First though, can you tell us a little bit about the concept behind Jennifer Strange and its ghostly horror? Jennifer has the gift of summoning, meaning she can give ghosts or demons corporeal forms.
The Blackwell family wants to stop her from using her power before all the undead in Savannah try to use Jennifer to cross over back into the land of the living.
But when the ghosts and demons start to find Jennifer, they also start to find Liz, and the two of them half to team up against the undead and the Blackwell family to survive. One of the things that first attracted me to Jennifer Strange was actually the idea of illustrations in YA.
How did you reach the decision to incorporate art into Jennifer Strange? Was it something you knew from the start, or did it come later? Believe it or not, Jennifer was a TV pilot when I first wrote her ten years ago. It was for a pilot writing class I took in undergrad, where I mainly studied screenwriting.
The irony that my name is now Scully by marriage is not lost on me. When I came back to class, I had the core story for Jennifer Strange, which after ten years has not really changed. Jennifer is the believer, Liz is the skeptic.
