Guest Post From D. Gabrielle Jensen

Hello. I am D. Gabrielle Jensen, author of what I’m trying to niche down to rock and roll urban fantasy—stories set in modern urban locales, featuring paranormal, supernatural, and mythological elements, and imbued with music.

I just finished my first full-length trilogy set in a version of Denver crawling with fugitive souls inhabiting human hosts. My main character, Fia Drake, is a solitary bounty hunter with the task of returning these souls to the underworld, while also navigating angels, demons, and drummers.

As a child, I took it upon myself to read and learn the stories of Ancient Greece, but I also studied the Christian Bible, both as a curious fascination more than anything. That grew into a fascination for all things weird and unusual. As an adult, I remained interested in the mythologies of various cultures, though admittedly, I still know more about Greece than any other traditions because of the time I spent with it so early in my life. I am deeply fascinated by connections and parallels that can be made between cultures that, in their time, would never have interacted in a way as to share their stories.

One such symbol that shows up repeatedly throughout my trilogy is a feather. A literal connection is made between the feathers and angelkind, but a deeper, less obvious connection is made between the feather and the underworld, through Ma’at and Annubis of Egyptian tradition. There is also a parallel between Fia and Max each finding their own feathers and where the story eventually leads us as readers. Without giving away an ending with a lot of punch, many cultures associate feathers with freedom, flight, connection to the divine or spiritual realms and these ideas come full circle, for all of the characters, as the series winds to a close.

Urban fantasy lends well to the incorporation of mythologies from around the world. Because we, as authors, are world building in an earth parallel, we have the luxury of a ready-made encyclopedia of creatures for our protagonists to encounter. And that, I think, is half the fun—figuring out how Cupid or Bael might get along in modern times, giving a character a pet Chupacabra. The sky is truly the limit in terms of how outrageous these monsters in a modern world can become.

My early fascination with these mythologies and legends, the stories of the ancient world, a fascination that carried on throughout my life, evolving and morphing as I learned more, read more, experienced more, has given me a plethora of beings to drop into a modern world, just to see how they react. Following Fia Drake, I have started telling the story of a new protagonist. Private investigator and earth-bound demon Abby Vega can be found in the limited-edition Magic and Mystery anthology from Bone Diggers Press, in the story “Price of Fame.”

If you are interested in seeing more of how I work mythology (and music) into my stories, I am all over social media, but the most reliable source of information is my newsletter which goes out every other Wednesday afternoon. New subscribers get the first chapter of Drummers and Demons, the first book of the Fia Drake Soul Hunter trilogy for free. 

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