Jane-Holly Meissner's Blog

Soon Fae Child will be in your hands. The culmination of a four year project, constrained by paper and forced into physical form. You created it, nurtured it along, babied it and disciplined it, and now it’s ready to go out into the world.

Once it is in the hands of others, you have to let it go. That piece of your soul that you put into the words? It’ll always be there, and that makes you vulnerable. You may wish to pull it back. To keep it close, rather than give it to the world.

But that is what makes it uniquely yours, and what gives the book its life. So, tomorrow, release it freely. Enjoy the moment. Ignore the haters. Try not to worry about sales, or marketing, or any of that noise.

Tomorrow it will be out of your hands, and into theirs.

And that’s how it should be.

I’m so excited and pleased to announce the #RandomThingsTours Blog Tour is kicking off today with @pscottwriter at the Book Lovers Boudoir! A big thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Through My Letterbox for organizing the tour, and thank you to all the bloggers taking part!

The Book Lover's Boudoir

When eight-year-old Abbie Brown discovers a quiet pool of water while wandering through the woods behind her Oregon home, she wades out into it and discovers she’s not alone. A wild-haired boy in green stares at her from the other side of the water. Mesmerized, Abbie reaches down to him and is yanked underwater.

She emerges on the other side as an unwelcome visitor to the Otherworld, the land of the Fae, with only the boy Foster to guide her. Back in Oregon, a changeling lookalike has taken her place, bonding with her mother while her father, hiding a secret of his own, views the “girl” with suspicion.

In the courts of the Fae a truce has long been in place between Winter and Summer. What havoc might a human child wreak in the careful machinations of beings older than time? And to what lengths will Abbie’s father go to…

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my best friend’s former boyfriend’s roomate’s sister’s goldfish died. I had to attend the funeral.

my dog ate my homework.

I ate my dog’s homework.

I had a severe case of meningitis over the weekend.

my dog ate all my clothes.

your lectures were too long and my notes too short.

my dog ate all my notes.

my notes got soaked in the rain.

the rain got water in my ears, which affected my balance and I was walking into walls all weekend.

the walls are closing in on me! I can’t breathe! [fall to ground and fake death]

I was on a secret spy mission for the CIA. Now I have to kill you…unless you give me an A.

um…my goldfish fell into my printer and ruined it.

Y2K

(I told you this was written a long time ago)

I was held captive by an underground militia group for three days.

my brother shot my computer.

my computer ate my homework.

I ate some bad Taco Bell and was having my stomach pumped.

the gas station pumped water into my gas tank.

my car exploded.

a cow fell on me.

I had amnesia for 5 days.

someone cast a spell on me and I was a cat all of last week.

I choked on a gummy worm and almost died.

I had quintuple bypass surgery over the weekend.

I was helping my sister move and I got stuck behind the fridge.

my refridgerator was on the fritz and froze my house, including all my notebooks.

I love reading, and as a mom it has been a lot of fun to read to my children. My father used to read to us when I was a kid and it is a treasured memory that I am happy to be able to pass down to my kids.

I might not throw the greatest birthday parties, or have the best planned activities (thanks ADHD brain), but I am able to open the world of books to them. I’ve been reading to them before bed almost every night for about three years now.

We’ve made it through the Harry Potter series (and the movies!) and the Artemis Fowl books, and are now working our way through Percy Jackson and the Olympians (we’re on book 3). I even read them the second draft of Fae Child (they approved)!

And hey, it’s also really good at getting that one kid who is SO TIRED but can’t sleep (because they keep getting out of bed to whine how not tired they are) to just LAY STILL for two minutes so their body can pass out. You know the one.

Anyway, it’s a great thing, and everyone should do it. Picture books with your babies are great, but CHAPTER BOOKS with your tweens are awesome. Drop some series suggestions in the comments, I’m always on the prowl for more to add to the pile.

Fae Child is not a traditional YA (whatever that means), because the protagonist is very young (8). However, the dual POV style I wrote it in means that for a chunk of the narrative we are following her adult father and his trials as he tries to find his daughter.

I think I was influenced by the Louis L’amour book “Down the Long Hills” which splits the narrative between two young pioneer children who are trying to find safety and survive in the wild, and the adult Native American who is tracking them. My father read us almost all the Louis L’amour books when we were kids/teens and this was one of my favorites. Having a child be a main character in a book meant for adults has always been fascinating to me.

That being said, I’m aware Fae Child is written very tamely and I think you should be perfectly safe to read it to your kids or allow them to read it on their own. And it’s short! Still a novel, though—I checked.

I am marketing Fae Child as YA because I split the difference between the adult and child POVs. Perhaps it fits as Middle Grade, but there are adult themes in it, as well as a body-copying, possibly mom-killing entity.

I hope Fae Child finds its readers, and that they love it. Maybe that is you? Enjoy! And stay tuned for Abbie’s continuing adventure in the sequel “The Furious Host.”

If you preorder Fae Child you can enter my giveaway for a new Kindle Paperwhite and some of my favorite ebooks! Click here for details: bit.ly/37nDMlP

Fae Child publishes in less than a month, and I am already nearly done with drafting the sequel, The Furious Host. Inkshares, my publisher, is running a contest for the end of 2020 and I have entered book two into it!

Eight years after returning from the Otherworld Abbie Brown has to go back, this time on purpose, when her parents go missing.

