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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… -
Creating a Mythological Structure
By Jennifer Lawler • September 9, 2025One of the surprises that cropped up when I was writing The Wanderer series occurred when all of the gods started to show up. I’d originally conceived of the first book in the series, The Wanderer, as an historical of the early middle ages, and the religion at that time would have been Catholicism. It… -
Creating Strong Female Characters
By Jennifer Lawler • September 5, 2025Lois Peterson, the older woman protagonist of The Mage of Motor Avenue series, is one of my favorite characters. She’s snarky and doesn’t take shit from anyone but she’s also kind, and those are my personal favorite type of people. Lucinda (the younger woman protagonist of The Wanderer series) has a dry sense of humor… -
Being a Foreigner
By Jennifer Lawler • September 2, 2025In the original draft of the first novel in my epic fantasy series (The Wanderer), Lucinda, the female protagonist, considered herself part of the culture she lives in. But in later revisions, I found it useful to use her perspective to explain the culture she lives in and to do that, it helped to make…