Horse Math

Happy October, friends!

What are you up to this fall? Me, I’m furiously drafting Magestruck 2, mostly because I want to know if I need to tweak any details of Magestruck while we’re still in edits—i.e. how long it takes to get places, how big my setting is, etc., before I’m locked into whatever I wrote when I was young and carefree and not worried about making everything in the sequel physically possible. (Well, physically possible with magic, at least. It is a fantasy novel.)

I’m a plotter, but drafting always contains a lot of discovery for me too, because I don’t really know my characters until I’ve written them. Of course, the characters from Magestruck will appear in the sequel, but not until the midpoint—the first half, where I am now, stars characters we only just barely see in book 1. (No spoilers!) I’ve always known who my leads would be in book 2, but I won’t truly find out who they are until I’ve gotten to the last page.

I’m excited to get to know these characters, and even more excited to get to the point where I no longer have to worry about Horse Math. (You know: how long does it take a fantasy protagonist on a horse to get from one warring kingdom to the next, bearing in mind that a horse is not an old timey fantasy car that can go forever.) Wish me luck!

What’s New?

Speaking of Magestruck, it’s on Goodreads! Feel free to add it to your shelf, if that’s a thing you do.

What I’m Reading

I was absolutely fascinated by The Dissidents: Autocrats! Vigilantes! Communists! …And Cartoonists! by Derf Backderf. Set during World War I, it follows a fictional political cartoonist named Joe Hertle as he begins drawing for the real-life Socialist magazine The Masses and becomes friends with a number of the real-life cartoonists there—cartoonists who were then charged by the Federal government for violating the espionage act because they dared to publish anti-war cartoons. I knew about the anti-immigrant backlash of the era, and a little about the Wilson administration’s suppression of the labor movement, but I knew basically nothing about the related crackdown of journalists and cartoonists. This graphic novel is deeply compelling and, unfortunately, incredibly timely.

What I’m Listening To

Oh, you know it’s Carly Rae Jepsen’s Day and Night! I’m thinking “The Lonely Side of the Bed” is the song for Magestruck 2. And “Versailles” is definitely the song for [REDACTED]. Too perfect, right?

Enjoy your October, friends! And if you are one of those people who doesn’t like candy corn, you can just slide that bag on over my way.

<3

Jessica