A to Z Blogging Challenge: Bowling, KJ

For the A to Z Blogging Challenge 2019, Punch the Rabbit delves deep behind the scenes with a series of Author's Notes related to the Stone Soldiers, Spectral Ops, and Shadow Detachment series. 

One of the best things about Men’s Adventure novels (a genre the Stone Soldiers books attempt to copy, in style) is the healthy dose of satire smooshed between bouts of intense, over-the-top action.  

Sharp-eyed readers of the series may have noticed this particular bit of satire: the Mary Cobbler books-within-the-books. In short, the characters of the Stone Soldiers have made references to their world’s most popular magical young adult series, about a young witch who attends a school for witches and wizard, called Frogwarts.

Yes, this is a parody of that popular real-world series about a young boy who finds out he’s something far from ordinary. How could one not include a reference to the successful works of a certain British author, particularly in a series that revolves around the supernatural and magical?

What readers might be surprised to learn is that there’s far more to Mary Cobbler than an off-handed character remark here and there. In fact, for the Shadow Detachment prequel short story series, I had planned an entire tome dedicated to the saga of Mary Cobbler’s author, KJ Bowling, a British author who readers would have learned wasn’t just an imaginative writer, but a former student of a witch academy herself!

Entitled Magician of Interest, this puny story was to take place in the early 2000s, just before the Stone Soldiers program, and was to feature KJ Bowling on the run from the Romanian wizards she was exposing in her children’s books. Protected by Colonel Kenslir and his A.I. sidekick MAX, the almost-witch was going to become an asset for the U.S. Military, revealing a number of secrets about the world’s many covens and the mysterious organization readers know as The Circle.

Alas, like Red Magick, the story chronologically before this one, Magician of Interest got delayed and is nothing more today than an extensive series of notes and outlines. It’s a tale of someone hiding what they really are in a series of books. And that is actually based on something in our reality.

JK Rowling’s worldwide success drew a lot of criticism when the Harry Potter novels first started coming out, with some overly-fervant Christian sects proclaiming the author was intentionally promoting witchcraft. That got me thinking… what if she really was? What if JK is a witch?

Obviously, I don’t believe Ms. Rowling is anything so evil as a bride of Satan, I do have to look to the Men’s Adventure genre, and in particular Agent 007 and wonder… You see, Ian Fleming, the author of James Bond’s many adventures, was indeed a spy himself.

If you read the biography of Ian Fleming, you’ll see the author was, beginning in 1939, a member of the British Intelligence community, serving in the British Navy, like his character Bond, and even went on to help draft plans to form the OSS—which, post-World War II, would become the CIA.

In 1953, Casino Royale was published, and James Bond became a part of literary history.

There’s an old saying that authors should write what they know. Ian Fleming did, and was highly successful. So, why not build upon that idea and choose another popular author and delve into the possibility that a witch could become an author, about witches…? Maybe in 2020...