Debut Author Interview: Jennifer Gruenke and Of Silver and Shadow Giveaway and IWSG Post

Happy Wednesday Everyone! Today I’m excited to debut author Jennifer here to share about her YA fantasy OF SILVER AND SHADOW. It sounds like a fast-paced fantasy with a unique magical system. It’s gotten great reviews, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

Here’s a blurb of Jennifer’s book on Goodreads:

Ren Kolins is a silver wielder—a dangerous thing to be in the kingdom of Erdis, where magic has been outlawed for a century. Ren is just trying to survive, sticking to a life of petty thievery, card games, and pit fighting to get by. But when a wealthy rebel leader discovers her secret, he offers her a fortune to join his revolution. The caveat: she won’t see a single coin until they overthrow the King.

Behind the castle walls, a brutal group of warriors known as the King’s Children is engaged in a competition: the first to find the rebel leader will be made King’s Fang, the right hand of the King of Erdis. And Adley Farre is hunting down the rebels one by one, torturing her way to Ren and the rebel leader, and the coveted King’s Fang title.

But time is running out for all of them, including the youngest Prince of Erdis, who finds himself pulled into the rebellion. Political tensions have reached a boiling point, and Ren and the rebels must take the throne before war breaks out. 

IWSG Post and In Loving Memory of Josephine “Jo” Wake Post

Before I get to my interview with Jennifer, I have my IWSG post and In Loving Memory of Josephine “Jo” Wake Post.

Posting: The first Wednesday is officially Insecure Writer's Support Group Day.

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

The awesome co-hosts for the December 2 posting of the IWSG are  Louise - Fundy Blue, Jennifer Lane, Mary Aalgaard, Patsy Collins at Womagwriter, and Nancy Gideon!

Optional Question: Blogging is often more than just sharing stories. It’s often the start of special friendships and relationships. Have you made any friends through the blogosphere?

Yes, one of the reasons I enjoy blogging is the friendships I have made over the years. Many of them are in this group. Although we live far from each other and cannot see each other in person, we are all so supportive of each other, which is the heart of friendship.

I have appreciated your support during my very hard times in my life, like when my husband suddenly died. I always try to be supportive too when I see someone going through a hard time. And I try to help shout out about everyone’s new book releases in my Follower News so that I can help as many of my friends as possible.

I’m also participating in the blog hop to remember Josephine “Jo” Wake. I did not know Jo, but like Nicole Wallace says every weekday on MSNBC news, it is important to "remember lives well lived". 

Here’s my simple recipe in honor of Jo.

Tostados

Tostados was always a quick, healthy meal we ate when my husband was alive. To be honest, I only

recently started making them again recently.

 Preheat the oven to 450 degrees

 Ingredients

Tostado shells (You can buy at a Mexican store or some supermarkets.)
Refried beans (Homemade or canned)
Shredded cheese
Chopped lettuce
Chopped tomatoes
Salsa

Heat the refried beans. Spread a layer of bean on the tostado shell and sprinkle on shredded cheese to taste. Heat them in the oven for approximately 3 minutes or until the cheese is melted. Top with the lettuce, tomatoes, and salsa. You can add other toppings, like sliced avocado, if you like.

Interview With Jennifer Gruenke

Hi Jennifer! Thanks so much for joining us.

1.      Tell us about yourself and how you became a writer.

I’ve been writing “seriously” (as in, with the intent to become published) for about five years, but like a lot of authors, I started writing at a fairly young age. I was twelve when I first thought to myself, I’d like to write a book, and set out to do just that. I couldn’t tell you a thing about that story. I don’t remember the concept, the main character, or even the setting. I don’t think I made it more than a chapter or two before abandoning what was sure to be a noble but atrocious attempt at a first novel. A strange fantasy story about a girl with purple eyes came next, when I was about fifteen or sixteen. That was similarly set aside to collect dust and eventually wither away to nothing.

I attended college at UC Santa Barbara where I studied Communication and Professional Writing. During these four years I sidelined my attempts at creative writing, setting aside thoughts of becoming an author for shiny and distracting new things. It wasn’t until I’d graduated and moved back home to live with my parents that I returned to the idea of creative writing. This was in part thanks to a good friend who was working on her own novel. Her passion for her work inspired me to try my hand at telling stories once again. It’s also worth noting that I was living in a very small town where there was little in the way of a social scene; outside of my day job as a journalist, I had more free time than I knew what to do with. I started putting words on the page again, and everything fell into place. Nothing had ever made me feel so fulfilled. This time, storytelling stuck.

 2. That’s so cool that you have a good friend who was working on a novel too. Where did you get the idea for OF SILVER AND SHADOW?

OF SILVER AND SHADOW was born from my first completed book, a YA sci-fi story that will never see the light of day because it really was that bad, though the draft does still exist on my computer (don’t tell the hackers). Most writers will agree that there are no wasted words, that everything we put on the page teaches us something, and while I absolutely agree with this sentiment, I can’t help my full-body cringe when I think about the fact that at one point I truly believed it was good. But I digress.

