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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… -
The Promise of Back-to-School
By Jennifer Lawler • August 29, 2025I have a fondness for back-to-school time because I always enjoyed school. It was a bastion of peace and tranquility where the rules were fairly straightforward and the teachers usually liked you if you weren’t disruptive. School was also where I could read without my mother nagging me to go outside and play, although admittedly… -
Rages versus Tantrums
By Jennifer Lawler • July 2, 2025When I was researching ancient mythology in order to construct a believable pantheon for the world of the Stone Island (The Wanderer series), I was struck by how Odin is always described by writers as having “rages,” whereas Freya is always described as having “tantrums.” Interpreting Mythology It’s easy to take these judgments at face… -
The Faucet
By Jennifer Lawler • July 4, 2024The faucet is dripping. The drip is loud in the quiet room: Splat! Like a children’s book: Splat! Splat! Goes the water. “Mom?” Jessica is watching me. She says something else, a thing I can’t hear because the drip is so loud. I jump to my feet to wrench the handles shut but it’s a… -
Trying on shoes
By Jennifer Lawler • May 7, 2024I’m shopping for shoes with my daughter Jessica, who is now twenty-six and tall and thin. Sometimes I can’t get over how beautiful she is. I’m not talking about her physical appearance, though of course being her mother I think she’s the fairest in all the land. But what I’m actually talking about is the… -
What real promise is
By Jennifer Lawler • May 7, 2024I see these memes going around: “At age 30, JK Rowling was depressed and wanted to give up, but she didn’t and now she’s worth 15 kajillion dollars, so you shouldn’t give up either!” And I just . . . think that’s bullshit. It’s not helpful. In fact, I think it’s discouraging. You’re more likely… -
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A personal Independence Day
By Jennifer Lawler • July 4, 2023In the U.S., today is Independence Day. I took the day off from work not because I wanted to celebrate the country (I’m actually quite alarmed at what is happening here) but because it is always a day where I reflect on my own Independence Day, which happened in a November more than twenty years…