that’s how we end up with this version of the cover.

It’s been months and hours and a saga of an editing process, (for both of us because I’ve been working on my proof copy during a good chunk of this)

and I look at this and tell myself Surely, it can’t get any better than this.

But it can, and it did because someone with a keen eye, or a zoom in feature, will find a few more subtle background details and easter eggs from our intrepid artist.

Even I don’t know all of them, but scroll back up to the top of this post and squint at that cover and you might just find a few.

So that’s it.

That’s how we did it!

And remember “we” here is a very generous way of phrasing that, because I didn’t do much besides be consistently astounded and enthralled by every stage of the process.

But Jenni, When Will It Be Published?!?

Welp…

This morning (March, 29th, 2022) Wild Wolf Publishing said “within the week”.

So before next Tuesday?

When you publish digitally, things can move quickly once there’s a cover.

So you keep an eye out, and I’ll put an ear to the ground, and when there’s something to buy, you can bet I’ll be there to tell you where, how, and how much.

Until then, thank you again to Hope for her incredible work, thank you to the patient friends who have been subjected to streams of arms and fonts, and thank you to everyone who decided to read this far down the blog post.

Chase thunder,

JdB

When I was a kid, prove it was the phrase we used to settle disputes.

I’m faster than you.

My daddy’s smarter than your daddy.

Harry Potter is the biggest book in the world.

Prove it.

Prove it.

Prove it.

Sometimes the things we demanded proof for were, indeed, provable. Sometimes they weren’t, but the point was that if a claim was made, someone needed to be able to back it up. Back it up with smarts, with skill, with bluster, with anything, but you needed proof.

The older I got, the more the word proof evolved.

In the crime dramas I watch, proof is what the clever detectives are always looking for. Innocence, guilt, exoneration, it’s all in the proof.

In college, proof was the number on the label that we looked for on the cheap bottles we bought, begged, and borrowed for house parties.

When I moved to Ireland, proof became identification, access to the country I’d decided to live in for a while—proof of residence, proof of employment, proof of good standing with my university, my landlord, my vaccination status.

When I became an author, proof took on yet another shade.

The proof copy is the last edit.

You work on your novel and you slave and you edit and you send it to your beta readers and you take their suggestions on board and you change and you edit and you slave a little more, and then you send it out to a publisher.

And if you’re like me, you send it out to another publisher and another and another and you ignore the one acceptance you got because you accidentally sent your manuscript to a pay-to-publish vanity press and paying someone else to publish your work in the era of free Amazon Kindle publishing is ridiculous.

And then you send it out another time or three until finally the shoe fits, the stars align, and the right publisher says they’ll give you a shot.

They take this manuscript that you’ve loved and hated and been preparing to put out into the world for so long and they turn it into a book, and sometimes there’s some back and forth with the editors, and sometimes there isn’t, and then…

Then they send you the proof.

And you make the final check, cross your fingers, and send your baby off one more time.

For a few weeks now, I have fretted over my proof.

Weighed capitalization changes, scrutinized word choice, moved the odd comma.

Nothing major. We’re well past major changes.

Now is the time for fine tuning.

I’ve called my self a novelist for years now, but the editing on my first novel is something I’m not proud of. At the end of the day, I had the final say in what that manuscript looked like, and I did not check my proof like I should have. No matter how much affection I have for those characters and that story, they will always be a little stained by the proof of my negligence.

So here we are.

A new story. A new publisher, and a second chance to prove it.

The cover art is coming along beautifully (look for a cover reveal soon), my edits will be sent back to the publisher before the week is out, and after that? I don’t have a publication date yet, but when I do you will be the first to know.

And then we’ll see what the proof says.

Chase thunder,

JdB

My favorite part of researching literature is contextualizing the text.

I know, I know –

That is a punishingly boring thing to set in stone as a favorite anything, but let me explain.

Basically, my favorite part of research is the fact that I get to be as nosy and gossipy as I want about people who have been dead for centuries, and that’s considered kind of a good trait.

Lord Byron once wrote a letter to his publisher in which he mused about running away from it all with an intelligent, red headed woman, now Mary Shelley was intelligent and Byron’s friend and her hair was sometimes described as reddish so does that mean…

Probably not.

Maybe?

We’ll never know, but it’s fun to what if? on it, isn’t it?

Okay, it is to me.

Other Shelley scholars are generally less amused by the possibility of a torrid affair between one of the most important female writers of all time and the doomed bad-boy of Romantic poetry, but they might just be sourpusses.

Another fun what if? Blake’s “The Tyger”, fabulous poem, one of my favorites, read it here ye’ who haven’t yet experienced it. But what if Blake’s great, mechanical predator wasn’t just a metaphor for a mathematical god, destruction, and the onset of the industrial revolution?

What if he was describing the kitten pictured up at the top of this post instead?

That’s an 18th century automaton and musical instrument constructed for the Tipu Sultan and confiscated by British troops in the 1790s. It’s a tight squeeze date wise, but there is a possibility that Blake read about the Tipu Tiger in time to write his own “Tyger” into existence.