 After a month or two of distance from that doomed novel, I came to realize it was never going to be published. So I asked myself what the concept would look like in a fantasy setting. That was the initial inkling, which I grabbed like a baton and took off sprinting. OF SILVER AND SHADOW has changed drastically since then, so much so that you’d never recognize my first novel in its pages. The bones of that story were whittled down to slivers before being extracted completely.

You may notice I haven’t revealed the concept behind that first novel. I assure you, this is intentional. I plan to go to the grave with my embarrassment.

 3. It’s good to know that there is hope for our doomed stories. I may have one too. One of the comments that reviewers made is that you have a unique magical system. What was your world building process like?

I’m always pleasantly surprised when a reader enjoys my world building, because it’s really not my

strong point. I like to do what I’m going to call micro-level world building (this might be an actual term, but I haven’t looked it up), where I build out the immediate world, focusing heavily on the senses. How is the city laid out? What does it smell like? What do people wear? Is there a lot of foot traffic? What about music? What do the buildings look like?

I’m an extremely visual person and I relish breathing life into settings. I hope readers can picture themselves walking along the cobbled streets on Denfell, breathing in salty air touched by a scent of cake floating from the open doors of Noble Finch. Macro-level world building (international relations, religions, rules to magic) doesn’t come quite so easily to me.

As a result, the magic in this world, called silver, is very visual. I originally pictured it as a magic based around illusion, but as I began to write the story it just wasn’t clicking. One day I went to see the Avengers. I was sitting in the theater watching the Scarlet Witch in all her badass glory, and I thought to myself, What if the magic in my story looked something like this? Silver was born in that moment. The rules of magic, limits and the things it could do, all came later. In the beginning, my main goal was very simple: I want this to look cool.

4. It also sounds like your book is a real page-turner. How did you plot it out?

This may or may not come as a surprise, but I am not a plotter. I find plotting to be a bit of a headache. It’s a necessary evil, especially when you’ve got four characters whose individual stories are eventually going to collide, and even more so when every single one of them is keeping vital information from the other, but I don’t plot unless forced. I write by discovery, following threads as they come and letting the characters lead me down roads I didn’t know existed. The tightening of the plot and pacing comes during revisions.

As for creating a page-turner, I’m drawn to books with crisp pacing, so I naturally try not to dawdle in my own writing. Each scene needs to accomplish something that carries the characters forward, the quicker the better. One of my goals is to end each chapter on a note of anticipation. This doesn’t necessarily need to be a cliffhanger, but I like to leave readers with the sense that something new waits around the corner and you’ll find out what if you keeping reading—just one more chapter. Mood and tone play a huge part.

5. I’m not a super plotter either and like to discover my story like you. Share a bit about your main character, Ren. Did anything surprise you about her as you wrote her story?

Ren started off as a very different person than who she ended up being. Writing the beginning of OF SILVER AND SHADOW was a bit like performing an excavation as a naive archeologist with a notebook full of misconceived notions about my dig site. During the first ten-thousand words I attempted to write a quiet Ren, a submissive Ren, a girl with an attitude to be sure, but an attitude she kept in check. It just felt wrong. As I wrote her initial interactions with her compatriots, this brash, mean, impulsive girl kept trying to come out. I repeatedly attempted to slap duct tape over her mouth, because the character she wanted to be didn’t fit with this idea I had in my head, but eventually Ren got her way, as she usually does.

Ren also started off on a much higher moral ground than where she stands in the published book. In the original beginning, the rebellion was able to appeal to her sense of compassion in order to convince her to join their cause. Ren became even more compelling to me when I realized she was considerably more interested in money than doing the right thing.

Once I scrapped the Ren I was trying to force into being and embraced the character she truly was, the story took off. Ren is far more selfish, sarcastic, and mean-spirited than I’d expected. I’d go as far as to call her downright cruel in her worst moments. Exploring the why of her character, her deep grief and sense of shame and the self-hatred that festered as a result, was one of my favorite parts of writing this story. In a way, I think Ren might have written herself more than I ever did. I just put the things she was telling me on page.

6. Your agent is Hilary Harwell. How did she become your agent and what was your road to publication like?

I connected with Hilary during PitMad, which is a Twitter pitch contest. When people say success in publishing is partially due to timing, they’re not kidding. I had started querying OF SILVER AND SHADOW not even a week before PitMad. I wasn’t entrenched in the publishing world at the time and I didn’t even know what PitMad was, but a friend texted me the morning of the event to tell me about it. I threw together three pitches in a panic, posted them on Twitter, and crossed my fingers. Hilary, who’d been an assistant at KT Literary for a couple of years, had just started taking on clients of her own and was specifically looking for a dark and gritty YA fantasy. She liked my pitch, I did my research (always do your research), thought she would make a great fit, and sent off a query.

