Colleen Cowley's Blog

This is the problem with wild ideas: They tend to eat up your life.

I went down the rabbit hole for one of those ideas eight years ago, and I'm coming up for air now with a completed romantic fantasy trilogy. (What's been happening the past eight years? Anything I should know about?)

The Clandestine Magic series is for readers who like determined-as-heck female protagonists, problematic wizards, power struggles, a semi-Edwardian 21st century and a suffragists-vs.-magic plot. (Also: A whiff of Hades and Persephone. Just because.)

Book one, Subversive, is out today. The rest of the novels will follow this fall.

(Oh, there's also a free prequel novella that covers the eventful four weeks immediately before the series begins. That's available here.)

Thank you to the kind readers who've given Subversive a try already! It's been so much fun to share this story.

The idea of the Book Readers Appreciation Group's B.R.A.G. Medallion is pretty cool -- the indie-book version of the Good Housekeeping seal.

So I did a little dance, as much as you can dance while sitting in a computer chair, when The Opposite of Magic got a medallion. Yay!

My life's been so crazy this year that Project No. 2 -- a trilogy -- has been slow going. It'll be done in roughly a decade at the rate I have time to work on it. But whenever I do snatch a few hours here and there, I get that fizzy this-is-fun feeling. As much as intrigue and assassination attempts can properly be described as "fun."

I love ebooks -- they're so convenient. I can read a few pages on my phone whenever I grab a spare minute or two, wherever I happen to be.

But there's still something about a physical book, isn't there?

So I'm thrilled to have a print edition of The Opposite of Magic out. All thanks due to my husband, who badgered me in a loving fashion to do it and then put a lot of time into helping it come to pass.

To celebrate, I'm trying out a three-book giveaway on Goodreads.

Goodreads thinks there's something about physical books, too. No ebooks allowed in giveaways.

And when I handed my librarian mother a proof version of the novel, she stared at it in something like wonder. My daughter has a book. I didn't get quite the same reaction when the ebook went up for sale last fall. She was excited -- my God, she'd been hearing about it and reading various versions of it for years, poor woman -- but ... there's just something about a printed book.

If you're reading a book with a single point-of-view character, would you rather be in the head of the most interesting person or the everyman/woman?

It's probably not either-or for most of us. Sometimes I want to see the world through Harry Potter's eyes. Sometimes I'd rather take the trip with Severus Snape.

I think that explains at least a quarter of the fanfiction -- for Harry Potter and every other fandom: We want to jump POVs. (OK, and 'ship characters, but POV is driving some of it, I swear.)

The thing is, sometimes an intriguing character is so very interesting precisely because we're not in their head. An element of mystery adds a lot.

So even though poor Harry isn't the most interesting character of his series, or even in the top five, I think we have his POV to thank for Snape's runaway popularity. Snape's more interesting than Harry, true, but he's more interesting still seen through Harry.

I've paid a lot more attention to book covers since I had to give input on one. Here are a few I really liked:



The Chaos of Stars' cover is immediately eye-catching, with the added bonus of details worth a closer look. I love the way the details intertwine with the title. And the stars have a dreamy half-drawn, half-photographed look to them.



Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children -- awesome title, by the way -- has a cover that puts you in the shoes of the main character as he first sees this black-and-white photo of a girl. I did a double take. Wait -- is she floating? (It's in the same category as Hourglass for that reason.) The cover sold me on reading this book.



Love, love, love the art for If You Go Into The Woods. The lettering, the evocative leaves, the spooky bird.

None of these shows the main character. Maybe that's part of what makes them memorable in a sea of attractive-people covers.

What covers do you like best?

Sometimes, the reason I like a book is less about what's there than what's not. No too-dumb-to-live characters. No dragging out easily resolved situations. No instant love.

That's just the short list -- there are more, oh yes -- and sometimes I flat-out stop reading a book when one of the no's pops up. It's a brick wall, and I'm not climbing over. (When I really Hate a book with a capital H, there's a brick wall -- or three or four -- at work.)

I'm sure plenty of other readers have brick-wall moments. But here's the thing: So many brick walls are individual, personal, idiosyncratic. There must be an appetite for instant love, right? Otherwise there wouldn't be so many books with it. And the character I think is awesome and assertive might come off as a brick-wall jerk to you.

One of the fascinating (and sometimes dismaying) aspects of writing a book and letting it out into the world is discovering readers' brick walls. Sometimes they're pretty universal, and you make a mental note to never do that particular thing again. But sometimes it's just personal taste, and good luck avoiding everyone's walls.

One thing I can do when I write is avoid my own. Or subvert them to my liking. It's fun to whack an unexpected hole in the wall -- and I like that as a reader, because I get to speed on through with a big sigh of relief.