A.J. Maguire

Author: ajmaguire

  • Settings and Mood Boards

    I learned a new trick and it seems to be seriously helping me with descriptions of the setting in particular, so naturally I’m going to share it here in case it helps someone else with their writing. Settings are often a struggle for me. I have read books on writing and gone to classes on writing and they always give this detailed list of the things you should know about your settings, and to be frank… these make my eyes gloss over.

    I’m not saying you don’t need to know that there are pock marks in the western wall where your character’s father once practiced knife throwing, I’m saying that making a list of these things was not helpful for me. And I’m saying that making such lists turned out to be a waste of my time because they rarely got looked at beyond the initial effort it took to make them.

    If these sorts of things work for you, then I applaud you and I am so glad. Seriously. Whatever works for you to get words on the page is what you should do.

    So what’s my trick?

    Images.

    Literal images.

    Deviantart and Pinterest are two places you can go to see some seriously beautiful artwork. This does come with the warning that oftentimes you’ll start browsing and before you know it, an hour has past, so make sure you go in with an idea of what you’re looking for.

    Now, for this next part, make sure you are looking at FREE images or that you’re not yanking someone’s hard work without somehow paying for it. Artists spend just as long on their craft as we writers do ours, so be respectful.

    What I do, is I start a Mood Board on Canva.

    I do love Canva. You can have a free account and do a lot with it. A lot of my marketing images and things come from Canva.

    Anyway, I start a Mood Board on Canva. They even have Mood Board templates you can use.

    Using the images that I stumbled across in my DeviantArt/Pinterest dungeon crawl (with permission if they are not free) I then fill that Mood Board. OR, I use MidJourney to help me create some images.

    Yes, Midjourney is an AI art generator. Yes, I understand there is a huge debate going on about AI in the arts. No, I’m not going to expound on this debate. Suffice to say, budgets are tight and if I could hire a flesh and blood artist to do some of these then I most certainly would. These images are for my personal use as I write/edit my drafts and I have found them supremely helpful.

    I digress.

    Here you can see a Mood Board that was made for a setting in Nora and the Winter King. Notice that I’ve paid particular attention to specific rooms, and that there is a distinct feel that all of the rooms follow. Identifying what is working for this setting is important. In this case, it’s a lot of stonework, a dusty and neglected feel while still be cozy in places.

    Oftentimes the very act of creating this mood board is enough to settle me into the scene I’m about to write, but having it on hand to reference as I go through the draft is helpful. Especially if I’m coming back to a setting that was left behind or returning to the work to begin edits.

    Anyway, that’s my trick. It seems to work better than making lists, at least for me, and it allows me to sort of “sit” in that setting and feel it.

    Happy writing, everyone!

  • Limbo Week – May 2024

    For those just joining us, I finished a manuscript at the end of April and have since been in what I like to call Limbo.

    Limbo is where I get to consume all the fiction I possibly can.

    Books. Movies. Video games. If it has a story, I’ll consume it.

    That’s not to say I’m not reading books during other weeks of the year. This is just the week where I get to spoil myself rotten with it.

    Reading and experiencing stories is so very important for writers. I know there are some out there who claim they are too busy writing to read, and I have to admit this makes me cringe. Because if you’re not reading then you have no idea what is being said out in society. Sure, you might get the highlights from the news, but there’s a deeper conversation happening in society and the only way you can access it is by reading.

    This is why I have been focused on bouncing Book Reviews up here lately. It’s not just because I enjoyed a book, it’s because I’m joining that deeper conversation.

    Even if that deeper conversation happens to be Romantasy novels with Vikings and Fae creatures running about.

    As I head into this next week, Limbo is officially over and work is beginning for Nora and the Winter King. I’m still hopeful that this is the final full length novel for Nora’s storyline, and that I will be able to deliver both Siren Song and Winter King within a couple months of each other.

    This is because Siren Song ends on a bit of a cliffhanger.

    My first ever cliffhanger, guys. I’m not sure if I’m excited or worried.

    Anyway, Limbo is closing out and I have some more reading to do.

    Happy Writing, everyone.

  • Book Review – Spark of the Everflame by Penn Cole

    This book took me a minute to get into, but I think that was my fault. I have been reading far too many Romantasy novels and needed a pallet cleanser. And I know some of you are going to gasp and be offended and say — There’s no such thing as too many Romantasy novels!

    To which I will say…

    There is if you are reading them one after another after another. Because the plotlines and characters really start to blend.

    SO.

