J.B. Trepagnier's Blog

I started writing my reverse harem Snow White retelling a few days ago. The 7 dwarfs are the Seven Deadly Sins. At first, I wasn't sure if it was going to be a series or a standalone. It's looking more like it's going to be a standalone. I could drag it out several books, but then the story would suffer. Instead, it's going to be part of a series, Fairy Tales That Bites Back. I've got the Little Mermaid and Rapunzel planned. There will be fae, dragons, and plenty of naughtiness.

I just adore doing fairy tales. It won't be rapid release and the stories will come out as they do. Forbidden has a tentative release date for March, but I may end up pushing it up because I finish writing it faster. It's going to depend on editing and beta reading. I'm about 80 pages into it so far.

There is a Grumpy sin. Man, is he a dick. And I can't wait for you to see what I've done with the sleeping curse

Most of my ideas for books come either while I'm sleeping or while I can't sleep. Bette, Unscripted came to me during a night of frustrated not sleeping after watching both twitter and facebook comment on the #metoos that were popping up and people defending Roy Moore. I was reading all sorts of things like "if that REALLY happened, they would have spoken up right away, not 20 years later." "Rape culture is not real." "If woman want to be taken seriously about this, they shouldn't dress a certain way" Essentially a bunch of horseshit blaming victims and not the fact that we have a broken system here. Brock Turner, anyone?


Here's a story. Someone tried to attack me when I was alone at my job. Locked me in the building and tried to corner me. Let's just say in the future, he won't assume small girls are easy targets. He ran out the back door when my manager unlocked the front. We had his name, address, and phone number because he's apparently as dumb as what I scoop out my litter box. My manager and I reported it right there. A cop came and interviewed me and we provided him with all his info.


The guy locked me in the building with every intention of raping me. He didn't get charge with false imprisonment or attempted rape. He got charged with simple battery because he touched me when I didn't want him to. If they could actually locate him with the information provided, he would get a citation and a fine. So, essentially, this guy is still walking the streets to do this to someone else and I got fired for being "distracting" to the workers.


And Brock Turner and his shit head father? They want the charges dropped totally because HE'S suffered enough. Seeing a pattern here? In the case of your boss or someone in the position to ruin your career, there's logic in safety in numbers like we are seeing in the #metoo movement.


Bette, Unscripted came to me while I was stewing on all of that. Some of it was personal experience, some was the news, some was just me fantasizing about a world where the chickens eventually come to roost and there's some fighting to heal there. It went to some darker places than I originally intended, but I like where it did end up going. Not every story is this extreme or ends this way, but I told the story I wanted to tell.

Child of Fire, Child of Ice, a new sci-fi fantasy is coming soon. There's some romance elements, a religious cult, and a princess who will cut a bitch.

I've literally made about 60 covers for this and now *I* want to cut a bitch, but then again, I generally operate in cantankerous mode. This is the final cover and blurb. I chose this cover because it works for a theme for later books because this will end up being a series. I already have the cover and title for book 2.

ANYWAY. Coming soon

Cendis and Avala. A planet of fire and planet of ice.

The humans that settled there after fleeing earth noticed physical and supernatural changes as time went on. After war broke out between the planets, they seemed to be cursed by their gods. Cendis lost fire and Avala lost ice. A truce was called and both planets cut off contact except for secret factions. The factions have discovered a paradise planet. The night they intend to bring it to the king, a celestial event occurs. The king on both planets and all of his advisors abruptly die and all of their wives, no matter what their age, suddenly fall pregnant.

The thirty-two children are special. They have fire and ice as well as mental gifts. The faction hides them and trains them in secret. The alliance between Cendis and Avala on the paradise planet rests in the hands of the Cendian prince and the Avalian princess and a special bond they are supposed to have. But when the Avalian princess sneaks into Cendis disguised as a slave, things go wrong. Things that threaten the lives of both groups of sixteen and could destroy both planets

Child of Fire, Child of Ice, like an adult His Dark Materials

S, I need cover input. I'm working on a sci-fi romance with 2 main characters that are 18 years old.

I made this cover, which I love, but a few people don't understand the dancer's right leg bending the wrong way. My knees do that and it's highly sought after in dancers right now. A few people thought it looked like the poster for a ballet

I also made this at the same time. A LOT of people prefer this cover to the ballet cover, but the people that dislike it have a good point. The person in the photo is a child and the book is supposed to be a romance with adult characters. This cover does draw my eye more in thumbnaiil

SO THEN, I went in and fooled around with this one. I like it and it says romance, but it doesn't exactly scream sci-fi to me. I think it says maybe fantasy or paranormal more

THEN, I got completely fed up with people in general and made this, but it just says generic sci-fi

So, tell me, readers of goodreads. If you were itching for a sci-fi romance to read, which of these would get you to click and read more? Any of them or do you hate all of them? I know my preference, my assistants preference, the general preference on facebook, BUT WHAT DO YOU THINK?

So, two series got total makeovers cover wise. I've got a few ideas as far as adding some books to The Spirus series, but I'm not writing anything in that series right now. The Mauve series, I had to put the book away and write something else when a bunch of Nazi shitheads made the news running over people with cars and it ended up taking over the plot. Mauve is to be continued and the Spirus is in the future.

The Spirus series is also being updated with new pricing. I've lowered the prices on all the books. The first book is LONG. I'll admit that, but the next 3 are shorter, so I lowered the price.

