Oliver and Jack

I’ve heard some soft cries of dismay from readers about the end of the Farthingdale Ranch series – and believe you me, I’m sad about it as well, for this was a fun world I’d created, a flexible world, where I could tell any story that I liked.

Additionally I’ve heard soft cries of dismay from readers about how the next six months is going to be Oliver & Jack – centric, because they aren’t really interested in gay m/m historicals….and I get that, I do. If my favorite cowboy author was suddenly going to be writing “smex in the city” (or something quite different than what I’d signed up for) type books, I’d be thrown too!

My Oliver & Jack series is a very very very long love letter to my two favorite characters in all the world: Oliver and Jack. So you have to know that this series gets the same treatment as the Farthingdale Ranch series did.

I love my characters, I go to bat for them, I work hard on their backstories and their dreams and desires – I did it for my time travel romances, I did it for my cowboys, and I did it (back in those long ago days) for Oliver and Jack. So you will get the same depth of character, the same emotionally involved character-driven plots, the sweetness and love amidst the angst. It’s all there, it’s all me, the same author, only from years before.

When I first published Oliver & Jack, I didn’t know what I was doing. I figured that, just like with fan fiction, if you put it on the interwebs, readers would find it and love it! But….that didn’t happen. My readership was small – intense and VERY passionate – but small. As the years went by, I figured out that I needed to do a bit of marketing, and that the covers (albeit beautiful) were not to market and so the packaging did not market itself as something of interest to m/m romance readers.

I had to start again, I felt, and to do that I needed a new start, a new pen name, a new genre, at least I felt I did.

With the help of my friend Pam (who sadly passed away in 2020), I picked Jackie North for a pen name. Jackie, because that was my favorite boy’s name, and a search on it brought up some great people: Jackie Robinson (great baseball player), Jackie Chan (great actor), and Jackie Onassis (great lady).

I picked time travel at first because, cleverly, I thought, I could write both a contemporary story AND a historical one. Oddly, as I wrote my Love Across Time series, I wrote three western/frontier/cowboy-centric stories that fit together like puzzle pieces. (Honey, Wild, and Ride)

I found I really loved writing about men on horseback, men who worked with their bodies and their hands, who smelled like hay and sweat and a little bit of leather oil. I LOVED it, which was quite a surprise to me.

Or maybe not. Back in junior high, when my bestie Janet took the Classical Greek Literature and Mythology track in English lit, I bravely headed out on my own and took the Western Tales and Trails track. So maybe my love for this genre began long before I realized it, and when I love something, I love it hard and I love it forever, so the Ranch isn’t going away.

My plan for future writing projects, as you might have heard, is to develop my Ranch 2.0 idea – that there’s an extension to the ranch, a retreat of sorts, less cattle drive and camp out and more hikes and horseback rides. I’m also developing my Orphan series because I LOVE a good orphan story – and this one will be gritty and smexy and hopefully a very good read.

This current Oliver & Jack project was hard come by as I was a bit terrified to unpublish the first books and republish with new covers. Which all sounds pretty straightforward, right?

Well, not for me. Those books were my children, my special snowflakes, my heart project, my everything. To move them from their current spot was tantamount to uprooting a mighty oak tree to make way for a superhighway. I’m so sentimental that when I went through my closet to divest myself of clothes I’d not worn for years, I was just about in tears the whole time.

My advice to republish Oliver and Jack under my new pen name came from Annabeth Albert and Rhys Everly-Lawless and Angela Lowry Bricker and Wendy Rathbone. They were quite encouraging and supportive but still to make the final decision was hard for me.

But I did it. I got the amazing Samantha Santana at Amai Designs to do the covers for me and she did such a great job I’m still bubbling with joy over it. On the back of the paperback for Fagin’s Boy, she incorporated the original graphics (a Grimshaw painting from the 1880’s) as an homage to the original cover. I didn’t ask her to do that – she just did it, creative genius that she is.

Heads up, the first book is incredibly dense!

What I was trying to do, I think, was pull Oliver and Jack’s story out of the original book (Oliver Twist), and as I did so, I brought bits of that book with me. So Fagin’s Boy is dense and Dickensian, and super long and like a winding road. The other five books in the series are less dense and Dickensian, because by that time, I’d made these characters and their stories my own.

So as we go along, I hope you’ll join me in in celebrating the release of these books – They are of my true heart and I’m glad to be able to show them some love, at last, and share them properly with the m/m reading world.

Any questions? Just let me know. 🤓