PRIDE MONTH INTERVIEW: Jordan L. Hawk

Today’s Pride Month (EXTRA!) interview is with author Jordan L. Hawk:

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Hi, Jordan! I hope you’re staying safe and healthy during the current events. What are you doing to stay creatively motivated in these unusual times?

Hi, and thanks for having me on the blog!

I’ve tried a few different approaches, but focusing on getting what feels like a “small” amount of work done every day seems to work best. What would have been a small amount before is about all I have the energy left to do, so I do that and refuse to feel guilty about not doing more.

 

Since June is Pride Month, I have to ask: this past year, you announced you are transgender. How has that self-discovery influenced or informed your writing?

I don’t think I’ve had the chance to really notice yet. Certainly it’s shone a light on a lot of the themes present in my work, but I find I’m still drawn to “person with a secret about their identity” stories.

 

You’ve recently ended your well-regarded Whyborne & Griffin series. Did you always intend for the series to run the number of books it did? I know I’m not the only fan who wishes it were longer!

I’m a big believer in endings, and though I know I could have continued on indefinitely, I felt ending the story would give it weight and meaning. I think we’ve all known series that overstayed their welcome, and I did not want W&G to turn into one of them! I never had a set number of books so much as “here’s a list of what I want for the story, so which part or parts works for the next book.” I’d say by Maelstrom (book 7) I did know it would end with book 11, though.

 

You’re not done with the city of Widdershins, though. Can you tell us anything about the spin-off series you’re launching?

Rath & Rune follows the adventures of Sebastian Rath, librarian and chief archivist at the Ladysmith Museum’s library, and Vesper Rune, newly hired bookbinder and conservator. There’s murder, evil books, necromancers, and of course romance. Book 1, Unhallowed, will be out July 17.

 

Since I recently ran a “Series Saturday” post about your Hexworld series, I’d like to focus a few questions there. The world-building is a bit more intricate than in W&G or Spirits – tell us how magic works in Hexworld.

Magic in Hexworld needs three ingredients: a hex (usually a drawing) to hold and shape the magic, a familiar to provide the magic, and a witch to channel the magic from familiar into hex.

Familiars shift between human and animal shapes. They have to form a magical bond with a witch in order for the witch to use their magic, as they can’t charge hexes on their own. Unfortunately this has led to a societal view of familiars more as resources to be exploited than people with their own lives and desires.

 

The formula for Hexworld so far is that you’ve introduced new witch-familiar combinations in each book and focused on their romantic ups-and-downs. Will there come a point where you’re no longer introducing new couples?

The upcoming Hexworld series, Roaring Twenties, will focus on a single couple.

 

If I remember correctly, the characters from your novellas “A Christmas Hex” and “Wild Wild Hex” have yet to be tied into the main novels. Is there any plan to see those characters again? (Given where Wild Wild Hex takes place in relation to the novels, that one might be a bit hard.)

Those were both one-offs, and I don’t currently plan to revisit those characters.

 

What are you working on now? What’s next out of the gate?

I’m currently working on the next SPECTR novella, Harvester of Bones, and doing research for Hexworld: Roaring Twenties.

 

And finally, where can interested people find you and your work online?

The easiest place to check is my website: http://www.jordanlhawk.com, which has links to all the places my books are sold. You can also find me on FaceBook at http://www.facebook.com/jordanlhawk and Twitter at https://twitter.com/jordanlhawk.

 

Jordan L. Hawk is a trans author from North Carolina. Childhood tales of mountain ghosts and mysterious creatures gave him a life-long love of things that go bump in the night. When he isn’t writing, he brews his own beer and tries to keep the cats from destroying the house. His best-selling Whyborne & Griffin series (beginning with Widdershins) can be found in print, ebook, and audiobook.

SERIES SATURDAY: Hexworld

This is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.

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Jordan L. Hawk’s most well-known series is likely their Lovecraftian Whyborne & Griffin series, which ended recently after 11 books and several novellas and short stories. W&G took place in something very close to our own world, where only a select few people know that magic and Elder Gods are real. In Hawk’s Spirits series, the existence of magic is a bit more widely known but still not commonplace. Of all Hawk’s historicals, the Hexworld series is the most removed from our world and definitely qualifies as alternate history.

