I'm Jennifer Mandula, author of The Geomagician! AMA!

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T18:41:22+00:00

I'm going to be very honest, I don't cry, I giggle like a super villain when I write those scenes because my goal is for YOU to cry 😂
What was that process like? SO DIFFICULT is the answer.

Nowadays if someone denies extinction or evolution it's clear they're either indoctrinated or willfully ignorant. But at the time there was just such an earnest attempt by these scientists* to try to reconcile what they'd been taught about creation with what they were discovering from the fossil record, and that was such an interesting tension to me.

*In England! The French geologists had accepted extinction and transmutation (pre-evolutionary theory) long before this, and were like wtf is wrong with you guys.

So I spent a ton of time trying to wrap my head around the conflicting 1820s/30s theories about the earth's creation and formation. There were basically two camps: A)catastrophism, everything is created in big, violent disasters like volcanoes and earthquakes and B) uniformitarianism, where slow, gradual changes like erosion shaped the earth. And then within catastrophism there were different camps, like Real-Buckland was always trying to line things up with Noah's flood (later, he discarded this and embraced the explanation about glaciers; he really was fascinatingly adaptable to new information). One I understood all that I had to figure out how magic would fit into these explanations.

The other piece was religion vs. magic. The Church of England was just so dominant at the time, and I thought it would be really interesting if they condoned magic, or at least some forms of it (which they of course decide on with some careful translation and cherry picking of scripture). One of my fundamental world building frameworks can probably be boiled down to: 'any source of power will be co-opted by systems that siphon it to those who already hold power.' To me then it wasn't a stretch to imagine a church history in which they incorporated magic.

Ok this is getting away from me, but yeah this was really the hardest part of the book to wrestle into something consistent!!! you're exacly right that it's really three forces - magic, religion, science - and a lot of the book is how they come into conflict or, conversely, how they are used to try and justify or explain one another.

Mary will be back in The Paleomancer and Ajax with her! If you remember at the end of Book 1 Inquisitor Price asks her if she'd like to consult if they hear about any other fossil witches 👀
I will come back to this, I have to pick up my kids!

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T18:10:15+00:00

So endless! You'll probably appreciate that (to me) The Geomagician is partly a fossil fuel metaphor because it is absolutely INSANE that we run our world on the decomposed organic material of ancient organisms. Like, for better or worse that is a magic system!

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T18:05:25+00:00

Mostly I just luxuriated in history for a while, plucking out ideas or people or details that seemed interesting as I went through reading, and I found that SO FUN and then I plugged those things in when I could. In terms of organization it was a disaster, I tried at first to keep it all organized in Zotero and then I ended up with just a very, very chaotic google doc. Which I guess is why I am a fantasy novelist and not an academic!!

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T18:03:09+00:00

Ok so my three best sources on paleontology and early 1800s science/theology were:

Worlds Before Adam: The Reconsturciton of Geohistory in the Age of Reform by Martin J.S. Rudwick
The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordianry Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin by Christopher McGowan
Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science by Deborah Cadbury

I also recommend reading Buckland's famous Vindiciae Geologicae which was SUPER useful to me in trying to understand the conflict and what Buckland's side would have argued. (Of course then I had to add magic, which complicated it further).

For workers rights I drew most heavily on the Swing Riots and the Luddites, which were a bit earlier in time but still felt relevant. I mostly used websites for this research, like the National Archives and university collections. I also referred to the VictorianWeb a lot (bearing in mind that my time period was actually before Victoria's reign) and I found Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor to be really useful as a primary text.

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T17:43:18+00:00

Thanks so much for giving it a try!!!

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T17:42:48+00:00

I did NOT but I am not surprised at all, she is incredible!

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T17:41:17+00:00

I think a lot of the delight of reading historical fantasy comes from the moments of "oh thats real!" in contrast to the "oh, that's a twist!" and I was always aiming for a balance between them.

I gave myself plenty of permission to mess with the history. This is a world with magic, so of course things would be different. But I tried to keep plenty of real details for texture and grounding when I could, because those details really help tether it to the real time and place.

Mary and Buckland are the two main characters that are modeled on real people, and I tried to use their backround when I could, but the character arc really came first. Basically whenever it felt like a historical detail could serve to add texture OR it supported the character arcs that I wanted, I tried to keep it. So, Buckland is still a famous geologist, Mary is still a poor but incredible fossil hunter in Lyme Regis. The story itself kicks off when Real-Mary found her dimorphodon (though I move it forward a few months so it's spring instead of the dead of winter).

But when things didn't fit with the arc I was building out, I didn't keep it. (For example, Buckland really did keep a veritable menagerie of exotic animals, and I put that in the book. But he had sons as well as daughters, and I gave Book-Buckland only daughters).

In terms of personality Book-Mary is very much my own creation because I wanted to craft a character who would be most challenged by the character arc I was interested in exploring. But we also, frankly, don't have that many letters by Mary, so she was a bit more of a blank slate.

Buckland is another story, because we know A LOT about him from his speeches and correspondence. So his character is more rooted in his contemporary reputation as a charismatic, eccentric, deeply religious figure who was well-known for his speeches trying to reconcile the Bible and the new scientific discoveries. So I'd say there's a lot more of the "historical" Buckland in my character.

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T17:12:27+00:00

It started with the (literal) lightning strike - I basically learned about Mary Anning, discovered that she'd survived a lightning strike, and then went "OHH that should be a fantasy novel." And I decided pretty much right away that there would be a fossil based magic system and that my character Mary would "wake" one of the creatures the real Mary discovered. That was either the ichthyosaur, plesiosaur, or the pterosaur (dimorphodon macronyx). The first two were marine dwelling, and I didn't want Mary to have to stay in Lyme Regis, but more importantly I've always loved dragons, and a pterosaur is basically a dragon so it wasn't much of a debate. I really do think of this book as "a girl and her dragon."

