Artist, Writer & Wild West Woman
Wednesday, 21 August 2024
JO. B. CREATIVE!: ALIAS JEANNIE DELANEY - A YEAR LATER....
JO. B. CREATIVE!: ALIAS JEANNIE DELANEY - A YEAR LATER....: It's just over a year since self-publishing the first book of my epic western trilogy Alias Jeannie Delaney - Book 1 - Go West, Girl! a...
ALIAS JEANNIE DELANEY - A YEAR LATER....
It's just over a year since self-publishing the first book of my epic western trilogy Alias Jeannie Delaney - Book 1 - Go West, Girl! and Book 2 - The Outlaw's Return was published in early August.
It's been swings and roundabouts throughout. The results have been tremendous, thankfully, considering that the subject matter is very niche-y. Not everyone is going to like it, and it is hard to market, but we did it! Between PA hubby and me, with our communication and graphics skills and learning capabilities, we got the word out and readers have bought and are buying. Every day hubby gives me the numbers - Kindle Unlimited readers and orders of Books 1 and 2 (mostly e-novels but occasionally the softback).
Here are a couple of reviews from Booksprout:
FIVE STAR REVIEWS FROM BOOKSPROUT!
'A strong sequel in this Wild West world
I really enjoyed the Western element to this book, it had everything that I wanted from the first book. It was a great followup and had the characters that I was invested in. It worked with everything that I enjoyed from the wild west and enjoyed the main character and cast. I can't wait to read more in this series and from Kit Mackenzie.'
'Jeannie's adventures continue...
Jeannie is back with her band of followers. The author wastes no time in kicking this story in gear. Gun fights, fist fights, bar fights, a daliance with a saloon girl... On to chapter three... There was a time in the middle-ish that the story seemed to drag a bit. Stay with it - it picks back up and the last third of the book just flies by. I've enjoyed seeing her find her way, trying to do the right thing, and hope to see more.'
One thing I need to emphasise - the drama, emotive feelings and intensity of the story using music. I hear a lot of music which takes me straight to the story and Jeannie - not necessarily western music. Two of these are the following YouTube clips. I imagine Jeannie singing them - not such a strange thing, I'm told, because I used to be so embarrassed about it. Not any longer! I'm glad to reveal such things, and I find it an enormous relief, strange or not. After all, Doris Days' Calamity Jane sang, didn't she?
ROBBIE WILLIAMS
FEEL
THE WEEKEND
BLINDING LIGHTS
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THE AUTHOR |
Facebook Jo Ballantyne
Alias Jeannie Delaney follows the life of devastating and charismatic pants-wearing cowgirl Jeannie Morgan, who's the fastest gun in the west and a magnificent lover to both men and women. This is her journey to find her true self on the wild frontier throughout deadly confrontations and personal tragedies. Will Jeannie find happiness or will her tomboy beauty, powerful persona and lethal gun ultimately be the death of her? Read the story and find out!
Available in E-book & paperback on Amazon.
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MY ORIGINAL DRAWINGS OF JEANNIE |
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TWO CHAPTER SAMPLES BOOK 1 |
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BOOK 2 |
Sunday, 18 August 2024
JO. B. CREATIVE!: MY ONLY NOVEL & THE REASON BEHIND IT
JO. B. CREATIVE!: MY ONLY NOVEL & THE REASON BEHIND IT: MY ONLY NOVEL & THE REASON BEHIND IT Is my trilogy Alias Jeannie Delaney my only story? Yes, it is. I wonder why? Here's a sna...
Tuesday, 13 August 2024
DID THIS CUTE, HOPSCOTCHING STEAMPUNK GRANNY REALLY WRITE THIS GRITTY WESTERN?
DID THIS CUTE, HOPSCOTCHING STEAMPUNK UK GRANNY REALLY WRITE THIS GRITTY WESTERN? YES, SHE DID!
(But is it any good? Yes it is!)
Now, here's the story that I'm talking about. ..
Alias Jeannie Delaney, my epic western trilogy, follows the life of devastating and charismatic pants-wearing cowgirl Jeannie Morgan, who's the fastest gun in the west and a magnificent lover to both men and women. This is her journey to find her true self on the wild frontier throughout deadly confrontations and personal tragedies. Will Jeannie find happiness or will her tomboy beauty, powerful persona and lethal gun ultimately be the death of her? Read the three novels and find out!
