Artist, Writer & Wild West Woman
Thursday, 15 February 2024
JO. B. CREATIVE!: SO...BUILDING MY AUTHOR PERSONA... WHAT FUN!
JO. B. CREATIVE!: SO...BUILDING MY AUTHOR PERSONA... WHAT FUN!: SO... BUILDING MY AUTHOR PERSONA... (THERE'S AN AWFUL LOT OF IT...) (the font is a bit tongue-in-cheek because this is not nece...
SO...BUILDING MY AUTHOR PERSONA... WHAT FUN!
SO... BUILDING MY AUTHOR PERSONA...
(THERE'S AN AWFUL LOT OF IT...)
(the font is a bit tongue-in-cheek
because this is not necessarily all about westerns!)
In order to sell books, it's pretty important to also build an author persona so that readers have a good idea of the person who's actually written this angst-ridden, colourful or otherwise tale of misfortune and triumph or otherwise, and perhaps get into the mind of the author (God forbid...😱 ?!). Okay, I thought, this could be fun, cuz I'm always writing about what I get up to as an aspirational renaissance soul/multidisciplinary artist anyway. Here's the link to my post Howdy Folks - I'm Blowing My Trumpet! .
(Much of this is taken from that).
I was born in 1953. In the May of that year, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest. I was a mere twinkle in my mother's eye at the time. That counts, doesn't it? I was also there when Princess Elizabeth passed my mother and my granny (Kit) in her coronation coach on her way to Westminster Abbey in the June of that year. At least, I was there in foetal form. That counts as well, doesn't it? I popped out in October.
AS JO BALLANTYNE, - ARTIST
I was born with a paint brush and a 4B pencil tucked behind my ear. I worked as a graphic artist and exhibited and sold art. Hubby maintains that I'm either genius or rubbish. The latter occurs when I'm experimenting and making a pig's ear of it.
My art was pretty conventional in my youth, although I liked different media. I used oils and pencils but settled on acrylics, gouache, pastels and collage or anything else that takes my fancy such as old tea bags (you neve know). I drew faces and characters, painted sixties psychedelia, abstracts and still lives, created clay and wood sculptures. I've since acquired a strong desire to be multidisciplinary, using a variety of media and disciplines. Whatever floats my boat and lights my candle. I read about an artist who's styles look like they've been created by ten different people. Sounds great! Even that can be marketed using the right approach.
AS A NON-FICTION WRITER
My published anecdotal articles and cartoons started after I began considering actually writing my novel Alias Jeannie Delaney, and are a complete contrast to that raw, in-depth saga. I created an anthology, Musings of a Butterfly Brain, consisting of many of those articles, but I never felt it was good enough to self-publish. Recently, however, with a refreshed eye, I decided that I would polish it and, indeed, self-publish eventually. Both this and my art are a future distraction from the intensity of what is now my epic western trilogy.
AS KIT MACKENZIE,
Western Author...
Last summer I self-published the first book of my epic western trilogy Alias Jeannie Delaney - Book 1 - Go West, Girl! on
Amazon. I'd worked on it sporadically for over thirty years
(you read that right), through parenthood and various other neurosis. Before publication, my editor read it and loved it - my story was thus endorsed for the first time by a professional! 😀
AS KITTY LE ROY ,
Wild Western Woman...
Before I conjured up Jeannie, during my teens a deep desire to dress western gathered pace, including fringed buckskins and western weapons, and now I do. Dodgy, huh? I'd take pot shots at empty cat food tins - ding! - with my Dad's air rifle from an open window. Dad called me Annie Oakley. Fabulous!
As a teen I grew fascinated by the wild west, particularly the parts played by the women who thrived in male roles. I was miffed at the lack of decent female role models in westerns during the sixties. Women were never the fastest gun, so, at night, before going to sleep, I visualized Jeannie Morgan, a cowgirl who was the fastest gun in the west. She
also became a great lover to both sexes. Don't blame me for that. It
just happened in my head. That's being a hormone ridden creative for
you! She starred in my own traditional western novel. By traditional I mean every scenario you'd expect in your usual western. The novel I'd always wanted to read and which I eventually wrote because no-one else had.
AS A RENAISSANCE SOUL / EXPLORER
Leonardo Da Vinci is a hero of mine. He was a scanner, a polymath, a multi-potentialite, a multi-passionate... Whaaa...?
A person with umpteen zillion interests, that's what, and I'm one of 'em.
