A coffee break with Jennifer Brozek
Jenn is a good friend of mine, and we regularly enjoy playing Eberron together on Twitch, as well as chatting over drinks on Thursday evenings. Over the years, I’ve come to know her as someone who’s thoughtful, smart, and downright fun! I invited her to share details about her new project, Dear Penpal, Belgium 1980, which is currently on Kickstarter. It’s a new type of project for her, on a new platform, and it sounds AMAZING! Grab a favourite drink (I recommend a cup of coffee for the morning crowd and a glass of vodka for the later crowd) and dive in!
“Dear Penpal, Belgium 1980” is based partly on your own life. Can you share a bit about the real inspiration behind the story?
I’m a military brat which means that one of my parents (my father) was in the military. Thus, we moved around a lot. Usually every 2-3 years. I lived on military bases for most of my young life with one exception—Belgium. Dad was stationed at SHAPE, Belgium from 1979 to 1980. That put me there during my impressionable tween years (9,10,11).
Because of “reasons” (I think it was a shortage of available base housing mixed with a favorable franc to the dollar), my family did not live on base. Instead, we lived in a 300-year-old manor house in Brugelette. The house was well build and had been updated for the time, but it still had a belltower off the attic, two floors, a stone cellar, a root cellar, and an escape tunnel me and my siblings weren’t supposed to know about. One of the standout aspects of the home was the huge backyard with its eight-foot stone wall.
It was the biggest place I’ve ever lived in my life both in footage and backyard space. We had a lot of room, but we only had ourselves. We had no school-age friends nearby. We did not speak the same language as our neighbors (the ones that weren’t cows). We did not have a normal upbringing. By and large, me and my siblings were left to our own devices in that rambling, old house…and many a strange thing occurred during those three years—some of which I share in the letters.
The storytelling is very different in this project, as letters back and forth between pen pals. Can you tell us a bit about your writing process?
“Dear Penpal, Belgium 1980” is even more different than reading letters between a couple of people (an epistolary story). All of the letters come from a single point of view: mine. Well, a variant of fictionalized 10-year-old me.
The thing about postal letters is that they need to have a loose structure to them. Previous questions answered and the continuation of previously told stories along with a mixture of what is happening right now in the letter writer’s life. One thought should lead to the next. Sometimes there are hard shifts in topics. But all of it needs to hang together.
Then there is the knowledge that these letters will be reread, often one after another. That means there needs to be a structure to the overall story arc that is being told. There needs to be a beginning, middle, and end to each arc introduced. It’s a bit like telling a novella-length story in flash fiction chapters. By the end, the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts because there is an understanding between what was said and what wasn’t said.
All that is to say…I outlined the whole story first, then I broke down each plot point by letter. Then I let my inner child go to town. Later, my inner editor had to make sense of what was written because we all know that while life doesn’t need to make sense, fiction must.
Something else that’s different about this project, which I love: You’ve chosen Kickstarter to bring it to life! To me, Kickstarter is an intimidating platform. Can you tell us a bit why you chose it, and any tips for other authors on how to use it?
While I have backed many Kickstarters, this is the first project I’m bringing to life through the platform. Yes, it’s intimidating as hell. It took me about three years to decide to launch “Dear Penpal, Belgium 1980” on Kickstarter.
Why? “A cozy ghost story told through 24 physical letters” is not something you can sell to New York. The overhead for mailing two letters a month per backer isn’t difficult, but it is not scalable in a way that would make it worth anyone’s time in a retail sense. Really, “Dear Penpal, Belgium 1980” is not a project I could sell traditionally anywhere—not even to those places that do tell stories via the post (The Flower Letters and the Max Letters) because of its singular point of view. Kickstarter is the only way I think I can produce “Dear Penpal, Belgium 1980” as a product.
Tips. My biggest tip for an author who wants to use Kickstarter for the first time is to get help from an experienced author or team. There are several Facebook groups designed around helping authors get their pages right, to answer questions, and to cheer them on. There are dozens of “how to” books out there as well. But as I have not used a book (I got personalized help), I don’t have any to recommend.
Also, I think as the markets change, how Kickstarter is used will change, too. Right now, many larger companies use Kickstarter as a marketing tool while many indie authors use it to fund the physical creation of their novels. Who knows how it will be used in the future?
Jennifer Brozek is a multi-talented, award-winning author, editor, and media tie-in writer. She is the author of Never Let Me Sleep and The Last Days of Salton Academy, both of which were nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. Her BattleTech tie-in novel, The Nellus Academy Incident, won a Scribe Award. Her editing work has earned her nominations for the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Hugo Award. She won the Australian Shadows Award for the Grants Pass anthology, co-edited with Amanda Pillar. Jennifer’s short form work has appeared in Apex Publications, Uncanny Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and in anthologies set in the worlds of Valdemar, Shadowrun, V-Wars, Masters of Orion, and Predator.
Jennifer has been a full-time freelance author and editor for over seventeen years, and she has never been happier. She keeps a tight schedule on her writing and editing projects and somehow manages to find time to teach writing classes and volunteer for several professional writing organizations such as SFWA, HWA, and IAMTW. She shares her husband, Jeff, with several cats and often uses him as a sounding board for her story ideas. Visit Jennifer's worlds at jenniferbrozek.com or her social media accounts on LinkTree.