In the 1890s New York City of the Hexworld books, there exists the Metropolitan Police, which handles every-day crime, and the Witch Police, which handles magic-based crimes. “Witches” here is an umbrella term for anyone who can wield magic, regardless of gender. But for a witch to reach their full potential, they must be bonded with a familiar. Familiars are shifters – people who can turn into a specific animal – and they are the conduits through which magic flows to witches. The bond, once forged, is difficult to break. While any witch and familiar can be bonded, the bond works best when the witch-familiar combo are meant for each other; a witch comes across “his” familiar, or vice-versa. The implication is that for most witch-familiar combos, it’s a working relationship, with the partners going home to their own lives when the work day is over. But the bonds can be romantic, and for the main characters in the books they pretty much always are. (Hawk’s hallmark is historical m/m paranormal romance with plenty of sex tossed in the mix.)

The general public (worldwide, not just in NYC) is aware of magic and in fact dependent on it. Shop-owners rely on hexes to keep thieves out of their stores, for instance. But they also distrust familiars. Prejudice runs deep, especially towards unbonded, or “feral,” familiars, who are often the first suspects when a magic-based crime has been committed. There are those among the Witch Police who would force-bond feral familiars, even though it’s illegal, and it’s a fair bet a portion of the general public feels the same. The prejudice rears its head in sometimes very subtle ways, but it’s always at least in the background of each book, and it’s not always easy to read.

Each book focuses on the beginning of a different witch-familiar pair. They usually come across each other in the course of investigating (or in one case, committing) a crime. Sometimes the familiar realize he’s found his witch first, sometimes the other way around. Romantic and sexual tensions increase as the investigation of whatever crime is at the center of the story goes on, and in the end the main pair of the book are not only bonded professionally, they’re paired romantically. Again, these are m/m paranormal romance from an author who believes in happy endings – so I’m not really spoiling anything major by telling you that out of four novels and two novellas, Hawk has yet to introduce us to a pair who don’t end up together. The romance/sexual side of the books is a bit more formulaic in that regard than either of Hawk’s other two historical series, but I don’t really mind. Knowledge that whatever romantic misunderstandings and trials the characters encounter will be overcome by the end of the book allows me to concentrate on the surprises and twists of the crime plots.

Those crimes range from murder to a feral-child-trafficking ring. The clues to each crime/mystery are laid out very well throughout each book, along with red herrings to keep the reader guessing. The crime introduced at the beginning of each book is resolved by the end, so each book is “one and done” in that regard. But there is an over-arching conspiracy our growing group of heroes becomes aware of that will need to be resolved before the series ends (and I do believe that as with the Whyborne and Griffin series, Hawk is working steadily towards that resolution and already has an end-point in mind).

Even though each book focuses on a different witch-familiar pairing, the main characters of previous books don’t disappear. Most of these pairs end up working for the NYC Witch Police, but not all. We get to see their romantic relationships continue beyond the end of the book they star in, as they provide support for the new focal pairing. Hawk is essentially building a large “found family” of characters who come together to support each other (and deal with that pesky over-arching conspiracy). This is something intrinsically recognizable to queer readers: building a family around yourself when your own family has let you down or abandoned you. It’s interesting to see this play out in a world where being a familiar, and especially a feral familiar, seems to be more disdained than being gay. (I’m not saying there’s no anti-gay sentiment in Hexworld, just that it seems less of a threat that anti-familiar sentiment.)

It should also be noted that at least as of book four, the short story/novellas “A Christmas Hex” and “Wild Wild Hex” do not tie into the main continuity but do give us a look at witch/familiar pairs outside of the NYC Witch Police. They are nice bits of world-expansion and are equally as romantic/erotic as the main books. (Also, full disclosure: I suggested the title for “Wild Wild Hex.” Yes, I was and am a fan of the Wild Wild West television series.