Happy coincidence, a conspiracy theory, or good historical contextualization?

Probably a little of all three.

But this is the kind of human puzzle that I love putting together.

I bring up historical contextualization, and my love for it, because sometimes that context leaps out and bites me in the behind.

Sometimes it even does that in my own writing.

Like many people who got locked into their houses for most of 2020, I started a personal project by accident. Namely, I wrote a novel.

And then I looked back on what I’d done and said “Oh damn, I miss travel.”

Immortal mages, a mysterious murder, and they just happen to wander through three of my favorite countries on earth while they’re solving the whole thing?

Vacation hunger might have struck while I was in lockdown.

Eagle eyed readers, or just friends who have seen my Facebook, might be able to guess a few of the novel’s locations from these shots…

No more though. The lockdown is lifted, the new year is looking just a little bit brighter than the last, and the lockdown novel is in the process of being published!

If I am the kind of person who gets studied by go-getter PhDs in 200 years (I won’t be, but a girl can dream), I want them to know that yes, on a subconscious (or not so subconscious level) level I probably (definitely) wrote this novel because I was sick of being locked in my house.

There, Jenni biographers of the far future. It’s confirmed, and I’ve just done your job.

Or at least made it a little easier.

Some Da Vinci arms, look at that musculature!

Now you get have fun figuring out which friend’s name got tucked into Heretic‘s plot, and what I’m tagging them back for.

For all the rest of you living in the Year of Our Lady 2022, Heretic (Hellmage Chronicles #1) is forthcoming from Wild Wolf Publishing. Exact dates and links to pre-order and all that good jazz will be celebrated in an upcoming post.

In the meantime, it’s going to be dark guys.

My cover artist and I are looking at Da Vinci dissections for inspiration, and that is thematically relevant.

Those of you familiar with my research also might find some familiar threads too, but why don’t we leave that to the biographers and academics of the future too?

Heretic has nothing to do with The Adventures of Dogg Girl and Sidekick. I will return to that world at some point, but not right now.

Right now, my second baby is in production. She was born from dark bones, written in a time when the world stood stiller, and now, she’s almost ready to walk into the light.

Won’t you join us?

Chase thunder,

JdB

The T.G.I.T. regulars, circ. 2015

When I was in college the first time around, my sister gave me a serving dish for Christmas. A very special serving dish – one big enough to hold a double batch of my family’s banana pudding recipe without me having to worry about spillage or excess.

Some of you will understand the significance of a good banana pudding recipe, and some of you are foreigners.

All of you should know that when I say I’ve received marriage proposals over this pudding recipe, I’m not joking.

And neither were the proposers.

An unexpected side perk of this marvelously sized dish was that it could also hold an oversized recipe of dough when I made my aunt’s scones on Thursday nights.

Scones were Thursday night supper at the apartment for young Jenni and her housemates and anyone who wanted to drop in for Grey’s Anatomy and angst.

I’ve already told you about my mother’s sourdough (Happy Birthday Herman! 28 years and counting!)

Whether it’s a chili recipe from another aunt, a peanut noodles recipe from a dear friend, or “real American” chocolate chip cookies baked for my classes when they need the extra boost, or the complete cookbook my Grandmommie labored on for years, these are the things that are inherited in my family: food, recipes, and the experiences that go with them.

For almost two years now, I have listened to The Highwomen’s “Crowded Table” on repeat, and all I can think of is how intimately food and love are bound up together in my life. Recipes are passed down, meals are shared and mythologized in family lore, food is how we love.

And crowded tables are among my favorite things.

I am not alone in this. I once read somewhere that in old fairytales (the dark kind, the ones where the fairies aren’t always so nice) the kitchen is the heart of the home. A place to be both mythologized and protected.

Coming from a home where nothing separates the kitchen and the table but empty air and a stretch of perpetually cluttered counter, I believe that. The kitchen, the table, and what fills both spaces, is sacred.

As the poet tells us, “The world begins at the kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.”

I do not know if I’m built to have a family of my own one day. If there’s a husband, 2.5 children and dog in my future, they are further off than I can see from here.

I do know that I’m built for crowded tables.

Whether crowded with friends or cousins or cats, I am made to share meals. I look forward to a future when I am settled enough in my life, work, and living situation, to do so regularly.

So here’s to the world beginning anew with the dawn of this new year, and here’s to your tables. Wherever they are, whatever form they take, may they be crowded with the people (and dishes) you love best.

And may your days be merry and bright.

Chase thunder,

JdB

…

Scrumptious Banana Pudding

1 large box instant vanilla pudding

2 cups cold milk

1/2 cup sour cream

1 can Eagle Brand Sweetened-Condensed Milk

1 (8oz) carton Cool Whip

Bananas

Vanilla Wafers

Directions:

Mix pudding and milk. Add sour cream, Eagle Brand, and Cool Whip. Mix until smooth. Slice bananas. Layer bananas and vanilla wafers with pudding. Chill. Top with vanilla wafers before serving.

Courtesy of Kim Smiley and the Friona Texas Friends of the Library Cookbook, 1995