I learned to fly straight and level when I was seventeen. I'd always wanted to fly. A newspaper photo of me in the cockpit was pinned on the school wall, and some bright spark had drawn a moustache on me. A boy asked me 'Why can't you learn to drive like everyone else?' Fair enough. I even had the opportunity some years ago to fly a friend's single engine plane straight and level around the Isle of Wight. Wowsers! I'm so proud of that!
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HERE'S THE PLANE! |
A bona fide travel magazine stated that to be considered a bona fide traveller one needs twenty countries under one's belt.
Tick! 😀 I toured the States twice by Greyhound Bus during the late seventies and, from a distance, witnessed a space rocket take off from Cape Canaveral. Mr. Google informed us recently that that rocket had journeyed to Venus on a research mission. Heavens above! On that trip I ate with the Moonies without realising it, spent a night in a friend's shack in Tombstone Arizona, and spent a night in a hillbilly's ranch. Mine host kept a pistol under his pillow. As ya do. Hubby and I have also visited Iceland and Malaysia - two extremes of climate.
I'm fascinated by the paranormal but shall never go ghost hunting. I was terrified on an Edinburgh night ghost tour and my ghost hunting son took me on a hunt for mother's Day in a local village cemetery and I screamed like a girl and ran.
Family history is fascinating - I'm on a quest to research some history in Canada and California - both ancestors joined gold rushes, and a holiday cabin in Dawson City, the Yukon, belonged to my great uncle.
I'm a decent archer and snorkeller.
We love archaeology, beachcombing and mud-larking (much the same thing, really).
I love wild and tropical gardens. We have three ponds, a waterfall, a fountain, my pioneer cabin and our canoe.
I'd love to cultivate indoor plants. Unfortunately I don't have my mother's green fingers. I look at plants and they die.
I love the history of photography, medical matters & science.
I'm a bit of a yogee. Very flexible.
I walk - fast (mostly...). During the winter I walk around the world courtesy of my treadmill and YouTube.
I was brought up rowing boats and canoeing. We own a narrow boat.
Hubby and I love steampunk and getting togged up in cossies, especially at Halloween!
Multi-passionate folks often feel embarrassed by having so many interests, but I've always felt proud . A little frustrated that I can't pursue them all, but hey - that goes with the territory.
I've now got to post this to my fans. I do have a couple.
Facebook Jo Ballantyne
A charity organisation supporting the LGBTQ+ community.
(I'm supporting Stonewall & they are posting links to Amazon & Alias Jeannie Delaney on their social media posts).
Tuesday, 13 February 2024
JO. B. CREATIVE!: A GRIPPING, KICKASS 19th CENTURY COWGIRL STORY!
JO. B. CREATIVE!: A GRIPPING, KICKASS 19th CENTURY COWGIRL STORY!: A GRIPPING, KICKASS 19th CENTURY COWGIRL STORY! Kindle Unlimited is an extremely useful source of information as regards readers' prog...
Friday, 9 February 2024
A GRIPPING, KICKASS 19th CENTURY COWGIRL STORY!
A GRIPPING, KICKASS 19th CENTURY COWGIRL STORY!
Kindle Unlimited is an extremely useful source of information as regards readers' progress through authors' books. I suppose it's a bit 'Big Bro is watching you', but it's the only means of working out whether or not your reader is actually enjoying your book. It's all guesswork otherwise. In this case, I don't think ignorance is bliss. I'd like to know whether or not my readers are enjoying the writing I poured blood, sweat and tears into over the course of thirty-plus intermittent years.
PA hubby keeps an eye on Kindle, reporting back every day if there's activity and what kind of activity it is. Even I know now, that it's a library system whereby subscribers pay a flat fee to have access to millions of books. The authors of the books the subscribers read are paid a proportion of the fee per page read. I believe. Don't take my word for it. I'm only just getting a handle on this!
Apparently, when readers stumble upon - organically or otherwise - and borrow the first book of my epic western trilogy Alias Jeannie Delaney - Book 1 - Go West, Girl! they steam through it at a rate of knots. Hubby observed that two books have been read in one day, and, in a couple of cases, almost non-stop. That's a lot of pages! Three hundred pages, in fact. So far I've had two hundred and eighteen readers altogether. Is that trying to tell me something? It's clear that when readers who enjoy my kind of story find my book, not only do they enjoy the story, because it's their kind of 'thing', it seems they don't want to put it down!