The alternate history worldbuilding is spot-on, the 1890s milieu perfect for the story Hawk is telling. The characters are endearing, interesting, aggravating, and, yes, sexy (in their varied ways). If you like alternate history m/m paranormal romance with a thriller/crime aspect, these books are for you.

The books in the Hexworld series are:

·         “The 13th Hex” (prequel short story)

·         Hexbreaker

·         Hexmaker

·         “A Christmas Hex” (short story)

·         Hexslayer

·         “Wild Wild Hex” (novella)

·         Hexhunter

Series Saturday: Whyborne & Griffin

Series Saturday is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.

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Two book series that I absolutely love for their detailed genre-mashup world-building and strong character development came to an end in 2019. The first was E.Catherine Tobler’s 6-book Folley & Mallory series, which I discussed in last week’s Series Saturday post. The other is Jordan L. Hawk’s 11-book Whyborne & Griffin series.

The Whyborne & Griffin series mashes up Lovecraftian Mythos with urban fantasy and three different romance sub-genres: historical, paranormal, and m/m. The setting is late 1800s New England (the town of Widdershins, north of Boston); the title characters are a socially-awkward museum professor (Percival Endicott Whyborne, late of Miskatonic University) and a retired Pinkerton Detective who has moved to town to work as a private investigator (Griffin Flaherty, late of Chicago and before that the rural Midwest). Opposites immediately attract but their meet-cute is complicated in the first book, Widdershins, by murder, theft, and supernatural shenanigans that involve not only both men’s personal histories but the history of the town of Widdershins itself.

Whyborne and Griffin are endearing first-person narrators throughout the run of the series. It’s fun, if sometimes frustrating, to witness relationship, and other, misunderstandings from both characters’ POV. (This is something Hawk excels at and employs to good use in his Spirits and Hexworld series as well.) The reader often has a clearer idea of what’s really going on than either of the characters do, which I actually enjoy provided the characters eventually come to the same realizations the reader has. And they usually do, although often it’s slightly too late in terms of the dangers being faced. (I should note: I don’t always expect the story to go where I think it should go; that’s different from the characters realizing things the other characters and reader have already been made aware of. Hawk often surprises me with plot twists I didn’t see coming but which make perfect sense in retrospect.) Their relationship grows and deepens across the eleven books and several adjacent short stories and novellas in the series.

They also have a wonderful primary supporting cast that grows as the series progresses. From the very beginning, Whyborne’s Egyptologist coworker Doctor Christine Putnam is involved in the action. Strong-willed, fighting the attitudes towards professional women endemic to the time-period, Christine is as compelling a character as the leads and gets her own character arc that also eventually includes romance with an adventurer named Iskander. Whyborne’s family is often front-and-center in the action, and often at odds with our heroes (particularly his father Niles and older brother Stanhope). Griffin’s estranged adoptive and birth families come into the action eventually, as do Whyborne’s distant relatives on his mother’s side of the family tree. There’s also a fun set of tertiary characters who add color and a sense of life in Widdershins: Whyborne and Christine’s fellow staff at the Ladysmith Museum, the local undertaker and police force, and the Librarians at the Museum, who have a distinct devotion not only to the city of Widdershins but to Whyborne.

Hawk is faithful to the Mythos genre in general, capturing the tone of Lovecraft/Derleth/et al without being slavish to those authors’ penchant for florid descriptiveness. And as befits a series such as this, the Mythos elements are not only prevalent, they build on each other and become more important as the series approaches its apocalypse-level finale. Hawk also adds to the Mythos, spinning some new creatures and twists on old favorites into the mix to keep things fresh. (The author has also posted a list on his Patreon of the Lovecraft stories that influenced/inspired the various books in this series.)

Likewise, Hawk is faithful to the primary tenet of the urban fantasy genre: Widdershins itself is as much of a character as Whyborne and Griffin and their supporting cast. From the very start of the first book, the city’s layout and history are important to the storyline as opposed to being just the place events occur. But the series avoids the inherent claustrophobia of the setting by occasionally veering outside the city. Trips to the mining town of Threshold in Appalachia, Alaska, Egypt, a rural Kansas farming town called Fallow, and coastal England build on the core mythology and present new and growing challenges for the characters that eventually follow them back home to Widdershins. Each of the remote locations is as well-developed as Widdershins.