Looking back, I know OF SILVER AND SHADOW wasn’t where it needed to be and I’ll always be grateful to Hilary for seeing its potential. She offered me an R&R (revise and resubmit) and gave me some notes. If I revised the parts of the book she didn’t think were working, she would take another look. Her notes resonated with me, I knew the book would be better for it, so I accepted. I revised over the course of about three months, sent the revised manuscript back to Hilary, and got The Call a couple months later. I officially had an agent. I was lucky in that it was a relatively painless process. Submission, not so much.

After three rounds of edits with Hilary, we took OF SILVER AND SHADOW out on submission, which is the process of pitching the book to editors in the hope someone will want to buy it. Submission is the land of dread, cautious hope, and incessant inbox refreshing. We went through three rounds of sub over the course of a year before the offer from Flux came in. I received rejections full of compliments about my writing, all concluding with some variation of “I loved this but not enough,” which was both lovely and awful at the same time.

And just when I started to give up hope, we sold to Flux. My editor, Kelsy Thompson, was an absolute dream to work with. She is brilliant and sharp. OF SILVER AND SHADOW is the book it is because of her and because of Hilary. I wouldn’t trade either of them for all the salted caramel brownies in the world.

7. What a cool road to publication story. Your publication date was changed due to the coronavirus. Share how that happened and how the virus has affected your book release celebration and marketing strategy.

I got an email from Flux on a late March morning stating that they were pushing OF SILVER AND SHADOW’s publication date from May 26, 2020 to February 16, 2021. The change would give the book its best chance at success. It was a tough blow for me, learning that I had to wait nearly a year for a book I thought I’d see on shelves in two months. But we all made the best of it, refocusing our marking efforts and getting into the swing of the “new normal.” We’ve been able to utilize that initial excitement by reaching out to early readers who loved the book to do a second round of promotion. I was worried that people who cared about the book a year ago wouldn’t still care today, but I haven’t found that to be true. Readers are a passionate, lovely, wildly supportive bunch, and I’ve been tagged in a number of posts reminding people to pick up OF SILVER AND SHADOW when it comes out.

The biggest positive about releasing a book in a space that has gone completely virtual is that events are way more accessible now. While I was looking forward to celebrating the release of my debut novel with friends at an in-person launch party, so many people who couldn’t have made it before can come now.

For those interested, Main Street Books Davidson (mainstreetbooksdavidson.com) is hosting the launch party and signed copies are available through them.

8. It must have been hard to have to wait so long, but it’s great that you have a team helping keep up the excitement for your book. What have you done to increase your social media platform since you signed your book contract? What advice do you have for other debut authors?

It’s a common myth that authors need to have a big social media platform in order to be successful. Not true at all. A social platform rarely correlates to success. I like being on social media in order to interact with readers. Instagram is also a creative outlet for me (fun fact: I was a bookstagrammer in a past life), but social media isn’t something I do because I feel I have to. I’m online because I genuinely enjoy being there.

As far as increasing your platform, giveaways are a good way to get yourself noticed while doing something nice to thank the community for their support. But the best thing you can do is embrace authenticity. Find the thing that brings you joy, whether that’s writing a newsletter or taking photos for Instagram, and lean into that. Don’t feel like you have to be everywhere at once. It’s better to put your effort into the one thing that works for you than to spread yourself thin. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, not only will others be able to tell, but it’ll bring unnecessary stress into your life. If you don’t like Twitter, you don’t have to be there.

9. What are you working on now?

I can’t tell you much because the book hasn’t sold yet—it’s not even finished—but it’s both the most challenging and most self-indulgent thing I’ve ever written. I’m incredibly excited at the prospect of seeing it in the world one day. It’s going to be years, but I think it’ll be worth the wait.

Here’s a tease: it might involve Death, a heist, and a starlit city. That’s all I’m going to say.

Thanks for sharing all your advice, Jennifer. You can find Jennifer at jenngruenke.com, and @jenngruenke on Twitter and Instagram.

Giveaway Details

Jennifer has generously offered an ARC of Of Silver and Shadow for a giveaway. To enter, all you need to do is be a follower of my blog (via the follower gadget, email, or bloglovin’ on the right sidebar) and leave a comment by February 20th. If your e-mail is not on your Google Profile, you must leave it in the comments to enter the contest. Please be sure I have your email address.

If you mention this contest on Twitter, Facebook, or your blog and/or follow me on Twitter, mention this in the comments and I'll give you an extra entry for each. You must be 13 years old or older to enter. This giveaway is U.S. 

Upcoming Interviews and Giveaways

Monday, February 8th I have an interview with debut author Kristy Boyce and a giveaway of her YA contemporary Hot British Boyfriend

Wednesday, February 10th I have an agent spotlight interview with Abigail Frank and a query critique giveaway

Monday, February 15th I have an interview with debut author Emily Victoria and a giveaway of her YA fantasy This Golden Flame

Tuesday, February 16th I’m participating in the Wish Big Giveaway Hop

Wednesday, February 17th I have an agent spotlight interview with Pam Gruber and a query critique giveaway

Monday, February 22th I have a guest post by debut author Sam Taylor and her agent Allison Hellegers and a giveaway of Sam’s YA fantasy We Are the Fire and a query critique giveaway by Allison

Hope to see you on Monday!