Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Strange is the Sparrow, cursed with the ability to give ghosts and demonic spirits a body-a flesh and blood anchor in the mortal world-with the touch of her hand. When a ghost attacks her high school and awakens her powers, her father dumps her unceremoniously in the care of her estranged older sister Liz, leaving only his journal as an explanation.

Drawn to the power of the Sparrow, the supernatural creatures preying on Savannah, Georgia will do anything to receive Jennifer’s powerful gift. The sisters must learn to trust each other again and uncover the truth about their family history by deciphering their father’s journal…because if they can’t, Jennifer’s uncontrolled power will rip apart the veil that separates the living from the dead.

A fast-paced and splattery romp, fans of Supernatural, Buffy, and Evil Dead will enjoy JENNIFER STRANGE – the first illustrated novel in a trilogy of stylish queer young adult horror books with big scares for readers not quite ready for adult horror.

Cat Scully’s illustrations bring the ghosts and demons of her fictional world to eerie and beautiful life, harkening back to the style of SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK and Ransom Riggs’ MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN.

***

It’s okay to be gross

The nature of Jennifer’s power called for it. I mean, if you have the ability to give ghosts and demons a body, and that demon has to rip right out of the possessed host to be born into a physical form, things get…messy. As a female writing a young adult horror book, I got pushed in a lot of directions, most of them re-concepting Jennifer’s gift into the gothic and romantic arenas. I saw nothing wrong with being gothic or romantic. Both genres I tend to read voraciously, especially in dark fiction. But I had to face that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to write about Buffy before she became the Buffy of season one, the prequel early years as she transitioned from clueless teenage cheerleader into the Slayer. I watched Ash Williams fight Deadites, wise cracking the whole way, and found myself secretly fantasizing how cool it would be to see a girl in his shoes. I wanted girls to be allowed to make jokes and deal with gross horror situations. I’ve loved horror almost all of my life, but there was nothing between Strong Female Protagonist ™ or the Final Girls of horror films to reference. I found myself holding a seed of an idea that wouldn’t leave me alone. I wanted to write something gross, something funny, a story where readers follow two sisters as they wrestle with a dark power in a family drama saga not unlike the Supernatural brothers Sam and Dean. Going down this route would mean ignoring a lot of advice, to gather the courage to write gore despite what everyone told me. Thanks to my agent and a slew of friends in the horror community, I discovered it was not only okay to be a female writer and write gross, but I wasn’t alone.

Get over your fear of meeting people, but don’t assume you own their time

It took me a lot of years to get this book published, about eleven all told. During those years, I gathered my courage and decided to meet as many writers as possible and give back as much as possible to learn the publishing business. I joined Pitch Wars as a mentor for five years, helped authors using my graphic design skills to create pre-order campaigns, I illustrated world maps for books, I was the Young Adult Editor for the Horror Writers Association, and ran conferences as a track director. Again and again, despite how afraid I was to go up and talk to writers who were further along in their careers, I did it. I tried to be bold, but never assume anything of their time. I genuinely wanted to get to know them and never assumed any of them would read my work, critique my book, or break me in. I had spent years in the south alone, not knowing any other writers who were into weird and dark speculative fiction like me. It wasn’t until I started being brave and genuine that I started to find my core tribe. I’m sure glad I did, because years later when it was my turn for my book to come out, my publishing house went through a seriously hard spring. I was left to handle most of the book publication process alone. I had to gather my tribe and ask for help to get the word out about my book, create swag, edit the book, get it on Netgalley, find trade reviews, and plan events during the coronavirus pandemic. I’ve had a campaign that went about the same as it would have (minus the in-person events) because of the people I’m lucky enough to call my friends. I really doubt anyone would know about my indie young adult horror series without them.

