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...
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 snapshot of the story:
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 three novels and find out!
First and foremost in my life came art, creative anecdotal writing, a renaissance soul life - I wish! - and a growing fascination for the wild west. Alias Jeannie Delaney was the only novel length story I ever came up with and felt a true passion for. I wrote one or two fairy stories when I was young and, aged fourteen, I won a competition. I then wrote a gritty murder when I was older, but nothing stuck.
Alias Jeannie Delaney came into my head as a result of watching sixties' and seventies' westerns and noticed the lack of decent roles for women, much less the fastest gun. Over the years, as my fascination for the wild west evolved, so did the story in my head. I began to illustrate Jeannie and it all became very exciting. Little did I know that it was an antidote for dealing with my mental health issues.
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MY JEANNIE |
Courtesy of parents, siblings and wives, I encountered emotional abuse and neglect over the years - a drip-drip of meanness, sarcasm or criticism mixed with my being ignored emotionally by family from the year dot until I turned sixty, after which time my parents died, leaving me free at last. My parents and I were good friends, but I was 'so sensitive' and none of the family were. They were the reason for me writing my trilogy. I was creative and quirky. They weren't. If I became moody and depressed, I was teased. Mother was of the 'pull yourself together' brigade.
Jeannie was an antidote. Of course I was unaware of this at the time. Jeannie was the woman I wanted to create and ultimately, the woman I wanted desperately to send out into the world. She was me. The 'perfect woman' (in my eyes). I desperately needed to tell the family about my evolving story, so I told them that I was writing a life story of a Calamity Jane character (most people have heard of Calamity). But Jeannie was, apart from being the fastest gun, also a magnificent lover to both men and women. I couldn't tell anyone that until my soulmate hubby prised it out of me and I showed him my drawings. He told me that she was sexy, and for goodness sake write that story!
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CALAMITY JANE |
My story was partly a result of my determination for the world to see that it wasn't only men who carried the fastest gun! My being a wild west enthusiast, that had to be. Jeannie had to take on the role of a traditional western hero and become a cowgirl, an outlaw, a deputy sheriff, a powerful rancher and finally a mayor and a member of the posse because she's unbeatable with a gun, and her magnetic charisma holds people to ransom. To top all this, she had to be devastatingly beautiful, but not in a chocolate box way. I wanted her to be a tomboy beauty, and I think she is. She represents me - a successful me. It's a wild west theme simply because that's my fascination. She could just as easily have been a pirate (mm - there's a thought). If I get her successfully out into the world, that means I'm successful. I wasn't aware of any of this until recently. Psychologically it's a very complicated and knotted up reasoning. Jeannie's story turned into a trilogy, covering half her lifetime. A friend of ours said recently: 'You've written a trilogy? Good grief!'
I've never been inspired to write another novel. Nothing came with quite the same passion, the same drive. My desire to achieve good research, great atmosphere, believable characters and a credible, exciting plot was my driver and caused me endless angst, heartache and tears over the years, causing me to end up in therapy - my counsellor is fab - the only therapist ever to completely understand Jeannie and me.
I've enjoyed writing anecdotal articles as well, and have had many published. They're relaxation, a complete break from something as intense as a trilogy. My first calling as an artist remains, and to be multidisciplined and make a name for myself as an artist and creative writer would be so satisfying.
I've learned about published authors with only one novel, or trilogy to their names. Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, for one, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind for another (written after she broke her ankle, to help pass the time).
These days traditional publishers won't take on authors with only one book to their names because in these fiercely competitive days they can't risk an unknown author who can't be guaranteed to write more. Your only novel is likely to end up on slush piles of manuscripts and not even glanced at. One person, the publishing company's professional reader, will decide on the fate of your novel.
That's where Amazon comes in. It's free to self-publish, and many people remark that a lot of rubbish is put out as a result. True. But great writing as well. That's where a discerning reading public come in. If astute readers dislike a book, the book won't get read and will languish on Amazon's bookshelves forever. Alternately, if the reading public enjoy a book, it will be bought and read and the deserving author will receive payment.
So there I am. The first two novels are selling - I won't say like hot cakes - but considering it's a very niche subject which is hard to market, they've done extremely well and have earned many five star ratings and over six hundred and fifty readers. Of course there is negativity and those who hate the story, so I'm careful to avoid reading anything negative.
Well-meaning folks utter: 'How exciting!' It's not. It's ******* hard work! Still, I've published Books 1 and 2 and I'm working on Book 3 now. I am, hubby tells me, successful. I believe him, but I still feel very bemused, if not surreal. I've got over surreal. I won't be writing another subject any time soon, but I may well write further stories about Jeannie. Apparently that's what some authors do when they can't part with their heroes. I'm not surprised.
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ME! |
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MY ORIGINAL DRAWINGS OF JEANNIE |
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TWO CHAPTER SAMPLES BOOK 1 |
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BOOK 2 |
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  |