Great Moments: The Devil Inside & my bio article

Great Moments from Last Night's Reading

Book: The Devil Inside by Jenna Black

Page: 79

Spoiler level: nil

Okay, who was it on Twitter who was going, Oh, Lugh! And on the Lugh lovefest train in reference to Jenna Black's The Devil Inside? (Mandi? One of the Vixens?) Because I'm totally seeing it now! This whole Lugh plot makes for fun reading.

The moment where I was won over by the whole thing was on page 79, where the problem of heroine Morgan's potential possession really comes to light.

To recap, Morgan, demon exorcist and demon hater, keeps waking up to find notes she wrote to herself in her sleep, saying she's possessed. She thinks it can't possibly be. She'd know! She wouldn't be in control. She decides it's her subconscious. Then, this note:

Morgan, this isn't your subconscious. you really are possessed, but you're so powerful in your own right that I can't get a foothold except when you lower your guard--like when you sleep. I don't want to hurt you. I'm as unwilling to possess you are you are to host me, but

The note ends there because she woke up. Right, there, reading that, I was thinking, I love this plot twist! And will our mysterious demon be inside her for the whole series? No! Don't tell me!

I think Black also has a lot of bravery with Morgan's character. She doesn't seem scared to make Morgan judgmental and rash, then sorry and self conscious about it later. I usually don't like the 'shoot first, think later' heroine, but Morgan is working for me because of this thoughtful self-consciousness. Her rashness seems positioned as a true liability, and not a liability that is secretly an advantage, and I really admire that.

Anatomy of my crappy author bio and my strategy to change it.

Brandon of Urban Fantasy Writers asked me to do a post a while back, and it's up here! He told me he has mostly readers who are writers, so I talked about an issue I was struggling with last week - that I put zero thought into my bio, and was regretting it.

In my old bio, I had just pulled out random true things about me, instead of true things about me that relate to what I'm doing as a writer. For the post, I altered a questionnaire I use for clients in my day job to make a helpful author bio questionnaire for myself and others. So, if you're interested in bio creation, check out the article.