There is such a thing as taking too much advice

I’ve always been eager to follow new writer advice. When I was a baby writer querying Jennifer Strange back in 2012, I eagerly lapped up every article I could find. Every critique partner session, I took almost every piece of advice. They were just trying to help me, right? I needed to put the best novel out there that I could. From what every article told me, I was too close to my work to see what was wrong. After years of this, I ended up with a Frankenstein’s monster of a novel. I didn’t know what the story was or where it was going anymore. I had completely fallen out of love with the idea and had tossed it in a trunk. After chucking Jennifer Strange, I rage-wrote an entire novel about a seafood chef fighting fish monsters. I did whatever the heck I wanted with no input from anyone for the first time in years and finally started to hear my own voice again. That novel landed my current agent. Trust your gut. Not to the point you don’t take any advice or critique at all! I’m not saying swing completely in that direction, but not everyone is going to get your book or your work. After retrieving Jennifer Strange out of a dirty garbage shoot, dusting it off, and getting it published, I had to learn to find what I loved about my work and my voice again. It wasn’t for everyone, and that was okay. I’d rather my book not be for everyone than try to please everyone by writing a patchwork quilt of broken story ever again.

Researching “real-life” ghost encounters are way scarier than movie ones

For Jennifer Strange, I went down a rabbit hole of watching every ghost movie I could find. Being born in the late eighties, I didn’t grow up with the Warrens or the media frenzy surrounding them, but I found the entire narrative fascinating. Were they telling the truth and trying to protect people, or were they just after the money and publicity? I went down another research hole, but the stories of their encounters terrified me. So much of the details seemed like they could swing in either direction, but the idea of capitalizing on fear of the unknown interested me. This idea became a large part of the puzzle piece that fell into place while writing the overall series arc. I wanted to show rival ghost hunting families on either side of that argument–people in it for profit and people in it to protect the living. Researching the book became more terrifying when I turned around on a walking tour in Roswell, Georgia and found myself face-to-face with a ghost when I wasn’t looking for one. I think to this day that’s why I’m never afraid of book monsters and always of movie ones—I’ve seen something I can’t explain. I guess it really is like they say…real life is sometimes stranger than fiction.

It’s okay to find a writing method and then totally change it

I didn’t know I had heart failure until I was in the hospital facing an impossible diagnosis. It was genetic mutation, a rare misfire of the heart that causes it to balloon and then fail under stress. Before my heart failed down to ten percent in 2018, I had a method as a writer that worked for me. Without fail, I’d put on my playlist and write no matter the noise or interruption at two thousand words an hour speed. I would plot everything out in advance, and I was lightning across the keyboard, sure and steady. After 2018, everything changed. With my heart failure came the loss of being able to read, and subsequently, to write. I left the hospital to find my first book Jennifer Strange had finally sold. First came the joy and then came the panic. I couldn’t read a sticky note to myself much less my own manuscript. Coming from clocking the pace I used to pull, going back to the drawing board in my methods was the most painful thing I’ve ever gone through. I had to teach myself how to write and read when the words swam and every noise would send my brain reeling into fog. I pushed the book’s publication date back from 2019 to 2020 and was patient with myself. I found audio books and subsequently Microsoft Word’s “Read Aloud” feature helped me read again. Slowly but surely being only able to read auditorily turned to being able to read sentences, and then paragraphs, and then pages. Writing became a muscle I had to train all over again from square one, with new methods and workarounds and tricks to get me writing, like exercise to get the blood flowing to my brain. And you know what? All of it was okay. All of it was worth it. I learned to start over and rethink my method when my health called for it. Writing as a practice has always been built by inches, not by miles. In some ways, I’m glad my health took a wrecking ball to my previous writing habits. I’m more thoughtful now, more careful in my word choice, because I have to slowly digest every word then read it aloud to hear if it translated to the page. And for that lesson, I’m grateful.

