Please allow me to introduce myself...

I’m a baaaad girl.

I signed up for the Fantasy & Enchantment Blog weeks ago. I nagged my fellow Samhellions into letting me in the door. I nagged them into posting Anne Cain’s gorgeous cover for my book. Then what did I do?

I vanished into the writing hole, that’s what.

Bad Jean Marie.

Well, no more. I’m back, and I plan to be a lot badder. Consider me the wild card in the F&E deck. I write comic fantasy strongly influenced by popular culture. My first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with the late Teri Smith, explored what would happen to a stultifying, Renaissance-style world where magic worked if you imported nine fanfic writers who thought they knew everything about it. My current WIP looks at the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and you know, the way I write it (from her point of view) it’s a comedy. Sex, death and rock-n-roll--what more could anybody ask?

I love dragons and great clothes and magicians and world-altering battles of good and evil, but I come at all of them from a slightly skewed angle. This blog showcases some of the best fantasy romance writers Samhain has to offer. They are our resident experts on everything from Celtic mythology and dragons to medieval witchcraft. They know their stuff, and most of the time I’ll leave the discussion of those topics in their capable hands.

I plan to bring you the other side of the fantasy coin. For example, everybody knows about the Hydra, the Minotaur and other A-list monsters of Greek mythology. But have you ever heard about the Melinoe? Did you know that Eros isn’t really a god at all, much less the son of Aphrodite (or Venus)? Depending on which source you read, he’s either the oldest of the Titans or the oldest sentient being in the universe. How cool is that for someone who believes in romance?

Then there’s the stuff that comes from other mythologies. The youkai--or demons--of Japanese legends are the personification of natural forces and natural-born shifters. They combine facets devils and shifters, and according to one popular theory, the reason we don’t hear about them anymore is they have figured out how to pass as human.

There are a million stories in the naked fantasy city. I hope to be your guide to the ones a little off the beaten track. They glitter just as brightly as the ones you know.