I feel like I should also mention that most of the books and stories in the series have one or more explicit sex scenes. Readers who don’t like erotica may be caught surprised when they encounter such scenes. I also feel like I should mention that they are very easily skipped over if one doesn’t enjoy reading such material; in fact, as the series progressed I found myself only skimming the sex scenes. They do include little bits of character development (for instance, Whyborne becoming a little less “vanilla” as his confidence in their relationship grows) but nothing that can’t be gleaned from the rest of the scenes in the book.

The Whyborne and Griffin series includes:

·         Widdershins

·         “Eidolon” (short story)

·         Threshold

·         Stormhaven

·         “Carousel” (short story)

·         “Remnant” (short story crossover with KJ Charles’ Simon Feximal series)

·         Necropolis

·         Bloodline

·         Hoarfrost

·         Maelstrom

·         Fallow

·         Undertow (novella)

·         Draakenwood

·         Balefire

·         Deosil

(The link leads to the author’s website, which includes purchase options.)

Although the Whyborne & Griffin series has concluded, Hawk has announced a spin-off series centering on the Widdershins Librarians. I’m excited to see other aspects of the town and its history being explored.

Series Saturday: the SPIRITS trilogy

Series Saturday is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.

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Jordan L. Hawk is a non-binary, queer and very prolific writer of M/M supernatural romance series, including the Whyborne & Griffin books (Lovecraftian in tone, and coming to a conclusion later this year), Hexworld (alternate history NYC where magic, and shape-shifters, abound), SPECTR (modern-day vampires and ghosts), and the Spirits trilogy, which is what I’d like to talk about today.

The Spirits books (Restless Spirits, Dangerous Spirits and Guardian Spirits) take place in a slightly-alternate history America at the turn of the previous century, wherein everyone knows spirits, and thus hauntings, are real. Some spirits are friendly, or at least essentially harmless, but some can and will cause great harm. As can, and do, people who pretend to be talented mediums but who are really just fakers.

Enter Henry Strauss, a scientist who was misled and taken advantage of by a fraudulent medium when he was younger. Henry’s goal is to reduce the odds of people being taken advantage of by using scientific means to locate, attract, and ultimately remove the threat of, ghosts. His Electro-Séance does the trick, if he can get it to work correctly and convince people like the Psychical Society of Baltimore that it’s more reliable and effective than human mediums. Henry, and his assistant/cousin Jo, get their chance when they are invited by a wealthy industrialist to a de-haunt a house in upstate New York – in competition with a renowned medium, Vincent Night, and his partner Lizzie. The industrialist is pitting science against spiritualism, but Henry and Vincent feel an immediate attraction to each other. Complications (and a little bit of hilarity and sexual shenanigans) ensue.

The “science versus spiritualism” competition is really only a part of the plot of the first book, and the rest of the trilogy finds Henry and Vincent working together on cases that appear to be distinct but in fact lead to revelations about Vincent and Lizzie’s pasts and a threat to the whole world.

There are certain things one expects from a Jordan L. Hawk historical series:

·         Two engaging, but quite insecure in different ways, male leads (and chapters that alternate point of view between the two)

·         A slow-burn romance in the first book, but insecurity-driven misunderstandings even once they do get together

·         Steamy sex featuring those male leads, multiple times per book, although the number of scenes per book usually decreases the longer the series goes on

·         A diverse supporting cast

·         A well-developed world with internal logic to how the supernatural element works and consistency in whether the general public knows about/believes in the supernatural or not

·         High stakes (often life-or-death) for the characters, but also for the world or society they live in.

 

 But here’s the thing: Hawk’s books don’t feel formulaic even with all of these consistent elements. And each series, thanks to that intricate world-building and thanks to the variety of lead characters, feels different from the others.