…

Cat Scully is the author and illustrator of the young adult illustrated horror series JENNIFER STRANGE, out July 21, 2020 from Haverhill House Publishing. Cat is best known for her world maps featured in Brooklyn Brujas trilogy by Zoraida Cordova, Winterspell by Claire Legrand, and Give the Dark My Love by Beth Revis. She works in video game development for the Deep End Games, working hard on their next title. She lives off Earl Grey tea, plays a lot of Bioshock, is a huge Evil Dead fan, and plays the drums with her musician husband. She lives outside of Boston and is represented by Miriam Kriss of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency.​ Follow her on Instagram or Twitter at @CatMScully or visit her at 

Cat Scully: Website | Twitter

Jennifer Strange: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Bookshop

It’s just one of those true things that for many, the DNA of Star Wars is in what we do — either because we’re fans or because it’s so pervasive, for good or ill. Here’s one author talking about that very thing — Django Wexler!

***

I wanted to tell the story of the inspiration for Ashes of the Sun, and that means talking about Star Wars.  So let me get this out the way up front: I love Star Wars.  It’s quite possible that no other single franchise has taken up so much of my fan energy over the decades.  I have a story in a new Star Wars anthology, and you have no idea how much fanboy-squee that makes me feel.

I say all this because this story involves a certain amount of nitpicking, and I want to make it clear that for a person like me (that is, a world-building obsessed turbo-nerd) this kind of fascinated close analysis is the highest form of affection, rather than trying to put down something I don’t like.  I can love The Empire Strikes Back with a fervent passion and also ask importunate questions like “How did they get from Hoth to Bespin if the hyperdrive was broken?”

Anyway, with that caveat understood, the story of Ashes begins with the Jedi, and specifically the way Jedi recruitment is pictured in the SW prequels and The Clone Wars TV show.  In the prequels, we see very young children (maybe five or six?) being trained by Yoda.  In The Clone Wars, we see younglings brought in for training who are maybe slightly older (starting in S5E6 “The Gathering”) and put through a bunch of harrowing tests in order to get their lightsaber crystals.  Watching this, I couldn’t help but start thinking — this is creepy as hell, right?

The thing is, the Jedi aren’t just a training society for force-sensitives, where you might send your kid to pick a few tricks like going to karate class at the mall.  They are a religious order of ascetic warrior monks, who swear an oath to uphold an extremely strict code of behavior.  This is, to put it mildly, not a thing which it is in a five-year-old’s power to understand or agree to.  (I find myself agreeing with the Harry Plinkett review when he says the whole “not permitted to love” thing means they must lose a lot of Jedi teenagers.)

It’s also not completely clear what happens if the parents aren’t on board with this.  We see some parents who are sad about it, but they’re all ultimately convinced.  If they weren’t, though, it’s not hard to image the kids would be brought along for their own good — the Jedi Order has some unspecified-but-vast legal authority in the Galactic Republic, and a strong interest in making sure Force-sensitives grow up to be Jedi.  Clone Wars’ narrator tells us that the younglings soon understand that the Order is their true family, which sounds extremely like a thing a cult leader would say.

(A related weirdness of Clone Wars is that the enormous authority of the Jedi within the Republic results in situations where fourteen-year-old girls are given command authority over literally thousands of soldiers, in addition to the law enforcement and other powers they already have.  Try to imagine a situation where your local teen, who was already an FBI Special Agent, was also commissioned a brigadier general on the spot.)

Okay, so, weird, right?  But in-universe, we have the Force, which makes it all work.  Younglings want to become Jedi, and their parents are okay with it, because presumably the Force wouldn’t allow things to be otherwise.  (And maybe making kids military commanders makes more sense when those kids have provably-correct magical insights, in addition to being combat gods.)  Again, this is not a critique of Star Wars, it’s just the kind of thing that gets me thinking as a world-builder and a writer.  And it got me asking the question — what if you didn’t have the Force to make things better?

More precisely, what if you had the magic-powers part of the Force, but not the semi-divine guidance part?  After all, in Star Wars, the Jedi are in charge because they’re wise and good, but also, it’s pretty clear, because nobody can stop them.  (The SW MMO The Old Republic storylines depicted this wonderfully on the Empire side — it was clear that nobody thought having a bunch of Sith religious lunatics running the government was a good idea, but since they were also a bunch of unstoppable killing machine … shrug emoji?)  And this, finally, brings us around to Ashes of the Sun.

