I talked about D.I. Jolly’s BaIT earlier this afternoon, and now I’m pleased to bring you this Q&A with him. I’m particularly grateful to him for this because I sent them the questions under the mistaken impression that we’d previously discussed doing a Q&A. He graciously replied quickly anyway.
Could you take a moment or two to introduce yourself to my readers? What set you on the path to writing, describe your path to publication, genre choices, and so on?
My name is D.I. Jolly, I’m a South African author living in Germany. I first wanted to be a writer when I was about seven years old and played a video game called Gabriel Knight, where the titular character was an author and just the coolest person I could imagine, so I decided I would be him when I grew up.
I currently have seven published books, five novels and two short story collections. When I moved to Germany is started a writing group called Poetry Club, and in the last seven years I’ve written over 270 short stories for this event, and all the ones that aren’t in the published collections are uploaded onto my website. So, if anyone is interested in dipping a toe into my writing you can read over a hundred short stories for free on my site.
When it comes to genre, my aim is always to use it as a story telling element. Rather than a setting. So, with Mostly Human, I used the elements of lycanthropy to display mental health and bipolar disorder. With Counting Sheep, the sci-fi elements are there to create an exaggerated environment of capitalism and consumerism, the two key themes of that novel. With Bait, I wanted to have what is seen now as a cliched paranormal romance novel, but focus on themes of consent rather than lust.
What was the genesis of Bait—both the story and the themes (assuming they didn’t pop up together in your mind)?
As I said, the main theme for me in Bait is consent. I had often joked that I could just write a romance novel and publish it on the Inkitt platform and get thousands of reads no problem. And I joked about it so much that I was challenge to put my money where my mouth was. So, I did, and in researching what was the current focus and trends in romance, I noticed something I really didn’t like. Something called ‘soft consent’. For those who don’t know, soft consent is when a book is written in the first person and the reader is in their head, so even though a character is saying “no, no, no, get off me.” The reader knows that in their head the character is thinking, “actually yes I want you.”
Now, I’m not here to shame anybody, your fantasies are yours, enjoy them. But what bothered me was that a lot of the audience for these kinds of books on those kinds of platforms are younger teenagers. And I saw a pattern of the snake eating its own tail, in that, an adult with experience and understand would write a soft consent novel to live out their fantasy. Absolutely fine. That would then get read by a teenager who learns something about themselves and expresses it in their own book. But now you’ve lost the experience and some of the understanding behind that kind of story. That then gets read by another teenager who does the same thing, and now it’s just focused on the sex and lacking consent but being displayed as, ‘this is what love looks like’.
And I wanted to throw a wrench into that spiral. So, I wrote Bait and made sure to show that consent was vital and very important, that consent could still be very sexy, and that consent taken away was traumatic. Both sexually and in the case of not listening to your partner while they’re in crisis.
And low and behold it got hundreds of thousands of reads on Inkitt, and was so popular that the digital rights were licensed by Inkitt and published on their pay to read app Galatea, and the publishing company TinPot acquired the print rights and put it out into the world.
I picked up a nod or two to your Mostly Human books—does this take place in the same world? If so—these werewolves seem different from Alex and the rest. Am I wrong about that? Or do you have multiple species wandering around the world (which is kind of cool), and do you plan on having them intersect?
They are different worlds in my head, but I did just want to put Easter Eggs to my other books in the story. Mostly for my own entertainment but also just to have a little nod to people who maybe go from Bait to reading some of my other books. I like the idea of someone who loved Bait diving into Mostly Human and going. “Ooooooooooohh!”
Jessica is a big personality. I know people like her and they can (fully unintentionally) take over a room/conversation in a moment—was it a challenge to keep her as a secondary character and/or keep her from taking over most scenes she’s in?
Because Bait is written in the first person and Jessica is always preserved not given her own perspective it actually made it very easy to have her be a big personally but not stealing the story. Having the boundary walls of not getting her own point of view, made it safer in a way to let her steal the scenes she was in, and to really be herself. It was also a lot of fun to write.
You’ve got a few books now under your belt—I’ve often heard that writers, or artists in general, will forget hundreds of positive reviews but always remember the negative. What’s the worst thing that someone’s said about one of your books, and has it altered your approach to future books?
There is a two-star review of my first book A Guy A Girl and A Voodoo Monkey Hand that is about 2 pages long, that point by point breaks down everything I apparently did wrong.
There is also a review of Mostly Human with the line. “…and the author didn’t really know what Thai Chi was.” Which always makes me think. “I don’t think you know what a joke is.” But hey. It’s still a four-star review. But these are the comments that live rent free in my head.
Is there a genre that you particularly enjoy reading, but could never write? Is there one you’re dying to try?
I read a lot of classics, Russian and Japanese literature. Which goes from brutal to psychedelic realism. Which I really enjoy reading but really don’t think I could write in that way. The way I think and tell stories doesn’t lend itself to that sort of world building and descriptions.
here’s a game we play around here, called “Online Bookstore Algorithm”. What are 3-5 books whose readers may like BaIt?
I’ve been told that if you enjoyed the Twilight series, you’d really like Bait. There is a very popular book on the Galatea app called Millennium Wolves, and those readers would also get behind Bait I believe. Otherwise, I don’t know, Vampire Academy? Or the Sookie Stackhouse books.
What’s next for D.I. Jolly, author?
I wrote a dark psychological thriller called Blurred Lines that I’m currently shopping around. I’m also working on a new novel Milton (working title) which is a family comedy drama. That I’m really enjoying working on. I’m waiting for a video game to be announced that I can finally tell people which game I wrote the story for, which is exciting. Poetry Club is still on going, the last Monday of every month, so there will be some new short stories going live on my website the next day. Yeah, lots of things going on, and they’re all writing.
Thanks for your time—and thanks for Bait, and hope you have plenty of success with it.
Thank you, me too.
The big idea: do we need to dismantle the literary canon?—it’s a perennial question, that almost perennially renders interesting ideas, like this one.
Grab a book, any book.
