D.H. Jonathan's Blog

As of yesterday, November 27, 2024, my 2019 novel Life Models is available as an audiobook on Audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/Life-Models-Audiobook/B0DP5J999S

I am happy to announce that all four of my novels are now available on Audible. To get any or all of those four novels, my author page there is at https://www.audible.com/author/D-H-Jonathan/B01J4GHF1W

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Here are handy links to all four of my books…

The audiobook edition of The Girl Who Stopped Wearing Clothes is now live on Audible and Amazon. Thank you to Amy McGhee for doing such a wonderful job reading it.

I am very happy to report that The Tattoo Collector is now available in an audiobook edition on both Amazon and Audible, narrated by the wonderful Lara Terco. And for those waiting for an audio edition of The Girl Who Stopped Wearing Clothes, that one is currently in production. In the meantime, check out The Tattoo Collector.

Today is the day! The Tattoo Collector is now available in Kindle and paperback editions. Get it now at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQZ33C9F

And here it is, the cover of my next novel, a thriller about a guy who has vision-like nightmares that he’s killing young women. The story also involves his wife and an FBI agent. The cover was designed by Paramita Bhattacharjee. Check out her website at www.creativeparamita.com for other examples of her work.

The Tattoo Collector will be released in paperback and Kindle editions on February 6, 2024. Preorder the Kindle edition here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQZ33C9F

My next novel, a thriller, will be released on February 6, 2024. I’ll be revealing the cover tomorrow, and the book should be open for pre-orders not long after that. Stay tuned…

I attended the DFW Writers Conference this past weekend and had an absolutely wonderful time. The weekend started with a pre-conference mixer on Friday evening, open only to members of the DFW Writers Workshop and the agents and editors who had been invited to the conference. I’m not normally comfortable in such social settings, but I did manage to have several great conversations with my fellow DFWWW members and with a few agents and editors.

I had recently finished the second draft of my murder thriller, the title of which I have changed from Nightmare Killer to The Tattoo Collector (although that new title is also subject to change). I did sign up to pitch that novel to an agent as well as talk about the new memoir I just started writing, which will be called something like Nude : My 40 Years as an Art Model. My pitch session was scheduled for Sunday morning, so I spent Saturday networking, going to classes, and listening to a lunchtime interview with our first keynote speaker Dave Eggers. My favorite of those classes was called “DROP THE PEN!: What Every Writer Should Know About Real Police Work” which was presented with style by David L. Williams.

After the lunchtime keynote address, I was one of eleven raffle winners who got a ten minute one-on-one consultation with bestselling author Dave Eggers. He and I had a fantastic conversation about the memoir I just started and about art modeling in general. Dave had gone to art school and still regularly attends figure drawing sessions.

My pitch session on Sunday morning went well. The agent requested that I send her part of the novel, which I intend to do once I’ve decompressed from the conference. The keynote speaker at lunch on Sunday was author and actress Evangeline Lilly who is probably best known for her roles in Marvel’s Ant-Man movies, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films, and the TV show Lost but is also the author of a series of children’s books called The Squickerwonkers. My granddaughter’s sixth birthday was two days after the conference, so I bought her a set of those books for Evangeline to sign. I also managed to get a photo with Evangeline who was a delight to have at the conference. She was there for the whole thing, attending classes and other events. She certainly didn’t act like movie star that weekend; she was one of us.

So many people at the DFW Writers Workshop put their heart and soul into the conference, especially Brooke Fosse and Brian Tracey and a whole bunch of volunteers. This was my first writers conference since 2015, but I’m already looking forward to the 2024 event.

According to my Facebook memories, I started writing what will be my next novel, now called Nightmare Killer (but was titled Evil Dreams then) four years ago on July 20, 2019. A photo with the first sentence (which has been greatly altered now) accompanied that post. July 20, 2019 was also the day before my novel Life Models was released. Since that time, I wrote pretty much all of The Girl Who Stopped Wearing Clothes which was published this past October. But I also kept up with working on Nightmare Killer.

The first draft of Nightmare Killer was completed early this year, and I am heavily into rewrites, revisions, and edits now. I’ve read a few chapters to critique groups at the Dallas Fort Worth Writers Workshop and have received some good and not-so-good suggestions. Here is the general premise of Nightmare Killer:

Donald White, a somewhat typical IT guy, is plagued every few weeks by vivid dreams in which he rapes and murders young women. He and his wife deal with these dreams privately until Donald recognized a murder victim on the news as one of the girls in his most recent nightmare and begins to question whether or not they are just dreams or something more.

I hope to have Nightmare Killer edited and polished by the October DFW Writers Conference.

I took some time today to visit Daum Gallery in Dallas. Once there, I was finally able to see the painting “Persistence” by Jess Tedder in person. I had previously only seen photographs of it on Instagram, but that had still been enough to prompt me to inquire about licensing an image of it for the cover of my latest novel The Girl Who Stopped Wearing Clothes. Seeing the real thing up close, the scale of it, the brush strokes, and the level of detail was definitely worth the trip.

I met Jess when she was an undergraduate art student at the University of Texas at Arlington a few years ago. I was the model for several meetings of her life drawing class over the course of two semesters, and her drawings of me always stood out. I wound up following her on Instagram, and when I saw this painting there in 2022, I immediately thought it would make for a great cover of my current novel. Thankfully, she was more than agreeable to the terms I offered, and I couldn’t be happier with how that front cover looks. Check out Jess’s amazing artwork at her Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/thejesstedder/.