Hi all,

Welcome to the delayed retrospective that was supposed to be JABB 700!  The storm that prompted the change ended up being not much of anything in my area though it certainly caused damage elsewhere.  Meanwhile, moving out of my office is almost complete.   Yesterday I took home all of my tech stuff.  All that's left is a few snacks and a sad, little box of assorted office supplies which I'm picking up on Monday.  Then we have a few weeks of limbo and then the locks will be changed and we will all be locked out of the office that I have worked in for most of my adult life.  It's a good thing.  The renovation will allow us all to have our own spaces but it comes at the cost of most of us not seeing each other for a year or more.  So maybe it's good that this more contemplative newsletter happens now. 

Anyway, before I get started I just wanted to wish a happy Mother's Day to all moms: moms to kiddos, moms to pets, moms to friends, and so on.  I hope you have a great day!

God bless,
Jenni


Random and Possibly Repetitive Questions and Answers

Yeah, so... had a snafu.  Partly a tech issue, partly me being disorganized.  I have a habit of putting bits for newsletters into the drafts section of my email program... but then forgetting to delete them once I've used those bits.  Then, to add to it, suddenly almost everything in my Drafts is dated February 2025 so I can't even sort to find what I wrote recently.  So some of these may have already been used but I'm just too busy to unknot it all right now.  I really hope that once I'm settled at work, I'll stop feeling so disorganized.

Will there be any angel/human anam caras among the Little Friends eventually?

I wouldn't rule anything out entirely but I think it would look a lot different if so.  For me, the only reason Andrew and JenniAnn aren't totally creepy is because Andrew was completely oblivious to JenniAnn's existence until she was seventeen and he didn't develop any complicated feelings until she was well into her twenties.  The story feels very different and, I think, very creepy if instead it had been Eli and JenniAnn.  Eli was there when JenniAnn was a baby.  Eli helped care for her when she was really little.  He watched her grow up.  If he'd ended up pursuing her, it would raise serious questions about grooming.  And I just don't want to go there.  I mean I never read the Twilight books but the Jacob and Renesmee thing made me wrinkle my nose when I heard about it.  No thank you...

So if it did happen, it would more likely look like Joccy and Takoda who are romantically involved but only a few years apart or Shelby and Violeta who are, again, only a few years apart in age but also share a familial bond as opposed to a romantic one.  It would not be a case of, say, Henry suddenly developing feelings.  That would be gross.  It would be some as-yet-unknown angel who was born within my lifetime.  And, to be honest, at this point I don't even feel like I need that.  I think it's going to be more interesting to see which Little Friends marry within the group and which marry outside of it and how they introduce their partner to everything.  At this point, the most "scandalous" things I have planned for that generation are Liam and Belle getting together with a five year age gap and being unofficial cousins and Avi and Evie only being twenty when they marry.  It probably becomes a running joke amongst that generation that their parents were so wild and messy.

How do you choose which current events to incorporate?

Really it's just a matter of time, chiefly, but also of interest and ability.  Sometimes there will be a global or social event that occurs and I quickly write a vignette in which Andrew or someone confronts it.  More often, however, even if I'm really moved by something, I don't have time to write about it.  Whether I write about something or not should never be taken as an indicator of how important I view that event to be.  For example, barring a handful of references, I haven't written about the war in Ukraine.  That doesn't mean I think it's less important than that one time Pope Benedict said something I thought was lacking in proper compassion ("The Butterfly").  It just means I had more time then and felt better-equipped to write about coming of age during the Catholic sexual abuse scandal than I do about the experience of having your country attacked.

How do you decide what aspects of real life politics and religion to incorporate and which to change?

Generally speaking, anyone at the country or global level is the same in the Dyeland/Asteriana stories as in real life.  The current U.S. administration is the one the Friends have to deal with.  Pope Leo XIV is the leader of the Catholic Church.  Aziraphale and Crowley probably see King Charles' image all over the place.  Ed's and Steve's and their crew's PM is Christopher Luxon and so on.  But at the state or smaller level, I will take creative leeway if I want.  For example, I'm sometimes tempted to make Joe Maxwell the mayor of New York City.  As it is, Archbishop Tony is the archbishop of New York when, obviously, that is not the case in real life (the would be Cardinal Timothy Dolan).  This distinction feels in keeping with most of the TV I grew up watching in which, unless it was specifically about the president, the actual president was assumed to be the real life one and yet some totally made up character would be the mayor or bishop.