We put it up for free on Amazon for two days recently in order that selected reviewers could read and review it (authors need reviews!), there followed an apparent 'rush' of a hundred-and-sixty readers downloading the novel over those two days.
Maybe it was the result of promoting the book on a writing acquaintance's blog (Smorgasbord New Book Spotlight – #Western #Women’s Adventure – Go West, Girl!: (Alias Jeannie Delaney Book 1) by Kit MacKenzie ). Maybe it was organic. Whatever. I like it. No, I love it. Who wouldn't?
My story isn't for everyone. No novel is for everyone. But this story in particular is a very niche-y story. Singular. One reviewer, who thoroughly enjoyed it and gave it five stars, said it was unique. Thank you so much! It won't appeal, I think, to conventional readers. My female hero, Jeannie Morgan (I won't call her a heroine because she doesn't fit into that category in my view), is the fastest gun in the west and a great lover to both men and women. Various chapters describe juicy adult hanky panky relevant to the story. I've injected humour into that sometimes. I think it works.
Jeannie is OTT in the personality and looks department. But that's the way I wrote her and I wasn't going to change her for all the ginger lemon black tea in Timbuktu (I checked. That tea is real!). Hell no! I thought about toning her down once. What? Was I crazy?! It's a story, and what story isn't OTT at times?
So I wrote this exciting, supercharged novel. Not everyone, particularly lovers of traditional westerns, will like a female western hero who gets shot and punched, shoots and punches back like a galvanised person on Speed and gets bloody. Just like your traditional western hero who happens to be a man. Jeannie is bisexual - she's got a girlfriend and a boyfriend. (How that's managed is another story). She's incredibly fanciable. Devastatingly tomboy beautiful. A pretty boy, some call her. Not chocolate boxy feminine beautiful. Not muscly. Athletic more like. I worked hard on this. Charismatic. A magnetic, powerful personality. Funny. Scary. Terrifying. The whole shebang.
The three novels cover forty-five years of her life. A saga you could call it. It's definitely epic. It spans half a lifetime and takes place on an epic landscape.
Earliest artwork & inspiration,
plus novel & Amazon page.
The subject matter is highly controversial, and it took me a long time to reveal the story, and even longer to write it. Over thirty years. But since westerns starring women are on the increase - thank goodness, and about time - PA hubby and I reckoned it was high time Jeannie was liberated. Now she is. We launched on Amazon last summer, and we soon appreciated how hard it would be to promote. It didn't seem to fit into any Amazon categories. It is a western, but a singular one. Over the six month period since its launch, my first readers loved it and took their time to read it. We went through a patch of drought, but the novel picked up as we've learned to promote.
It feels surreal. A little detached. Those words that I penned and typed over that humungously long period of time are being read by strangers, mostly Stateside and a few UK readers. Well-wishers and followers have called this journey exciting. Thanks, guys, but it truly ain't. It's been harrowing. Particularly for my fragile mental health.
I'm getting back to artistic creativity, particularly YouTubing artwork, and that is rather exciting when viewers view and like and subscribe. That's immediate. You can see that people like what you've done. It doesn't do your head in. More of that, please, Jo Ballantyne, Artist (that's me, folks!). It stops me from going bonkers. (Does it, though?). 😕
p.s. Keep an eye out for Book 2 of Alias Jeannie Delaney this summer. PA hubby and I are reaching the end of editing and it'll soon be time to send it to my editor. 😁
Facebook Jo Ballantyne
A charity organisation supporting the LGBTQ+ community.
(I'm supporting Stonewall & they are posting links to Amazon & Alias Jeannie Delaney on their social media posts).
Saturday, 3 February 2024
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT JEANNIE & HOW THAT CAME ABOUT
I've visualized Jeannie since my teens, daydreaming western stories about her before going to sleep because there were no decent female role models in westerns back then, let alone fastest guns, and I found her and her story incredibly exciting! Time passed and I imagined what she looked like and what her persona is. I had to work on her image in order to create illustrations of her the way I imagined her. I'm an artist so had little choice but to create illustrations!
The initial images were pretty rough, but as the story developed, so did my skill as an artist, so later images grew more refined (even if she didn't!) and I was able to use one of them as a basis for my Go West, Girl! cover.