Some folk may say that anyone from the UK, let alone a granny, couldn't possibly want to write a gritty, no holds barred western in which the hero is a woman. Well, I wanted to, I had to, the story is very exciting, and the story of the story will follow. The short and the long of this is that yes, my story is a great success! With well over six hundred reader and five star ratings and reviews can't all be wrong, much less all my readers on Kindle Unlimited who steam through Book 1 like a railroad train then immediately order Book 2.
I shared this post a while ago, after visiting a Cobbles & Clogs Steampunk event at Basingstoke's Milestones Museum in Hampshire UK. Enormous fun! Loads of stalls, music and everyone dressed wild west steampunk, fairies, military, medieval, you-name-it...
Hubby and I were dressed to the nines - hubby as a military sergeant in frilled shirt, peaked cap, medals and goggles and me as glam pirate Kitty Le Roy complete with small flintlock pistol. When I'm not Kitty Le Roy, a gun totin', cheroot chompin' wild westerner granny, that's what I do.
Milestones Museum is an indoor Victorian town open to customers to wander shop and factory settings. One of the pavements boasts 'chalked' hopscotch squares. Naturally we have to hop. Hubby is tall and drainpipe skinny, and he's good at hopping. I ain't. I used to be slim and beautiful but now I'm Rubenesque and beautiful. I've never hopped well and was terrible at school PE, although I'm great on a bike and striding briskly. So I sorta hopped on and off, huffing and puffing. Hubby hopped like a good 'un, and we filmed one another. Brilliant. Hop scotching steampunk style. As you do.
Now, if you want to see the thing being done properly, here you are:
Here is further evidence of the unexpectedly cute nature of the author of this gritty western. A very unlikely person. Many years ago I received a phone call from a fellow wild westerner. 'Good grief (or words to that effect - so western.) - I expected you to sound butch, not sweet.' Apparently I sound sweet. So much for sounding like a wild west cowgirl!
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DRIVING OUR NARROWBOAT
OUT OF LOCKS NEAR RUGBY.
A GREAT TRIP!
So, did this fun loving, hopscotching cute Gran (so they say, and who am I to dispute that?) to teenage twin granddaughters really write that gritty, sometimes dark and violent western trilogy? Yes, I really did. The mind does boggle a tad. There are two sides of me. The dark side who suffers from depression and the goofy, creative side. The goofy artistic side is dominant, thank goodness, but the dark side, when the mood strikes, comes crashing in.
I had to write Alias Jeannie Delaney. I had no choice. This girl gunslinger, the fastest gun in the west, and eventually a great lover to both men and women, had to be. My fascination for the wild west decreed that I write the life story of a pants-wearing cowgirl. I know her inside out. I know what she looks like, her qualities and her likes and dislikes. I wanted to be her, it turns out.
Jeannie is powerful. Magnetic. Charismatic, funny, scary. Terrifying sometimes. Tremendously stylish in male clothing. Sexy as hell. Tomboy beautiful. OTT. Irresistible. She's bisexual. All things to everyone. I was horrendously embarrassed about her, which made things even harder. I tried to tone her down but it didn't work. Finding out just how much people appreciate her has made things much better for me, and sharing illustrations and stories about her no longer terrifies me.
I wanted to be like her to make up for my largely alone, neglected and unappreciated position within my biological family. Having children made matters harder and my mental health, exacerbated by childbirth and post-natal depression, suffered, along with the drip-drip of biological family pressures and opinions.
That's why I wanted to be Jeannie. That's why I needed to write her story and 'get her out there'. That's why I have two sides. 😄
See you in my next blog post! x
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| THE (CUTE) AUTHOR |
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MY ORIGINAL DRAWINGS OF JEANNIE. AS AN ARTIST I'VE UTILISED CANVA FOR THE JOB |
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TWO CHAPTER SAMPLES BOOK 1 |
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BOOK 2 |
Wednesday, 7 August 2024
JO. B. CREATIVE!: JUICY ADULT BITS FOR GROWN UPS
JO. B. CREATIVE!: JUICY ADULT BITS FOR GROWN UPS: JUICY ADULT BITS FOR GROWN UPS One of the big issues with my epic western trilogy Alias Jeannie Delaney is that the story contains juicy gr...
Tuesday, 6 August 2024
THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK COVER REVEAL
THE STORY
BEHIND THE COVER REVEAL
OF ALIAS JEANNIE DELANEY - BOOK 2 -
THE OUTLAW'S RETURN
First off here's the cover of Book 2 - The Outlaw's Return. To those of you who don't know the story, my epic western trilogy Alias Jeannie Delaney follows the life of a devastating and charismatic pants-wearing cowgirl who's the fastest gun in the west and a magnificent lover to both men and women. This is her journey to find her true self on the wild frontier throughout deadly confrontations and personal tragedies. Will she find happiness or will her tomboy beauty, her powerful persona and her lethal gun finally be the death of her? Buy the series and find out!