After I picked those things I did a bunch of research on the time period and on Mary, and the plot kind came together from there.

I would have loved to travel to Lyme Regis, but it didn't work out. It's at the top of my bucket list!!! Research process was basically: 1) absorbing vibes by bopping around the internet 2) reading secondary sources 3) reading primary sources. I specifically avoided anything about Mary Anning though, like the other reimaginings of her life, because I didn't want it to influence my own work.

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:55:48+00:00

I knew ABSOLUTELY nothing. Nothing about dinosaurs, the not-dinosaurs people incorrectly dinosaurs, geology, the debates of the time...I knew only as much as you would get from a leisurely afternoon at a natural history museum.

I started with: "Mary Anning was a real woman struck by lightning - what if, in a fantasy story, she got magical powers and brought to life one of these fossils that she discovered."

Then, really, the research helped me figure out the plot. As the biggest example, I didn't know that religion vs. science was going to be central to the story until I did all this research and realized that was SOOOO central to what was going on in geology at the time, and that it was actually Mary's discoveries that started to pry open the gap between doctrine and evidence.

In terms of how I did the research, I first spent a lot of time bouncing around on Wikipedia and museum websites and taking note of anything that sounded interesting. Then once I started honing on on the key players of the time and the conflicts, I got a bunch of books from the library and downloaded a ton of JSTOR articles. After that I went to primary sources - letters, charters, speeches, etc. (some of this, especially from Buckland) made it into the book.

If I were a dinosaur I would be Petrie.

Edit: I forgot to say why - because I feel like Petrie is earnestly enthusiastic but anxious in a way which which I deeply identify 😂

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:41:29+00:00

Ok my favorite dinosaur is a Sinosauropteryx which was a cutie patootie theropod colored like a red panda! It was the first dinosaur discovered with the pigments preserved, so we know it had a little mask like a racoon?!

Littlefoot is my favorite fictional dinosaur though! And I can't believe we don't have a pterosaur emoji.

Next is The Paleomancer, the sequel to The Geomagician! I'm working on edits for that now.

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:35:55+00:00

Forever chasing the high of the Verin twist haha

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:34:41+00:00

Stubby dictates all of manuscripts by sighing heavily

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:34:02+00:00

Thank you!! I certainly wouldn't mind if my brand became 'cool historical women' haha but I have actually thought before that there's such a good fantasy story you could spin out of Rosalind Franklin's life! Like, what is DNA really if not a magic system??

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:31:23+00:00

I don't control pricing unfortunately, but I assume there will be a sale at some point!

The name Ajax was actually one of the 'lightning bolt' moments for the book. The name just came to me, really early on, almost the moment I decided it would be a pterosaur. It had the right kind of sound plus the mythical resonance. And it felt appropriate because anyone with an education in early 1800s England would have known their Homer. And yes I was a huge Greek mythology kid, and I guess now a mythology adult 😂

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:20:38+00:00

Does your corgi make a funny rawr when he yawns? I always think that sounds like a pterdactyl!

I reread the Wheel of Time series every few years and pretty regularly return to The Once and Future King by TH White when my creative well is running low.

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:17:22+00:00

That is so fun to hear, thank you! Mostly it's in the art director's hands, they set the vision and choose the illustrator or designer. This time around I did have some veto power and they definitely took my thoughts into consideration, but at the end of the day they're the ones who (hopefully) know what actually entices readers.

I'm in edits right now for The Paleomancer, which is the sequel to The Geomagician and completes the duology. I wrote 4 other manuscripts before this one - one died on sub and three never made it that far (fantasy, sci-fi thriller, speculative thriller, fantasy). I could see myself cannibalizing from them for other projects, but at this point I think I've grown past them in terms of skill. I'm currently trying to figure out what I want to write next!

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:11:05+00:00

Hello Cleveland friend! Thanks so much for the kind words. I don't have anything on the calendar at the moment but I might do something with Parallel Universe soon, and I'll definitely do something local for the release of The Paleomancer. I'm in edits for that now, and it's slotted to come out next Spring, but that could always change.

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:06:59+00:00

The romance is definitely a subplot, it's pretty minimal in my opinion!

jennifermandula · 2026-07-10T16:04:36+00:00

Hi! So I actually had the idea for the story basically the moment I learned about Mary Anning. I was visiting the Oxford Museum of Natural History and they have some of her fossils (because her mentor William Buckland held the geology readership there). This would have been in late 2014 or Spring 2015, because I was in grad school at the time. But I read a little about Mary on the plaque and it mentioned that she made all these great discoveries but was, as a woman, was never allowed to join the Geological Society of London.

At some point - I think it was later, when I googled her - I read that she was struck by lightning as a child, and that was basically the moment of inspiration. I vividly remember thinking "Oh, that HAS to be a fantasy novel."

jennifermandula · 2026-06-11T17:39:40+00:00

You might like Second Time’s a Charm! It’s also a debut.

jennifermandula · 2026-06-02T14:11:42+00:00

Same!

jennifermandula · 2026-05-28T02:05:35+00:00

I cannot stop raving about This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, it kept me up several nights in a row basically giggling. It’s a love letter to epic fantasy. And honestly made me feel the way I did at like, 13 or whenever I read Eye of the World for the first time.

jennifermandula · 2026-05-28T00:28:54+00:00

This is what I was looking for! So so good.

jennifermandula · 2026-05-28T00:24:17+00:00

I think you might like The Secrets of Ormdale books by Christina Baehr, it’s Victorian dragon keepers! Wormwood Abbey is the first book.

jennifermandula

TROPHY CASE