(As an aside, it’s not the first time I’ve been inspired by this kind of theme.  My middle-grade series, The Forbidden Library, came from the observation that Dumbledore sure does spend a lot of time allowing Harry and his friends to get into life-threatening danger in order to accomplish things that he, Dumbledore, could do easily and safely.  In the books, we trust Dumbledore because he’s both well-meaning and knows what’s best, but removing this element — what TVTropes calls the Omniscient Morality License — gives us what I described as the Sketchy Dumbledore Scenario, where an old guy tells you “Hey, you’re a wizard and the Chosen One!  Now fight these guys I don’t like for me.”)

In the world of Ashes, you can be born with the ability to access deiat, the power of creation.  Using special tools, deiat users called centarchs become almost unstoppable fighters.  The community of centarchs, the Twilight Order, see themselves as the last bastion of civilization, and this is not unreasonable: after a race of deiat-wielders called the Chosen went extinct and their great civilization collapsed, only the Order has access to the power to hold human society together and protect with from the monstrous plaguespawn on its borders.  Centarchs have unlimited authority, both legal and practical, because apart from another centarch, no one can stop them.  But they don’t have an all-powerful Force assuring them everything will come out for the best; deiat doesn’t provide guidance, it just blows things up.

Gyre is eight years old, and his sister Maya five, when a centarch comes to their home and declares that Maya has the gift and will be taken to join the Order.  Maya doesn’t want to go (what five-year-old would, right?) and Gyre tries to help her, and gets badly injured for his troubles.  The incident sets them on opposite paths: twelve years late, Maya is a loyal member of the Order and devoted to her mentor and friends, while Gyre has become a thief and a rebel, scouring the dark places of the world for forbidden power that will let him stand up to the centarchs.

There’s a lot more to Ashes then that, of course.  Like any good story, once I started working on it it took on a life of its own, and there’s a few other big threads and themes that got drawn in.  But the original idea, and the core argument between these two characters, comes back to my Star Wars thought experiment — if you have people who are born with the potential for great power, can you justify forcing them to use it for the common good?  And, if you do, is it fair to assign authority based on what is after all just the luck of the genetic draw?  The Order, in Ashes, would answer yes to both questions, and they could easily be right; survival is a struggle in a world full of monsters.  But ruling classes — centarch or Jedi — like to construct elegant justifications for their dominance, when in the end it just comes down to who has the magic swords.

***

Long ago, a magical war destroyed an empire, and a new one was built in its ashes. But still the old grudges simmer, and two siblings will fight on opposite sides to save their world in the start of Django Wexler’s new epic fantasy trilogy.

Gyre hasn’t seen his beloved sister since their parents sold her to the mysterious Twilight Order. Now, twelve years after her disappearance, Gyre’s sole focus is revenge, and he’s willing to risk anything and anyone to claim enough power to destroy the Order.

Chasing rumors of a fabled city protecting a powerful artifact, Gyre comes face-to-face with his lost sister. But she isn’t who she once was. Trained to be a warrior Maya wields magic for the Twilight Order’s cause. Standing on opposite sides of a looming civil war, the two siblings will learn that not even the ties of blood will keep them from splitting the world in two.

About the author: Django Wexler is the bestselling fantasy author of the Shadow Campaigns series and the Wells of Sorcery young adult series. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with degrees in creative writing and computer science, and worked for the university in artificial intelligence research. Eventually he migrated to Microsoft in Seattle, where he now lives with two cats and a teetering mountain of books. When not writing, he wrangles computers, paints tiny soldiers, and plays games of all sorts. 

Django Wexler: Website

Ashes of the Sun: Indiebound | Bookshop | Amazon

So, there’s this pandemic, right? A real corker of a coronavirus — some people get li’l colds, some people get pneumonia, others have organs attacked, suffer strokes, or endure long-lasting neurological symptoms. And we’ve no idea if there are longer-term problems waiting in the wings. Like I said the other day, polio could wage additional damage decades after you had it.

