Jesse Alexander, #1
Urban Fantasy/Paranormal
Publisher: Pen & Page Publishing
Date Published: May 11, 2017
During Starfall, magic flooded the Earth and destroyed most technology while humans developed strange new powers. As the scion of a male-dominated clan, Jesse should have risen to become a hero.
One disastrous choice ruins her hopes for the future.
To forget about her life as an assassin, she heads to the dying coasts of Florida. Unfortunately, a chance encounter with a Starfall stone and the Siberian tiger shifter after it thrusts her into the limelight. Escaping Nate’s sights is only the beginning of her woes.
When two dangerous Starfall stones are stolen, it’s up to Jesse to recover them. Should she fail, she’ll only be the first to succumb to the rogue stones’ powers.
Interview with RJ Blain
Thank you for having me! I’m glad to be here, and
I look forward to the interview.
Is There a Message in Your Novel That You Want Readers to Grasp?
As a somewhat
amusing side note, this is one of the questions I almost always dread in an
interview, especially for this book. Yes, there is a message I want
readers to grasp in this one. In many of them, the message is to just let loose
and have fun. Mostly. (I always have things slid in in every book, if a reader
wants to go look for it.)
But in the Jesse Alexander series, the message is
about the perception of family and a woman’s journey to discovering that family
is more than blood, and sometimes, the family we need is the one we aren’t born
into—and that they are often more valuable than blood ties.
And that’s kind of a hard message, because most
people, at a core, want those blood ties to truly matter.
Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing?
Visualization, truth be told. I have a medical
condition called aphantasia, which means I do not have any ability to ‘imagine’
anything in my head. (It is a dark, silent place. When I close my eyes, that’s
it. Just dark silence. Pretty peaceful, actually.) I think in words, so it can
be sometimes very difficult to try to figure out which words will make other
people visualize something.
I (somehow?!) manage to pull this off, but it’s
still an utterly foreign concept to me that people envision things in their
heads! I really thought it was a figure of speech for most of my life. It turns
out there’s a significant neuropathy issue in my brain, so visual recollection
and imagination (and all other senses, including touch and taste and smell) aren’t
recollected and can’t be imagined.
Yeah, it’s as weird as it sounds. I mean, I knew
I was weird all along, but now I know part of the reason why I’m weird.
Aphantasia is considered a brain
disorder/malfunction, so essentially. I’m defective. I don’t mind, though. I
think in words, so writing is right up my alley.
How many books have you written and which is your favorite?
I lost count. I
spend most days of the week writing, and I just stopped bothering to count at
some point. Picking a favorite is hard, but I think I have to go with Double
Trouble: a Magical Romantic Comedy (with a body count.) It releases in late
November 2019. It has unicorns. Multiple unicorns.
I am known to have an unreasonable love of
unicorns.
If You had the chance to cast your main character from Hollywood today, who would you pick and why?
This is a good
question, as I don’t watch movies as a general rule. So, my awareness of actors
and actresses is very limited. But for one of my male leads, somewhere, in one
of my books, I would pick Chris Pratt because I love dinosaurs. (Yeah, I never
said I was normal…)
When did you begin writing?
Realistically, sometime after high school. I
dabbled in high school, but I wasn’t even literate until 4th grade.
(Yes, I somehow navigated through the public education system essentially
functionally illiterate until 4th grade.) A teacher figured me out,
though, and gave me my first science fiction/fantasy novel, A Wrinkle in Time.
I was reading college level by the end of 4th
grade. Ironically, in 6th grade, I was registered to be with the special
needs kids because of mental developmental delays… after acing the standardized
testing in several fields. Yeah, the school system when I grew up was a mess.
My mother demanded an IQ test.
I scored genius. They discovered my problem: I
was bored.
I was returned to normal classes with a caveat: I
was allowed to read books in the back of the class following the reading/question
sessions, as I processed information too quickly.
Later in life, I learned this was actually a
consequence of having aphantasia. I work with words exceptionally well, and can
process them very quickly, so written lessons were my jam, as what I read would
often stick. Lectures, however, were the reason I couldn’t successfully navigate
through college.
I couldn’t remember the lectures, and I couldn’t
write fast enough to take the notes.
I became an author instead of a biomedical
engineer. Go figure.
I took being completely incapable of doing
college to realize I could make writing work. But it took over 15 years of
studying and learning before I was able to write a somewhat decent book.
I’m still working on it.
How long did it take to complete your first book?
I’d say about six
years. It’s terrible. It lives on my shelf of shame never to see the light of
day. Approximately seven rewrites later, it became Storm Without End. I released
The Eye of God first, but I have many regrets on that score. (I could do
better. The rest of that poor sad series will be better. Once I get to it. I’m
hoping I can finish The Fall of Erelith and Requiem for the Rift King in 2021
and 2022.
Did you have an author who inspired you to become a writer?
Mercedes
Lackey and Madeline L’Engle. Lackey taught me books could be fun, that it was
okay to write about horses, and that anything was fair game to write. L’Engle taught
me books were fun to read.
Nowadays,
I idolize Faith Hunter and Ilona Andrews. (My bookshelf beside my desk is
loaded with their works, and they’re all my preciouses, all signed.)
What is your favorite part of the writing process?
Honestly, I love everything except implementing
my editors’ notes. That part sucks. Everything else just makes me happy. And
I don’t really hate the editorial phase, it’s just stressful because
that’s when I try to make the crap shine. The writing is easy. The polishing?
That’s hard.
Describe your latest book in 4 words.
Thar be unicorns here. (Double Trouble, Nov 2019)
Can you share a little bit about your current work or what is in the
future for your writing?
As a matter of fact, yes. I can. Here is the first paragraph
of Steel Heart, Water Viper’s sequel, which releases on Christmas 2019. Personally,
I think this paragraph fits Jesse perfectly. At the time this was posted, my
editor hadn’t gotten to it yet. Shhh. I won’t tell if you don’t.
Why did so many of my problems begin in a bar? I sipped my beer from
the corner, kept my back to the wall, and admired the brawl in full swing. Four
broken tables, seven stools, and eight chairs littered the floor along with
copious amounts of blood and beer, none of which belonged to me for a change.
About the Author
RJ Blain suffers from a Moleskine journal obsession, a pen fixation, and a terrible tendency to pun without warning.
In her spare time, she daydreams about being a spy. Her contingency plan involves tying her best of enemies to spinning wheels and quoting James Bond villains until satisfied.
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thanks for hosting
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