The Furious Host

I crowdfunded Fae Child, as most of you are probably aware, through Inkshares’ crowdfunding platform, but the newest contest does not require individual preorders in order to secure publishing. I think Inkshares may be pivoting away from purely crowdfunding, while also keeping that option open for authors, but that is just conjecture.

Regardless, this contest is driven by reader engagement (shares, links back, clicks, and page reads) as well as what stories Inkshares is interested in. Please click here: bit.ly/thefurioushost and follow the story. There ARE minimal Fae Child spoilers on the project page, but I tried to keep things vague.

So, click around but don’t read anything, haha! You may also preorder the book — if I don’t win publishing I’ll end the preorder phase and you will be refunded. I won’t be pushing for preorders like I did for Fae Child, and am just leaving it as an option for you to show your interest and support.

Thank you for your time and support, I appreciate you!

A long, narrow way, typically having walls either side, that allows access between buildings or to different rooms within a building.

When you hear the word ‘passageway’ you may think of a hallway. You have one in your home: a space that is in-between. Neither here, nor there. You don’t sit down and hang out in a hallway, you travel through it into other rooms. It is what referred to as a ‘liminal space,’ a threshold between two realities.

In this case, a threshold between the room you left and the room you’re going to. Another example of a liminal space is the airport. You don’t hang out in the airport on purpose, you travel through it in order to go from one destination to another.

In the same way the upcoming Passageways anthology is a hallway between different worlds. One of those doors opens to the universe of The Fae Child Trilogy, to a short story that I have written to give you a taste of what you can experience in my full-length book. Once you step out of my story you will find another door open to you, perhaps the one into the universe of The Faoii Chronicles (pronounced “fa-YEE”). Written by the very talented Tahani Nelson, her story will transport you into a world of warrior women and magic.

Another few doors might take you into the science fiction realms of Evan Graham, or S. E. Soldwedel, or to Susan Hamilton’s urban fantasy universe. The beauty of Passageways is that you don’t have to only travel from one place to another, you can go to all of the different destinations that are connected through this liminal literary space.

Once you get a feel for each writer’s style and book series, you can move more fully into their ‘universe’ and read their full-length novels. I am very happy to have been invited to take part in the inaugural edition of Passageways, and I hope you will pick up a copy once it is published at the end of the year.

Fifty days until my first full-length novel is published.

It’s ‘only’ 55,000 words. It is not a novella, it is a novel. I checked.

You have to have somewhere to go when you start writing sequels and the length bloats up! Or something like that. Fact is I wrote what I wanted to write, and it is fairly compact. I like to think I put a lot of story into a smaller space. I put a lot of WORK into it, for sure.

Early reviews are coming in. I promise myself I’m not going to look at them, and then I do. Sometimes I’m happy about it, and other times I’m not. You can’t please them all!

But seriously, I’m not going to look at the reviews anymore.

I’m going to do NaNoWriMo again, working on the same thing I did last November. The Furious Host, the Fae Child sequel! I should get it finished for sure. I really want to get it moving toward publication as soon as possible, which, funnily enough, means I need to finish writing it.

It’s really good. You’re going to enjoy it.

FIRST, however, you need to read Fae Child.

And it’s coming out in fifty days.

I have been writing choose-your-own-adventure type stories on a well-known message board for longer than I’d like to admit. (Mainly because they’re still ongoing and I haven’t managed to finish one yet!) The current political climate/global pandemic has been a muse killer, and I haven’t been writing much.

Of course, I’ve edited Fae Child and done a lot of ‘marketing’ for its release. Which is to say, I’ve done a lot of staring at my laptop and pretending I know what I’m doing. And yet, regardless of all that, I wish to always be creating NEW stories. It’s the spark for creating something new out of the ether that has been hard to grasp lately, so I have been dipping my toes into the creative water, so to speak.

Writing something new, and yet familiar. Something collaborative (with the ‘players’ who read along on the message board and vote on options at different points in the story), and with an ENDPOINT so I don’t just ramble on for a year or so.

And so, Adventures in Winter was created, a story set in the Fae Child universe. And you can read the results on my Ko-Fi! I will be posting the story of Treadle, a Winter fairy/pixie who has more bravado than brains and is on an EPIC QUEST to find their kinfolk, Pan, and possibly recover a long lost magical item. Will they succeed? Will they die?! It’s up in the air at this point.

Follow along on Ko-Fi, and I hope you enjoy.

Since starting the editorial process in June, I have been waiting for a concrete date that I could point to and say, “This is when you can hold the book in your hands.” My publisher was hoping for a Fall 2020 release, but with the global COVID-19 pandemic currently wrecking the United States (and the world, to a lesser degree), they were having to figure out their publishing process all over again.

Well! Everything is settled now, at least as far as FAE CHILD’s release date is concerned. December 15th is the big day, and I couldn’t be more pleased. I am trying to figure out all the things I need to do to make this launch as good as I can.

I have already submitted the ARC to several review sites, so hopefully it gets picked up. My launch team has their ARCs and are busily reading, and FAE CHILD has a Goodreads page! Yes, really! You can head over to your Goodreads account, if you have one, and add FAE CHILD to your “To Read” list.

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In other, related, news, I am writing a short story set in the same universe as FAE CHILD that will be in a brand new anthology. PASSAGEWAYS will feature works from several up-and-coming authors, aimed at giving a glimpse at their unique literary worlds.

And by writing it, I mean I should be finishing it up right now but instead I’m updating my blog. I better go and get to work.