That, in a nutshell, is the story.
And now for the story of my cover reveal! I collaborated with my cover designer Shaun Stephens of Flintlock Covers to do this. As an artist, I was determined to do it. The image below is what inspired me in the first place.
I must have been sixteen or thereabouts in the late sixties when I drew it in the sixth form common room at school in between lessons. I used a black and white film still for reference and replaced the rider with Jeannie. I remember doing it. Clearly my fascination for the wild west and my heroine, Jeannie, was gaining pace even then. I sent Shaun, my designer, several images, including this, and he created the cover from them. I'm very pleased with the result.
New novels need a cover reveal - a tantalising glimpse on social media of the spanking new cover of your yet-to-be-released next novel. It was time to create a cover reveal and I had a great idea. I'd watched reveals on YouTube, when an intriguing something is revealed from under a wrapping. One of them was a beautiful material - velvet perhaps - slowly rolled back to reveal a display of sparkling jewellery. I liked that a lot! I had created something similar for some of my artwork and uploaded it to YouTube - that was fun! I could do something similar for my novel cover. I considered a rustic material for a wild frontier feel. Then it hit me. A 'wanted' poster with Jeannie's image on it. Of course!
I created one on my graphics site, Canva. I used an original drawing I'd done, again many years ago, this time after I married. It was a drawing of Jeannie based on a western film still of Marlon Brando leaning against a wall, his hands clutching his gun belt. I changed him to her. What's bemusing me hugely is the fact that I'm using images created years ago in my current marketing strategies. Who'd have thunk ought it, huh?! 😄
It's not a pristine, crisp image, and it's old. Great - I need scruffy! I cropped the image to use her top half and used western fonts. The reveal would show hands ripping the poster to expose the book cover, I thought. Then Hubby said: 'Set fire to it.' Of course! Much more original and fun. It's a western! (Thanks hubby!). Also, I'm a naturally scruffy artist who finds it hard to be neat (that applies in life...), so lucky for me. I printed out three posters. After all, I was going to set fire to one, and if that didn't work...
Next job - scruff up the posters using coffee grains, tea bags and water and rough up the edges. Fun, and it worked a treat.
Next - the setting. Inside my garden cabin. Just inside the door away from breezes. That cabin is another story, to be told at the end.
So - on with this story...
I blue-tacked a print of my new cover on Book 1 for support and set that against the back of my old wooden chair. (That chair, a Windsor I think, has yet another story). I stood a vintage beer bottle in front of the book and leaned a poster against it. I set up my phone into video mode and hubby lit the bottom corner of the poster. It burned like a dream and it took one take. Yes - as I boasted to our son later - one take!
Lastly I edited the video on the editing app Clipchamp, removing hubby's hand with match, and set music to it - 'Cowboy'. The result was fabulous! I managed to fade the music out at the end so that it didn't finish abruptly. Lastly I posted it on social media and the result has been a huge success. I'm incredibly pleased. And here it is - ta-da! (Turn up the volume...)
And now for the other stories. My cabin. I'd wanted a cabin ever since I was really young and my family had spent a day in a cabin in the New Forest courtesy of my dad's cousin. I remember the sounds of stream and rainwater most of all, but it must have been glorious because I became determined to have a cabin of my own. Achieved, oodles of years later. A frontier cabin in my back garden. It's brilliant during the summer under the porch.
And now - the chair. I can't quote precisely, but I think it's the chair in which my great granny died sitting bolt upright in my uncle's kitchen in Westminster during the fifties. It was getting on a bit even then. It ended up in my parent's early 1900s bungalow where I grew up, next to our old boiler in the kitchen. My dad would sit in it and little me would sit on his lap. He'd open his knees and I'd fall between them, squealing with giggles. Later, as a sulky schoolgirl, I'd sit in the chair slurping my cornflakes before school, barely awake. I grew up. As a twenty-plus person I had a party, and one of the boys ended up in the chair chatting to my mum. People felt very at home in that chair. Many, many years later my parents died and I inherited it. It moved around a bit until it found its final resting place in my cabin. Couldn't be more appropriate. Its latest adventure is as a prop for my cover reveal, although you can only just make out the back of it. Oh, if only that chair could talk.