In this pandemic, we shut the country down. Sorta. Partly. Some states went whole hog, others half-assed it, and now we’re all varying degrees of “reopened,” and cases are surging. All because we didn’t do shit, really, as a country. Some states did well. My state, PA, is doing… pretty okay? Better than a lot, not as good as some of our Northeast counterparts. But nationwide, as a whole, we took allllllll that time locked down to accomplish… eeeyyyyeaaaannnhhh, very, very little.

And now, in many places, it’s worse than it was in March. Worse than the conditions that triggered the lockdown in the first place.

We were on a train driving toward a broken track over the edge of the cliff, and we wisely said, “We’d better slow this beast down, lest we go off the edge,” so we slowed it down… but then… kinda did nothing? We didn’t build new tracks. We didn’t construct a bridge. We didn’t even cover the train in pillows and bounce-houses in the hopes it lessened our impact, if we had to go over the cliff.

We just bided our time and then started speeding up again.

The track is still broken.

The cliff is still ahead.

And the train is full of children.

What I’m saying is, how the hell are we supposed to open schools again?

Consider the following problem —

Soon, it’s going to be cold-and-flu season. That can start as early as September around these parts, and really gets its roots in by winter. Hell, autumn brings allergies, too.

Now, let’s say a kid, or a teacher, starts to have symptoms of one or the other.

Sniffles, sneezes, runny noses, coughs. A temperature.

Is it COVID-19?

Well, you won’t know, so whaddya gonna do? Just casually remove them? The virus is catchier than a Rick-Roll, and often before you even show symptoms. You pretend it’s fine, you could make sure that everyone gets it, that it runs a race around everyone in school.

So, the likely answer is, you have to shut down the school, or at least that class, until the person is tested. And once again, testing is harder to get across the country. If you can get a test, then some people are receiving results in 7-14 days. For a while there it was faster, but remember SLOW DOWN THE TESTING, PLEASE, from our erstwhile shitberg of a president? Yeah. His wish was our command, and now testing is half-fucked again. So, if the person with the coughing-sniffles gets a test, it could be two weeks before results roll in.

Two weeks where people have to freak the fuck out that maybe their kids, or the teachers, or the parents, or whoever, caught the thing that may or may not be the virus that may or may not leave you with lasting long-time damage. That’s a very big Schroedinger’s Cat situation, isn’t it?

Then, then, assume that people are going to also get this thing. Not just cold. Not just flu. But people are going to get it. Statistically, that’s gonna happen, and I’m betting it happens in the first month of school. A kid, a teacher, an admin, a parent, or even someone secondarily connected to those people — a grandparent, a neighbor, whatever, someone where there has been exposure.

Now what?

Well, again, you probably gotta shut shit down.

So, best case scenario, you’ve got a rolling series of openings and shutdowns, blunting any educational momentum the kids and teachers gain. All while school is surely hamstrung anyway, because there’s no way you can run a school the way you did before in the midst of all this.

Given that even a single cough or elevated temperature could totally knee-cap your entire school for two weeks… how’s this supposed to work? What’s the point? Why even bother opening? It’s a futile gesture, like trying to thread a needle with a blowdart from across a crowded room. I guess it’s not impossible but oof. Of course, the Sword of Damocles hanging over everyone’s head is that parents have to work and that means they have to send their kids to school and then there are kids who need school for meals and education (obviously) and social growth and maybe even an escape from abusive or problematic families. But federally, we have no response for this, no planning, no way forward — and a lot of states don’t have much of a clue, either. So onward the train goes, chug-chug-chug, choo-choo, and we know the tracks are busted, we know there’s no bridge, it’s only a cliff ahead and a damning drop to the hard ground below. But we keep going. The train keeps a rollin’.

HULLO HULLO. It is I, your bearded Charon guiding you down the rivers of the Underworld. Come, take a boat ride with me to the bubbliest, barmiest of blogtowns.

I’m reminded of polio. I know, starting off real exciting, right? Polio? JFC. I’m just saying, polio is one of those diseases where it infected a lot of people — but a bunch didn’t show symptoms, a bunch got the equivalent of a flu, and a smaller percentage ended up with muscle problems, paralysis, and death. Then, as if that weren’t sucky enough, some folks got a follow-up round of PPS (Post-Polio Syndrome) anywhere from 15-40 years later. And they don’t know why. Because viruses are weird.