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This is one of my first images of Jeannie, back in my teens, using a photo for reference. |
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The Evolution of My Drawings
I've worked hard on her image and personality over the years, to get her the way I visualised her. I eventually settled for tomboy beauty, but I was terrified of revealing her. I finally showed her to hubby while I hid my head under a pillow! He informed me that she was sexy, so I loved him even more for that. It was hard to reveal her to anyone. I was scared people would say - 'She's weird. Why would you want to invent her?' When she did eventually 'come out' on social media, and the response was so positive and amazing, my relief was cataclysmic. You can't imagine.
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JEANNIE AS A KID/TOM SAWYER. |
Some folk ask if I visualise Jeannie as a kid. I do. When she adopts her tomboy image as an eight-year-old, I see her as a Tom Sawyer urchin kid. I found the image above while browsing and it fits perfectly although he/she is a little older.
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I used Jeannie's figure here as the basis for my
Go West, Girl! front cover.
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My designer's result was pleasing
if not exactly how I imagine her.
No matter. I was just a fussy customer!
I tried hard not to make her too butch in appearance, but I wanted tomboy, slim, athletic, but sexy. Trying to get the balance right was tricky.
As far as her persona goes, that's another thing altogether. As an individual she's complex in some ways yet straight forward in others. She has a habit of telling you straight if she doesn't like you, but if she does like you she keeps it quiet, which really annoys her brothers. She grows devastating in appearance and manner, charismatic and dynamic.
Jeannie grows to love beauty, art and style. She dresses in bohemian male fashion when not on the range and looks gorgeous. She plays the harmonica well and is a great jig dancer and has a sense of beat and rhythm. She adores kids, animals and older people, and, more often than not, they adore her. She has a ribald, irreverent sense of humour when she's not being scary, encouraged by all her frontiersmen and cowboy mates. When she's scary, she's terrifying. I wouldn't like to meet her down a dark alley when she's like that! She can go from totally bonkers and hilarious to frightening at the click of your fingers.
So, yes - I've worked on this forever. I've worked out, more or less, why I'm so fixated on her. It's to do with my mental health issues and depressions which is another subject altogether, which I'll go into another time. Terribly complex.
Here follows a breakdown of her story:
She's difficult as a kid back during the 1860s in New Orleans, not surprisingly because her mother wants little Jeannie to be a lady, being the only daughter among five brothers. But Jeannie has other ideas. She's a natural tomboy and extremely strong willed. She's a leader right from the start, when she begins gathering a bunch of boy mates together. She's not Jeannie, a girl, she's just Jeannie. She does have friends who are girls, and they're tomboy types like herself. She gets into trouble a lot.
She despises a doll given to her as a small child and throws it into New Orleans Pontchartrain Lake with a laugh, but adores her brothers' toys, including a small wooden sword. As she grows, she moans to her Pa, her soulmate, wondering why she can't wear pants like her brothers. He asks her to be patient. The time would come. He adores his little tomboy, but doesn't want to upset her mother.
Her mother tries to get her into a child's corset, but the arguments are so furious her mother becomes exhausted and has to concede. Eventually, aged eight, Jeannie changes her image, cuts her hair and adopts her brother's shirt and pants, although she still wears a dress to school.
Jeannie becomes the Jeannie we know on the trail west. She learns to shoot, hunt game and help maintain the wagon. But she's a gentle, kind kid when it comes to nursing people and animals (animals don't judge), and she's capable of cooking and sewing although she dislikes it. She tells her brothers the necessities of learning to do everything because you never know when you might need to. She witnesses true womanhood - a young man and woman having a candlelit dinner on the trail, as young lovers did occasionally - and vows never to be like that woman, who is treated with such care and reverence by her man. She tells her Pa never to treat her like a girl and he respects that. Jeannie's view of life is extreme but understandable.
Her mother dies on the trail west from tuberculosis and her oldest brother, Rodger, Mother's soulmate, who left New Orleans to study theology back east, hates Jeannie for this, blaming her for his mother's ailments. He's a thorn in Jeannie's side.
The family settle in Wyoming, Pa establishes a cattle ranch and Jeannie becomes a cowgirl. She discovers that she's a natural shot, much to her delight. She eventually becomes a phenomenal shootist, much to the disgust of many of the men around her. She proves herself unbeatable and many men and women fancy her and are often jealous of her charisma and magnetism. Just to complicate the issue she discovers her questionable sexuality and matters take a dangerous turn....
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Stonewall is proud to provide information, support and guidance on LGBTQ+ inclusion (Stonewall are sharing my book links in return for my sharing theirs).
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