    Yes, this book took me a minute.

    Because Diem (which, by the way, insofar as character names go is admittedly not my favorite, but I got over it) was so much like every other kick-butt female heroine from a Romantasy novel that my eyes were kind of glazing. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, we love tropes for a reason, so I put the book down and did something else for a while until I had enough distance from that trope that I could love it again.

    I enjoyed this book. While there were elements that were blaringly obvious and I wanted to reach into the pages and strangle the main character until she came around and paid better attention, there were other elements that I distinctly loved. The world and prejudices inside it were real. You could feel and understand the frustrations coming from the human element of society, even while you wanted desperately to see some sort of resolution that would not put innocent lives in danger.

    But most important.

    I loved that Diem made a mistake.

    Mild spoiler alert. Diem makes a choice that turns out to be a bad one. And it’s one that you know she is going to make. You see it coming. And you understand it. That in and of itself made me adore this book, but to top it off, the banter between Diem and the romantic interest is fun.

    I look forward to the next in the series.

    AMAZON LINK – Spark of the Everflame by Penn Cole

  • Release Shenanigans – Nora and the Duke of Autumn

    I try to alternate weeks between writing posts and book review posts buuuuuut….

    But this week the paperback edition of Nora and the Duke of Autumn was released and so I am going to steal today for shouting my excitement from the rooftops.

    Mood Board – Nora and the Duke of Autumn

    For those just joining us, Nora’s story sparked with a X (then Twitter) conversation about how I loved the concept of Lucifer having a therapist in the show of the same name. Another writer and I were chitchatting about how the characters in our novels all deserved some therapy after what we put them through, and I made the offhand comment about how a lot of the romance couples needed this too.

    Bam.

    Nora’s story was born.

    An empathic wizard living in Boston who provides counseling to the supernatural living amongst us? The possibilities were endless.

    Mood Board – Nora and the Werewolf Wedding

    In the first book, I had a lot of fun introducing the world(s) where Fairy and Earthside coexist and teasing at the deeper lore hidden behind Nora’s ignorance.

    I knew a couple of things walking in. First, I knew I wanted relationships to be highlighted. In Nora and the Werewolf Wedding, we saw several relationships throughout. We saw a bride and her mother, a bride and her groom, a son and his mother, and a grandson and his grandfather, all of which played significant roles in the story.

    In Nora and the Duke of Autumn, we see Nora struggling with her personal relationships, and we see a young son rebelling against his parents, as well as a broken mother and daughter relationship. I don’t want to spoil anything here, so I’m going to be purposefully vague. There are brothers and lovers and friendships throughout the book that Nora is able to influence in some way.

    The second thing I knew walking into this series was that I wanted magic to be hidden in plain sight of humanity. Don’t ask me why, but this story can only exist with the parallel between Earth and Fairy. In Nora and the Werewolf Wedding, we stuck real close to Earthside, but in Duke of Autumn we take that major plunge into the Fairy. Sixty percent of the novel is traipsing through my steampunk version of Fairy, and I had a blast writing it.

    Everything else about the books has grown over time and will likely continue to grow as I delve deeper into the series.

    Mood Board – Nora and the Siren Song

    SPEAKING OF WHICH…

    I am excited to announce that by the end of April, I will have a completed draft of Nora and the Siren Song. (Yes, that’s only a couple of days away. Yes, I am THAT close. Currently I am sitting on the final chapter and the epilogue.)

    So here is me, throwing confetti for the paperback release of Nora and the Duke of Autumn AND finishing the draft of Nora and the Siren Song.

    Come on, 2024, let’s see what else we can get done.

    PURCHASE LINK – Nora and the Duke of Autumn

    PURCHASE LINK – Nora and the Werewolf Wedding

  • Paperback Release! Nora and the Duke of Autumn

    Woo! Today is the day!

    You can get Nora and the Duke of Autumn in both Paperback and Hardback from Amazon. Here are the links!

    PAPERBACK LINK

    HARDBACK LINK

    A couple of things to note…

    #1 – This is only the physical copy release date. The KINDLE version is still up for preorder until its official release in August. Don’t ask me why, but Amazon would not let me schedule them at the same time. It seems weird to me, but hey, it is what it is. Just means those of you who like physical copies get to enjoy the book first.

    #2 – Major thanks to those on my ARC team who have left reviews/ratings. You are all super stars.

    Don’t know where to leave a review?

    I can help with that!

    Goodreads and Amazon are still both the best spots for this. Here’s the GOODREADS link for this book in particular. And here’s the spot Amazon.