The Spirits trilogy maintains its focus on ghosts/spirits, and eschews any other form of the supernatural. No werewolves, vampires, zombies, witches, or cosmic horrors. Just spirits and the people with the ability/talent to communicate with and affect them. Vincent Night is a medium (he can speak to spirits and spirits can speak/act through him). Lizzie Devereaux is a spirit-writer. Other supporting characters are sensitive in one way or another. And then there’s Henry, who wants to do what Vincent does through science, specifically electromagnetism, instead of spiritualism. But there’s nary a hint of other magic in the books at all, and that’s refreshing. (Even though I’ve joked with the author on social media about a story where Henry and Vincent meet my favorite Hawk characters, Whyborne and Griffin, it’s clear that these series are set in the same time-period but very different versions of “our world.”) This trilogy is an ongoing debate on science versus spirituality (or, if you’d like, science versus religion/belief), but the author at no point allows one to best the other. There’s a trend out there right now in fantasy novels for magic to work the way science does – rigid rules of use and conduct and cause-and-effect – and Hawk refreshingly doesn’t use science to explain the spiritual nor use the spiritual to justify the science.

As with many of Hawk’s romantic pairs, Henry and Vincent are a study in contrasts. Henry is literal in his approach, not prone to expressions of humor, insecure because people just don’t want to believe in his achievements (the reader sees right away that Henry’s device works, although imperfectly) and also because of the way he was taken advantage of as a young man (by a medium claiming to be speaking for his father without really doing so). Vincent is a bit more poetic, swaggering (but not overbearing) to hide his own insecurities which are based in his failure during a séance which led to his mentor’s death and in the fact people don’t want to believe he’s as intelligent as he is because he’s Native American. The attraction between the two is immediate (and acted on fairly quickly, if awkwardly). Their position as rivals for a big cash prize (which each needs to save their own business and keep themselves and their partners with food and shelter) is just the first road-block of many thrown in front of them by the author. But they do persevere and grow towards a happy relationship. (No unhappy endings or “murder your gays” tropes to be had in a Jordan Hawk book!) Although it’s never expressed in quite this way, what the men have in common is a loss of fathers via “possession.” Vincent was possessed by a malevolent spirit which killed his mentor/father-figure while in Vincent’s body, and Henry was “possessed” by the fraudulent medium who took advantage of Henry’s attraction and guilelessness to steal Henry’s inheritance away from him. Both of these possessions haunt the men, and affect not only their relationship with each other but with their friends. Vincent’s fear of being possessed again holds him back from holding the séances needed to keep his and Lizzie’s business open; Henry’s anger at being taken advantage of makes it difficult for him to compromise with the people he needs to make his business a success.

This may be the most diverse main cast of all of Hawk’s historicals, both in terms of ethnicity and gender, and that’s saying something. While Henry is a gay white man, Vincent is Native American, Jo is mixed-race (the child of Henry’s white uncle and a black servant), and Lizzie is transgender. Since the Spirits trilogy is primarily M/M romance, it would be easy to relegate Jo and Lizzie to the status of “secondary characters” but they really aren’t. They have their own character arcs and contribute to the successful resolution of the potentially world-shattering events they are taking part in, and they do get their own romantic sub-plots – they just don’t get any sex scenes.

And if that’s not a perfect segue, nothing is. As mentioned, it wouldn’t be a Hawk book without increasingly hot (even when they’re awkward) sex scenes between the leads. These scenes also tend to be lovingly romantic. But they are certainly not for the prudish. (I think the books read just as well without the explicit sex, but as the sex is part of what Hawk (as well as KJ Charles, Adam Carpenter, and other authors I enjoy) is known for, I can’t complain about their inclusion – and certainly can’t claim that they’re not well-written.

The trilogy tells a complete story, over the course of three interesting hauntings and along with a variety of sub-plots. I’m sure there’s much more that could be explored in this world and with these characters, but for now the author says the story is finished. (Maybe they’ll decide to revisit this world now that the long-running Whyborne & Griffin series is drawing to a close?)

Check out Jordan L. Hawk’s Spirits trilogy if you like: ghost stories, séances, M/M romance, diverse and well-written casts, and subtle, supernatural-based alternate history.