So there we have it - the story of my novel cover reveal. I'm delighted with the whole thing. Last but not least, the novels are available on Amazon.
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FEET UP IN MY CABIN! |
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MY ORIGINAL DRAWINGS OF JEANNIE. AS AN ARTIST I'VE UTILISED CANVA FOR THE JOB  |
DOMESTICATION & BEING IN THE WRONG MOOD
DOMESTICATION & BEING IN THE WRONG MOOD 😝
Domestication. I can't think of anything worse when I'm in the wrong mood for it, which is often. 😝I wasn't born domesticated, I was born a creative artist/writer and a renaissance soul (for the uninitiated, a renaissance soul - think Leonardo Da Vinci - is someone who has a zillion interests and hobbies. As in Leo's case, he also had loads of unfinished canvases).
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MY MATE LEO |
One of my zillions of interests is genealogy. I've looked at the 1911 census for my granny and found her as a young woman living with her sister and mother with her invalid father. The three women did 'domestic duties'. 😝I know, it was 1911 and that's the way it was, but I'm so disappointed that there weren't any suffragettes in my family. No rebellious women. For shame. I always say that I would have rebelled in some way, including suffrage-tting, and I'm told by my daughter that I wouldn't have done that. 'You would have accepted it as it was.' She says. No, I wouldn't, I respond very heatedly. At least, I jolly well hope I wouldn't. Having said that there were no rebellious women in my family, I hasten to add that my mother was rebellious. As a young lady of fourteen, she refused to be confirmed because she didn't believe in God. Folks were shocked, but she stood by that. Good for her, I say, if that's your belief, and why should you believe? During the war she refused to stay home and look after my blind granny, bless her. My mother responded that her mum had plenty of help - she did - so she was going to war, like her two older brothers. She promptly joined the WRENS and that was that. She actually had a jolly good time of it in Scarborough during her free time.
I have her stubborn streak and rebellious nature. Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I'm Jo Ballantyne, artist and writer aka Kitty Le Roy, a cheroot chompin', gun slingin' wild west woman, and, as Kit Mackenzie, a Western Author with an epic western trilogy to my name (Alias Jeannie Delaney - Book 1 - Go West, Girl!). Where does domesticity fit in, if at all? Hubby is more domesticated that I am, having left home at eighteen for university, so learned the art of looking after oneself pretty quickly. He empties bins and changes beds when I forget. When I'm washing up (he cooks, so I don't mind) I ponder how I'd survive as a frontier woman in a cabin. I'm pretty sure I'd be off there as well. I've read enough stories of women who turned their backs on domesticity and went prospecting for gold, or adventuring, or driving wagons. The very idea of domestication on the frontier makes me run for them thar hills! So long as pard/hubby did his bit in the cabin, I'd do what had to be done then I'd be off. Wherever 'off' is.
I've had many 'off I goes'. I'm a pretty good archer, I row and paddle boats and canoes, and I learned to fly straight and level in a single engine small plane aged seventeen - very proud of that.
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MY FIRST FLIGHT - AGED FIFTEEN-ISH |
Years later a friend invited me to take the joystick of his small plane around the Isle of Wight. I'll never forget it! On top of all that, I often visualise myself as a tanned, barefooted artist on a Cornish beach with salty, tousled hair and halfway through painting a huge acrylic abstract. Finally, I'm more than proud of being fascinated by the wild west. A very unusual hobby, particularly for a granny in the UK.
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ME IN WESTERN KIT |
Most important of all is the fact that I've written my epic western trilogy. It's taken years, but I had to do it to make up for the lack of heroic women in literature until recent times. I'm pleased as punch to announce that, beyond being a tad bemused by the whole thing of being self-published (I've got past the surreal thing), I've accumulated over six hundred readers, many five star ratings and reviews in America, and on Kindle Unlimited, readers steam through Book 1 like a railroad train and immediately order Book 2. 😀
What really does my head in though, besides domestication, is my mental health issues, particularly since my desperation to get my protagonist Jeannie 'out there'. It puts the kibosh on so much, including socialising and some of my interests, but, with the help of my fabulous soulmate hubby, I get through it. I want to share these experiences in order to hopefully inspire and encourage other sufferers in their own endeavours. And I hope I do inspire, because mental health issues, when they hit, are crappy. I could be so much more than this, but it's one of those things I have to work at and it can suck. I don't want to end on a low note. I'm jolly grateful for everything I've ever had, including my fab hubby, kids and granddaughters. Hooray for them, and I really mean that!
THE AUTHOR, PADDLING
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