    Don’t have time to leave a full review? No problem! You can just hit the stars and I promise that’s just as good. Even if you give it 1 star because you hated it (please always be honest) the ratings are there to help people see if it’s something they’d be interested in reading.

    FROM THE BACK COVER::

    We call ourselves the Bright.

    Most of us look like you.

    We live next door and shop in the same stores. We laugh and cry and work, just like you.

    There’s only one difference between us…Magic.

    When Nora Grayson grudgingly took a premarital counseling job for a pair of socialite werewolves she never expected to unearth secrets about her own family. Her life in upheaval, Nora tries to piece together the truth after her so-called caretakers have gone on the run, stealing not only answers, but every cent Nora had saved. To make matters worse, Derrick King has been called to London to handle the werewolf clans there, putting a significant pause on their budding relationship.

    Clinging to the hope of his return, Nora must rely on Constable Elliot Cade and the rest of his team as they continue to sort through the shattered pieces of Nora’s life. When evidence of murder is discovered in her Uncle Martin’s pawn shop, Nora and the team must reopen a decade old cold case in their hunt for answers. As the team narrows down their investigation, Nora must prepare for a trip to Fairy, where Bright politics prove to be as unforgiving as they are deadly.

    Nora and the Duke of Autumn Moodboard!

  • Book Review – Tune in Tomorrow by Randee Dawn

    This is a fun, lighthearted read. You delve into the strange world of Fairy Entertainment, which was a neat concept. There were places where I wish the author would have slowed down and allowed us to really live in the world she had created for a minute. I mean, we read these things to escape but I barely got an impression of what the backstage elements were like.

    The characters were all colorful and it was interesting to see them reacting to different things. I will note that these were also bare impressions at times, like the bigger personalities were simply that and I wished there was more to explain why they behave as they do, but many of them are creatures of Fairy so perhaps they are meant to be caricatures instead of characters.

    All in all, it was a fun, popcorn read. Go into it expecting a fast pace and some Fairy weirdness and you’ll have a good time. There are no major explicit scenes but stuff is implied in places, it might not be suitable for the youngest among us.

    Happy Reading!

    Purchase Link – Tune In Tomorrow by Randee Dawn

  • Ventures Into Fairy – Nora Grayson Edition

    When I set out to write Nora’s story I did not know what I was getting into. I had a vague premise – marital counselor for supernatural creatures – and a sort of Clue setting for Werewolf Wedding. I quite like the game Clue, and massive old houses with loads of history, and since my other books were feeling a bit too heavy, I wanted to have some fun with this one.

    It did not take long for me to realize I had a lot more here than Clue meets Fairy Creatures, but I fought the desire to dig further because I didn’t want to write a series. I wanted a standalone novel and I struggled mightily to force this narrative into submission.

    (Insert manic laughter here.)

    The fact is, I had too much fun with Nora and her world. I’m still having boat loads of fun, in fact, and I sincerely hope I continue in this vein.

    For those who haven’t read Nora and the Werewolf Wedding, the basic summary is that Fairy was created so that Bright folk (aka Fae creatures) could hide from humanity, who were hunting them for their magic. Bright creatures can access the way to Fairy through any body of water, and make frequent crossings between Fairy and Earthside.

    With Nora and the Duke of Autumn being released in paperback next month, it seemed prudent to mention that we dive heavily into Fairy in this book.

    Nora has not been to Fairy, for reasons you’ll have to explore in the books, and her brief forays into Fairy in Werewolf Wedding leave a whole wide world out there unexplored. Happily, this gets remedied with Duke of Autumn. Nora not only gets to see more of Fairy, she gets to meet — you guessed it — Fae nobility.

    Why did I choose Autumn for the setting?

    Uh… because it’s my favorite.

    I also revisited one of my favorite steampunk settings with a dirigible. However, fans of Witch-Born will notice this dirigible is a bit different, particularly with the amount of fairy creatures and the heavier focus on steam powered items on board.

    Among the more challenging aspects of writing Fairy has been the need to show a kind of mish-mash of cultures. Having Fairy lean on steampunk has been a fun physical means of differentiating between it and Earthside, however, and I look forward to continuing in this vein. It shows that humans have still left their fingerprints on Fairy, and while they have many traditions they call The Fairy Way, there are still some bits of technology that have been fused with magic to make their way of life a little easier.

    I could go into a deep dive in the books, but I have chosen not to. The books already edge toward the super high end of the word count spectrum and while it’s fun for me to know Nicola Tesla was a wizard in my world setting, it might bog down the pacing.

