#WriterWednesday with Jonni Jordyn
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I’d like to welcome Jonni Jordyn back to the blog for #WriterWednesday.
Things you need for your writing sessions: Lately, I’ve been working to resume a novel that I set aside a few months ago as I prepared my previous books for new releases under my new imprint (publishing company). I have an outline, but still, picking up where I left off has proved challenging. I haven’t yet fully recovered the muse that took me through the story, and I have become painfully aware of how much I need to get that internal drive going. Until I fully recover it, I’m basically just filling out a form of what happens in the various scenes. This is not a disaster. I will go through the whole book again to flesh out some of the background and fill in details and “fluff” to what I’ve written. When I say fluff, I mean how far I go to describe the color of her dress, if I do at all.
Things that hamper your writing: distractions and interruptions, of course, but this time of year, a simple cold could hamper the clarity of my thoughts, especially if I’m taking cold medications.
A few of your favorite things: It’s the holidays and I’m a sucker for Christmas romcoms. I especially love stories of princes and princesses, Cinderella plots, and anything in Scotland so I can just listen to them talk.
Things you need to throw out: Shoes. On the one hand, a girl can’t have too many shoes, but I need to get rid of some to make room for new ones.
Favorite foods: My favorite breakfast sandwich is a scrambled egg with butter and jelly. It's sweet rather than savory, but it's my favorite start before my morning writing routine.
Things that make you want to gag: peach and apricot jam. It's a mental thing. When I was 5, my mother wouldn't believe that I could swallow a pill, especially the enormous penicillin pill they prescribed me, so she smashed it in a spoon and mixed it with apricot jam. Have you ever tasted penicillin? Nothing good can cover that hideous flavor. Add in my hypersensitive taste and smell and to this day, I can't allow those jams anywhere near my mouth.
Favorite music or song: “Windmills of Your Mind” as sung by Sting is one I will always stop what I’m doing to listen to.
Music that drives you crazy: “It’s a small world.” Disneyland was torture when walking past that ride, and my family loved pushing that button.
Things you’d walk a mile for: I don't mind walking, so there's not much I wouldn't walk a mile for.
Things that make you want to run screaming from the room: I am uncomfortable in loud crowded parties and may need to find a quiet spot to overcome the sensory overload.
Things you always put in your books: I always put some kind of a romantic thread in my books. It may just be a tiny casual relationship, or an enemy to friends or lovers romance.
Things you never put in your books: I have yet to put any kind of gratuitous sex or violence in my books. If I include scenes of sexual assault, they are not explicit and they are only their to paint just how evil the antagonist is.
Favorite places you’ve been: I went skiing in Vancouver at the Whistler & Blackcomb mountains. As a skiing adventure, these mountains provided one mile of vertical elevation, but I remember standing on top of the glacier and looking into its blue depths at my feet. I would love to return some day.
Places you never want to go to again: There are many wonderful things to see and do in New Orleans, but I went to Mardi Gras once, and I had no problem with flashing tops to get beads or some of the other shenanigans that went on there, but I was kind of disgusted that the gutters were actually flowing with spilled alcoholic beverages and vomit.
Favorite books (or genre): I tend to gravitate towards fantasy and sci fi, but I prefer books that only use the genre as a vehicle to advance a story that is about the people and their relationships. I don’t often delve into high fantasy, but the hobbit series was an exception. The 2001 series was pretty hard sci fi, but the story was about the personalities of HAL and Bowman.
Books you wouldn’t buy: I don't read horror. Stephen King's Thinner and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes may be as close as I come.
Most daring thing you’ve ever done: I responded to a woman on a dating app who was nothing like the women I had connected with. I don’t know what prompted my finger to like her. It was kind of other worldly as I sent her a nice introduction. It wasn’t the last thing that I had done that was out of character for me. We clicked and are going strong, but I don’t know where I got the gusto to initially contact her.
Something you chickened out from doing: I was in the sixth grade and new to a school at the start of my first semester there. I was invited to a party. I don’t party, but I went hoping I would make friends there. After some food, introductions and gossip, they wanted to play spin the bottle, but I totally made up some story about having to get home. Total chicken.
The funniest thing to happen to you: I was skiing with a friend and we took a turn down a trail that looked empty, except the trail fell off into a steep slope covered by a ground fog that was indistinguishable from the groomed slopes and made it look relatively mild. We survived and laughed.
The most embarrassing thing to happen to you: I was in the fourth grade and at dinner one night, my father was quizzing us and asked what the capital of Portugal was, and I quickly responded, “Lesbian! Oooops. Lisbon.”
Some real-life story that made it to one of your books: I wrote a queer novel about a lesbian couple that had to go to Texas to accept an inheritance. My granddaughter totally knew which one was patterned after me.
Something in your story that readers think is about you, but it’s not: I wrote a mystery about musicians and an older band that describes many facets of life as a musician in one of my novels. In it, all the musicians are modeled after some of my bandmates, but the keyboard player is not really about me.
About Jonni:
Jonni Jordyn, born in Oakland, Ca, started out playing music at age two, and moved on to singing and acting in grade school. High School introduced writing and film making followed by drawing and photography in college. In other words, she had a VERY LIBERAL arts education.
Jonni published some poetry and some india ink drawings in literary magazines while in college, won critical acclaim for her acting in a cabaret theater, but was faced with a decision to pick out the arts she wanted to pursue.
Of all the available opportunities, music and song writing won the first round when she found herself performing with legendary stars of the sixties and seventies.
Round two began years later, after leaving California for Arizona. It all started with a blank piece of paper and the question, "how can I possibly write more than eleven thousand words for a single story?" A valid question which was followed up a year later with, "How did I ever write 160,000 words?"
Now, the writing comes much easier, but still there are questions like, "How will I ever get all these ideas written down?" followed closely by, "How many times can I edit the same book?"
Jonni currently lives in Colorado with her bird.
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Website: Books by internationally read author John Kovacich