What I’m trying to say is, take COVID very seriously. In particular, take warnings about neurological damage with considerable concern. Further, it’s worth realizing that survival — while good! — doesn’t mean a life free from symptoms or problems. We need to stop pretending like this is just the flu, like you get it and move on, like we understand the margins of this thing. We don’t. Even with a vaccine, its effects will be with us for a while. Wear a mask. Try to remain distant. Stop going to parties and bars, for shit’s sake.

In better news, Far Side is back. I mean, holy shit. The Far Side is back?!

Some TV I’m enjoying? I started up both The Boys and Doom Patrol and… okay, listen, I wasn’t sure about The Boys. I kinda figured it was gonna be a bro-town meh-fest, but I should’ve have doubted. It’s great. I’m digging it. And Doom Patrol? Who knew? Both are squirrely, dark takes on the superhero thing, and I’m not super into the dark takes right now, but what can I say? What works, works. And these work. What shows or movies have you been digging?

I got a hammock. Its singular purpose was for reading — to disconnect from the world and to pick up a physical book and just read it. My pleasure reading has been erratic as hell since all this started, but lemme tell you, I started Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song yesterday, and in a blink, I was 100 pages deep. I haven’t read 100 pages of a book in one sitting since before the Quarantimes. Ironically, it’s a book about a virus — an upgraded rabies virus. It’s horrifying. Tremblay is a monster. A wonderful monster who is a helluva writer. What are you reading right now?

I saw a video that has made me laugh so hard I wept. It’s Akilah and Milana. Just watch it and improve your life one thousand percent.

A casual reminder that you can find me on Instagram. It’s @chuck_wendig over yonder.

Our garden doth grow. Been eating snap peas, which have been sweet. Our radish days are gone. Got kale that needs harvesting. Shishito peppers blooming. Peas starting. And something called “Dragon Beans” which are, no joke, growing taller than anything we have supporting them, so I’m pretty sure they’re some kind of mythological legume. We also used compost to help jump start our blueberries, but I guess the compost had squash seeds in them because now the blueberries have some squash buddies growing alongside them? I’m sure that’s fine.

Beer me, barkeep. I had something called Cocoa Cow from Sunriver and hot dang that was good. It’s like dessert, except it’s beer? I wanna put some vanilla ice cream in it. Because if you’re going to be unhealthy, you might as well press pedal and pitter-patter.

So it’s been a year, now. Happy birthday, Wanderers. The little big book has been out for a full year, and it’s done very well and I’m happy, but do you remember when it was fiction hahaha aaaaghhaaAAAAGHHHH yeah me too. Also holy shit, it’s at 989 reviews at Amazon — ?! That’s a helluva thing. I’m still very proud of the book. It was serendipitous in the writing and the reception, and equally so — if more troubling — in how it occasionally would come to mirror some of reality. I don’t think the book’s journey is over, and it continues (somehow?) to sell pretty well, and I’m just glad it’s out there and did okay. I remember taking a road trip to do research for it and — wow, remember road trips? Remember going places? Remember doing stuff outside your house. Of course, because we live in Two Americas, there are lots of people who remember those things well, because they just did them like, last week. Half our local cases are from people who thought, “Now’s a good time to go to Myrtle Beach, where I can rub my nose in some coronavirus with lime, baby.” Seriously, our cases in PA are coming from out of state. Because people just can’t be smart and keep it under control. IF I DON’T GO TO THE BEACH I’LL DIE, they say, before going to beach and catching a disease that could kill them. Cool cool cool, extremely cool.

I have all kinds of news I can’t yet share. One day I’ll share it. For now I’m sitting on a nest of eggs that only I know are there. HATCH, LITTLE NEWS GOSLINGS, HATCH.

ANYWAY that’s all she wrote, I think.

Wear a mask.

Here’s a flower.