What’s in a name?
I hate to break it to you, but Jennifer J. Coldwater is not my given name. It’s the name I have given myself.
Junction of Mulholland Drive and Coldwater Canyon, Studio City, California. Photo by Ken Lund / Creative CommonsI was on sabbatical in Oklahoma when I decided on my nom de plume. I was making my friends nuts with my daily pen name iterations. Then one day, I decisively announced I’d write as Jennifer J. Coldwater. Everyone cheered! (I’m pretty sure they were all just glad I’d made a decision—not so much that they liked the name.)
Now that I’m back in Los Angeles, I must clear up a gross misconception. I did not name myself after Coldwater Canyon.
Quentin Coldwater
“Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed.” —the first line of The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Quentin Makepeace Coldwater is my favorite character in all of the written word. I have read The Magicians trilogy an embarrassing number of times—I have read all three novels in their entirety no fewer than fourteen times. I’ve read most of The Magicians, the first book, many more times than that. (Don’t judge—how many times have you re-watched an episode of Friends? This is my version that. My literary The Office, if you will.)
George R.R. Martin famously said, “The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea . . . dark and dangerous and full of twists.”
In The Magicians, we meet Quentin at his teenage angst-iest moment. He’s the ultimate nerd—an IQ too high for his own good, nerd friends, nerd habits, nerd hobbies. His ultimate nerd hobby is his obsession with the children’s fantasy series Fillory and Further. In The Magician King, Quentin and his cohorts get to live out their fantasies but of course there is always a price to pay. In The Magician’s Land, Grossman serves up the singularly most satisfying end to a series I’ve ever read.
If you’re looking to mainline magic, this is the series for you. I handsold more than one hundred copies of these books in five years at B&N in Tulsa. We kept track.
These novels, over time, have become my happy place. In the same way Quentin aches for Fillory, I have long ached for Brakebills. Iykyk. If you don’t know, might I suggest you read these books. (As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)
Claire Juniper Hadley
“Stories can die. Of course they can. Ask any author who's had an idea wither in their head, fail to thrive and bear fruit. Or a book that spoke to you as a child but upon revisiting it was silent and empty. Stories can die from neglect, from abuse, from rot. Even war, as Shakespeare warned, can turn books to graves.” —The Library of the Unwritten (A Novel from Hell's Library Book 1) by A.J. Hackwith
As you may have heard, A.J. Hackwith’s The Library of the Unwritten scared the living daylights out of me.
I credit Claire J. Hadley (her middle initial? Stole it.) with lighting a fire under my writerly ass.
In Hackwith’s world where Hell is a self-imposed punishment, Claire’s Hell is filled with unwritten stories. She has doomed herself as Hell’s librarian for her own sin of never writing the stories in her head. Yeah, no.
Rather than continue to wish and wonder about writing, I sat down and did it. And I’m still working on it.
And I gave myself Claire’s middle name as a reminder of why I’m here. Thanks for reading. I appreciate you with all of my heart. But I do it for me. For my soul.