    But hey, the series has at least one more book for me to write. Maybe it’ll come to light in the narrative naturally.

  • Book Review – House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J Maas

    So there has been a lot of conversation around this book. Some people hating it, some people loving it. Most people falling somewhere in between.

    I fear I fall “somewhere in between” loving and hating it.

    I’ve followed some of the arguments about how this is Bryce’s story and while many people may have wanted to see a larger gathering of talents and minds for this war, I’m afraid that’s not where I felt the most disappointed. I fully accepted that these people did not know one another and that a crossover beyond what we saw was unlikely to occur.

    The things that bothered me were not that Bryce was a turd to Azriel and Nesta, but rather that Bryce never seems to grow.

    Like… ever.

    The reason I loved the original Crescent City novel, and what had me picking up the second novel, was that Bryce grew an incredible amount in that first book. She underwent some horrifying things and she as a character grew from them. She is precisely the same person at the end of House of Flame and Shadow as she was at the beginning, and she really should not be.

    Enter the Spoiler Zone.

    I do hate giving spoilers, but the things that bother me about this book require some details, so here it goes.

    #1 – At no point did I fear Bryce would lose.

    Someone should have perished. Someone we cared about. They needed to LOSE somewhere in this novel, and in a big way. But even when they kind of-sort-of lost, that person was brought back from the brink of death and still played a major role in the end scenes. The book falls flat because nothing was really at stake.

    #2 – The… info-dump magic video-montage.

    This lasted… uh… for ages. And it gave way too much away. Sure, it was interesting at first, but I remember that every time we flashed back to Bryce in the cave listening/watching to the history that I started to groan and asked, out loud to my very confused husband; “We’re really just going to spoon feed me everything right here?”

    The book would have been far more interesting if some of this magic-montage-history-lesson had been corrupted somehow. Say, maybe, at the water parasites… and instead of just having Bryce show up and mention they have a water problem, the Ocean Queen could maybe have been investigating this all along since… you know… she’s an OCEAN QUEEN and innately tied to the water.

    But that’s just my gripe here. The big mysteries were explained and unveiled too early on.

    #3 – Hunt got sacrificed to Bryce’s awesomeness too much.

    My lord, if she mentioned Bryce doing all this amazing stuff in her pink shoes one more time I was going to lose my mind. What little Hunt was allowed to do never eclipsed or matched what Bryce did. Ever. It made him the weaker of the two, rather than her equal in the relationship, and this… This frustrated me the most. Relationships are built on give and take, and we read Romance and Romantic Fantasy to see two people come together and work out how this looks for them specifically.

    Hunt was constantly on his back foot and I kept waiting for him to have a moment where he got to do some of the giving, or even have his own idea that surprises us all where he narrowly skates through danger, but he was never given this opportunity.

    Now…

    All that said, I gave the book 4 stars. The series is a worthwhile read for worldbuilding alone, and the Ruhn and Lidia plotline had me invested through this book. In fact, Ruhn seemed to carry the novel the most as he and Lidia had the stakes I was looking for and seemed to struggle the most to overcome the circumstances and problems surrounding them.

    Happy Reading!

    PURCHASE LINK!

  • The Nitty-Gritty – Writing a Series

    I will preface this blog entry with the reminder that what works for me might not work for others. Writing is an ever-evolving craft wherein I learn something new with every single book. What follows are simply the steps that I’ve found work for me.

    Maybe this will change in a year. Maybe my writing process will remain the beautiful chaos it is now until the day I pass on from this life. I honestly don’t know.

    Let me also say that I never set out to write a SERIES.

    I simply set out to tell a story. Sometimes that story winds up being far bigger than original anticipated, is all.

    The Nora Grayson Series is by far my largest undertaking, and the possibilities for offshoots keep cropping up. Which is either super exciting or daunting, I can’t decide which. Regardless, the fact that it has grown so very large in my head means that I have had to take some serious steps to keep things in line.

    I’ve mentioned the Story Bible before, which for me is a singular notebook that has the outlines, draft notes, and character notes of every book in the series in it. When I say it’s chaos, I mean that it is absolute chaos. There are different shades of ink, there are scribbled notes in the margins, there are highlighted bits and then question marks beside those highlighted bits and timelines and character questions everywhere.

    I pity the man who picks it up and tries to make sense of it.

    For me, however, it is my happy place.