So, let's see some covers! I decided I was over the comic theme I had going with the Mauve series and wanted to go in another direction. It is technically a comedy series, but Mauve is still learning to be a bad ass secret agent and I have her journey mapped out as they move towards catching The Arm. I wanted to show more of that on the covers. I put the Origins short story back to the original photo instead of the one I turned into a techno comic book cover and found totally new images. Check it out




For the Spirus series, the original covers were just book characters, but I decided to change it to a fire theme. The ability to wield fire is limited to the ruling family and only 2 living people until the mysterious girl shows up in the first book with all these strange abilities. So, check out the new covers for the Spirus series and if you are so inclined, the new pricing should be updated soon or they are also on KU if you were interested in reading them

If I'm writing about Adam's first wife, Lilith, and I have her eyes ice blue when she is human and red when she is a demon, do you prefer the cover with blue eyes or red eyes?

So, there's recently been some drama on facebook about certain people and a certain group. The group, Books Galore, which has since been made secret, was intended for someone who appeared to be a huge supported of us authors selling paperback ARCs that had been sent for free. Their logic being that Ebay hasn't pulled the books down and allows it, so it's totally fine.

I get being a voracious reader and running out of space on your shelves for paperbacks. I totally do. I was totally against kindles and e-readers, preferring holding a real book for years. After dragging yet another book case into the house and trying to find space for it, my husband ends up saving up and buying me a paperwhite kindle for Christmas about 6 years ago. He watches me open the box, sees the look on my face, and tells me it's a book intervention and to at least try it because we have too many cats in the house if I have to get another book case. I really enjoy my kindle now and that's pretty much all I use.

On the subject of SENDING paperback ARCs, it's not really something I personally do right now. I'm in the middle of remodeling my house and there's just too much stuff that needs to be installed lying around for me to keep paperbacks on hand to send them out. I only send out ebooks for ARCs.

HOWEVER, this entire situation reminds me of when I was a child. My grandmother did accounting work for a bookstore. This was before the internet, before ebay, before cat memes, before windows, hell, it may have been before MSDOS for a little while. This bookstore carried everything from classics to Stephen King. I don't know how they got their books then. They are still open and I don't know how they get them now or if this is still a thing.

When they wanted to pull a book from the shelf, either for an updated cover or to make room for a new release, they would let employees take bags of them home. My grandmother would call and tell me she had books if I wanted to pick some. BUT, even then, before the internet and internet marketplaces, they didn't want people reselling the books for money. SO the books I went through had various levels of defacement BY A BOOKSTORE. Sometimes, it was the front cover ripped clean off, a marker taken to the entire front chapter, sometimes it was also the back cover ripped off so I couldn't read a blurb when I was picking books.

I understood why this was done after my father and grandmother explained this to me WHEN I WAS 8. I still have some of these books with ripped off front covers on my book case. Bookstores and publishers didn't want you selling an author's work that you got for free in a early 80's and they were willing to deface books to make sure that you couldn't.

SO, unless people want to start getting defaced paperbacks since we can't watermark them like we do ebooks or you want an outright refusal for ARC's in that format, stop trying to turn a profit off someone who's barely making one as it is. I RARELY sell paperbacks. Most of my sales come from ebooks. If you get a paperback ARC for free, it's because the author BOUGHT AND PAID for the proof, used gas in their car to drive to the post office, and paid to ship to to you, all with the understanding that you would leave an honest review when you were done.

I'm pretty much given the option of this or his anus when it comes to my mouse. If he's not disturbing the mouse, he's trying to fit 14lbs of ginger fabulousness in my tiny lap that can't hold all of him. It generally results in him half on my lap, half on the keyboard inserting gibberish. Or, he'll come at me from the side and I have to type with my arm over his head or he bites me.

BUT HE'S MINE AND I LOVE HIM, DAMNIT

So, I'm hard at work on a sequel to Flash-A Death Story. That book takes place in Chicago, but I needed a setting, remote, creepy, hard to get to, and only a few people know about.

What perfect places than my old haunts as an art student at LSU? The painting students have their studios in a very old building along with ceramics and sculpture. We essentially worked in an old foundry with flaking lead paint, asbestos, broken windows, one fan in the corner for ventilation, and no heating and air conditioning systems in the southern heat.

What's even more interesting about the building other than the brutal conditions they expect the art students to work in is that there is a hidden 4th floor. The staircase goes up 3 floors, but if you find the hidden ladder and climb it, you can get to an entire deserted 4th floor with dust everywhere and random graffiti. No one knows what it was meant for or why the stairs don't go there.

There is also a tunnel system underneath campus. One of the entrances to the tunnel system is at the art building. The tunnels were meant to have steam pipes and the like, but now they are just creepy and have random graffiti where people have broken in.

I've also taken ballet classes at the fieldhouse looking out the window at the deserted Huey P Long pool. I've also done an installation art piece there as part of one of my art classes. At the time, it was one of the biggest pools in the country, had raquetball studios, and the ballet studio I was in had all sorts of arches and was a ballroom.

The pool is now in worse condition than the art building. The pool has been drained and forgotten about. Almost every surface is covered is dirt and graffiti if you know the secret way in (I do). All of the gates and entrances are padlocked shut, but there's one secret way to get in if you have the know how. You just have to make sure you can actually get out once you've gotten in.

So, I've got those three locations. The secret 4th floor, the tunnels, and an abandoned pool that I have people waking up in a blackout in and murders happening in on of the raquetball courts.

Right in front of the fieldhouse buildings are two Indian mounds from the middle Archaic period. No one knows much about them except they are there and they are not burial sites. The Indian mounds are right across from the field house and a few buildings away from the art building.

I've come up with a symbol that ties every single on of these locations together, but I haven't exactly gotten to the point that I know what it means and all the pieces are in place. I sit down with a basic idea and just write as the ideas come. It will come eventually, its just not there yet