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On characters winning the lottery
By Jennifer Lawler • October 24, 2025One of the things that annoys me in series characters is when they start off like the rest of us, living paycheck to paycheck, worried about the bills and how to pay for the car repairs and then halfway through the series they win the lottery and don’t have work anymore. I don’t mind when… -
Why we need editors
By Jennifer Lawler • October 21, 2025In my current work in progress, I established early on that the main character doesn’t drink coffee. She mentions it to just about the first person she encounters, and so you would think I could remember this fact about my own character. But the other characters keep offering her coffee, and my poor main character… -
On learning a new language
By Jennifer Lawler • October 17, 2025When I first moved to Spain, I knew very little Spanish (“hola!” and “Quiero una copa de vino blanco”). As the months have passed and I’ve taken classes, my Spanish has improved. I’m still at a beginner level but I know more than I did when I got here. People talk a lot about how… -
Setting-Inspired Character
By Jennifer Lawler • October 14, 2025When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had the idea for an urban fantasy set in my neighborhood, featuring a reluctant wizard – a woman but I call her a wizard because I didn’t want her to use magic like our stereotype of a witch (cauldron, herbs, etc.) (It turns out that she prefers… -
Respecting Literature
By Jennifer Lawler • October 10, 2025One of the the things I adore about Spain is how strong the book culture is here. There are countless bookstores in the area where I live – I can think of eight within a kilometer or so. They’re not franchises, just small, family-owned businesses that thrive despite the fact that Amazon and ebooks are… -
The Importance of Luck in Book Publishing
By Jennifer Lawler • October 7, 2025Once upon a time, I wrote a lot of books about the martial arts. It’s not a thing I set out to do, but I did it because people paid me to do it. I ended up writing a dozen martial arts books, more or less, including my very popular Dojo Wisdom series (Dojo Wisdom… -
Why I Write
By Jennifer Lawler • October 3, 2025Once upon a time, a reader said to me, “Your books got me through a terrible time after I was seriously injured in a car accident” and I’ve treasured that remark to this day. A person can write novels for a lot of reasons, but I think a lot of readers are like me. When… -
Fairy and Folk Tale Inspiration
By Jennifer Lawler • September 26, 2025When I was a child, I adored fairy tales and folk tales. I devoured the Brothers Grimm and then every other kind of fairy tale or folk tale I could get my hands on, including those from other cultures. After a while, my interest expanded to include mythology, starting with Greek and Roman, moving to… -
Letting a Story Evolve
By Jennifer Lawler • September 23, 2025When I first started writing about Lucinda, the female protagonist of The Wanderer series, I gave her a love interest, Lord Stephen, and then I gave him a personal bodyguard named Simon. Originally I thought I would give Simon a love interest of his own in one of the books of the series, and I… -
Tropes I Hate
By Jennifer Lawler • September 19, 2025Back when I was an acquisitions editor for a romance imprint, I used to get manuscripts that featured the secret baby trope. This is a somewhat popular romance trope – a woman gets pregnant and for some reason (usually puerile) she doesn’t tell the father. Later, he finds out, so of course he’s angry (conflict!)…. -
What’s Your Reading Mood?
By Jennifer Lawler • September 16, 2025Sometimes readers like serious work and sometimes they’re in the mood for something lighthearted. Unlike a lot of authors, I have two modes of writing, snarky and dead serious, and I’ve often felt that this is because my life is either absurd or heartbreaking, with very little in between. If a bird is going to… -
Do You Adore Animal Sidekicks?
By Jennifer Lawler • September 12, 2025I do! I’m working on a novel where the protagonist has an animal sidekick. The tone is lighthearted, like Lessons in Magic. The female protagonist in that novel also has an animal sidekick. Lois, the protagonist of The Mage of Motor Avenue series, has a plethora of animal sidekicks, but the two that carry most…