    It’s my Muse at her most free, dallying here and there with tantalizing possibilities. I have no rules for the Story Bible other than I’m concentrating on this one series and no other books. There are, however, what I call KEY pages.

    For instance, I have one KEY page titled: SET IN STONE.

    This seems self-explanatory, but these are the key elements of the story that have already been published. Details go in here that I often need to reference such as Nora’s home address. It is sectioned out between books, so for Werewolf Wedding I have a running list of names for those she met in that book and how they correspond to her and then any unresolved matters that did not get addressed in that particular novel.

    With each new book, the SET IN STONE page grows. For obvious reasons.

    Readers are smart, and I don’t want to upset one by assuming they aren’t going to notice that Delilah’s eyes changed from green to blue between Books One and Three. Or if they do change color, it better make sense in the story.

    Which brings me to the most important part of writing a series…

    Reading.

    Or rather, re-reading. I’m working on these concurrently, so I have an audio version of Werewolf Wedding being narrated to me, am doing final pass edits on Duke of Autumn, am drafting Siren Song, and outlining Winter King. There’s a lot of moving parts. There are a lot of details I don’t want to miss.

    If it looks overwhelming, don’t worry. The fact is, I’m having a blast. I love Nora and these stories and I cannot wait to share them with you. Truthfully, if I am ever not having fun, it normally means I’ve lost sight of the story and need to go back to the Story Bible and flip through it.

    There are a ton more KEY pages in my Story Bible, such as the Compost Dump that I’ve mentioned before. (I still recommend Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass on Writing. You won’t regret it.) But I want to highlight one more before I run off for the day. This KEY page is titled: The Lies They Believe.

    It’s a very evocative title, I know.

    We’ll take Nora for example. MILD SPOILERS INBOUND.

    Werewolf Wedding – The Lies Nora Believes – is that she is a low level empath whose only use is as a counselor. Further, she’s a burden to her Nana Bess and Uncle Martin – especially Uncle Martin. She believes Fairy is a place where criminals and reprobates thrive, that decent people never go there, because this is what Bess and Martin have told her. This lie is reinforced by the fact that her own parents abandoned Fairy before she was born, though they never told her precisely why.

    Why is this page KEY?

    Because by the end of Werewolf Wedding, Nora has to see through these lies, if not confront them.

    Happy Writing!

    Purchase Link – Nora and the Werewolf Wedding

    Pre-Order Link – Nora and the Duke of Autumn

  • Book Review – The Broken Kingdoms Series by LJ Andrews

    First of all…

    Yes, I discovered this author via BookTok.

    A ton of my friends encouraged me to check out Book Tok and since I was already on TikTok, I decided to check it out.

    Please, no politics and raging in my comments, social media constantly has backlash from people who dislike certain platforms and I’m old enough to remember the rise and fall of many of them. Suffice, anything and everything can be exploited for attention/misdirection or to earn a buck, the responsibility falls on you to do your research and participate with moderation and intelligence.

    SO!

    The Ever King by LJ Andrews has a fantastic book trailer that caught my attention. And I devoured that book in two days only to discover it had a major cliffhanger at the end. Which.. fair. It’s a marketing strategy and it worked well on me since I went out and grabbed Curse of Shadows and Thorns by the same author whilst waiting for the next book.

    Which is a roundabout way of saying how I stumbled into the Broken Kingdoms Series, but there you have it. The books are on Kindle Unlimited, which is good because I have a husband who loves me and wants me to be able to read at my own pace (often quite fast) so we have a Kindle Unlimited account.

    Say what you want about Amazon, Kindle Unlimited is brilliant. One price every month and I have access to millions of titles? This. Saves. Me. Heartache. And it makes authors money who would otherwise have been passed over because my book budget would only allow for X amount of novels that month.

    Anyway, Curse of Shadows and Thorns is the introduction to the Broken Kingdoms series by LJ Andrews and I adored this story. Yes, it’s adult. So walk in with your eyes open. Yes, it’s romance. It’s Vikings meet Fae, full of wonder and hope and tragedy.

    Now, I will admit that I saw the twist coming in Book 3. Yes, there are tropes and some predictable elements by the time you hit books 4 and 5, but at the end of the day… I had so much fun reading them.

    Just… fun.

    And really, as much as I love books that open my heart and mind to other cultures and ways of life, sometimes you just want a girl to see the good man beneath the monstrous exterior, and for love to conquer all the ugliness that came before it.

    Happy reading, everyone.

    PURCHASE LINK for Curse of Shadows and Thorns on Amazon!