In terms of which issues and events I cover, see the answer above.  It's largely a matter of timing.  Ongoing things like policies are more likely to inform how a story is written than a single event is.  So, for example, some characters will make some major life changes due to the current immigration policies. 

One thing I'm having to be much more mindful of is not writing too far into the future.  When Joshua is among the Friends, his "live feed" is down.  That means he doesn't know what's going to happen at every single moment.  That's why they can do things like surprise him with a special meal or spa day.  But he still remembers creating every last person.  So he's never going to be absolutely shocked by what a given person does.  He knows them better than anyone else ever could.  So that means he should never be completely thrown off by a newly announced policy and, ideally, might even have started prepping the Friends for it.  So... yeah.  That's definitely slowing down my writing of "The Prodigal."

You've incorporated characters from other TV shows, movies, and books into the stories.  Are there any who you wanted to include but didn't?

Not gonna lie...  I was a bit tempted to steal a character from Conclave and make him the Pope within the Dyeland/Asteriana universe.  However, I decided it was more important to be able to engage with whatever Pope Leo ends up doing with his papacy than make up an entire idealized one.  Beyond that, where I have decide to incorporate other media, I've more often found myself wanting to write about the existing characters engaging with that.  So like no member of the Crane family is going to show up at Willowveil but, instead, Andrew and JenniAnn have some deep discussions while watching Hill House.  Obviously, I went a bit further than that with Steve, Ed, and their crew.  They're all expys from Our Flag Means Death although I've enjoyed beginning to flesh them out beyond that. 

To be brutally honest, I also don't really wanna risk it any more.  Between Rowling and Gaiman, my desire to bring in others' work is pretty diminished these days.  If Mike Flanagan ever does anything awful, I might become a hermit.

Have your views on how the angels perceive themselves evolved at all from when you started writing?

I think so, yes.  From the start, I had a pretty clear idea, inherited from TBAA, about how the angels identified.  They are not man and woman and likely not even truly male and female.  But they can be masculine or feminine or both or neither.  They do identify with whatever their form makes them appear as.  Hence, it's not weird that Tess used "Angel Boy" and "Angel Girl" and "Miss Wings."  And it also makes sense that Monica feels bound to Ireland and its people, same with Ed and Aotearoa and the Maori people.  The principalities all feel a special kinship with the people and land they're assigned to and they appear to be part of those people. 

Where I think the shift has been is how their relationships towards humans have evolved.  Obviously, some of them have human anam caras.  But there are also characters like Marty who has spent most of his life watching humans from afar and now is enmeshed.  The theory underlying the stories is that had humanity not fallen, angels and humans would have lived and worked together in Eden.  That, obviously, didn't work out.  But now Marty sees a chance to snatch that back and he's very invested, even going so far as to view Andrew and JenniAnn as a sort of new Adam and new Eve.  Marty realizes now that that was a bit unhealthy.  But the underlying desire remains. 

As a result of that, I've also reflected more on what that means for the angels' relationship with Joshua.  And I've concluded that, especially for the angels like Andrew who have human anam caras and children, they view themselves as sort of co-recipients of Joshua's sacrifice.  Before, I'd viewed them as secondary victims who just had to sit by and watch their Creator get tortured and killed with no real benefit to them.  But now I think of them, and they think of themselves, as secondary beneficiaries to the point that, in the El-Chananite Church, angels can and do take the Eucharist.  This is because they recognize that, through his death and resurrection, Joshua made it possible for their human loved ones to reside with them in Heaven forever.  His sacrifice didn't secure their eternal lives in the sense that, without it, they'd be in Hell.  But he secured their eternal lives with those they love.

I've also, over time, begun to emphasize more the fraternal feelings among the angels.  The Watchers, in particular, feel like the older siblings who try to stand between the younger ones and Satan, even going so far as to leave most if not all of the non-Watchers out of the War. 

What do you think is the nature of the angels' human forms?

I honestly have no idea.  It's one of those things that even just in TBAA, if you think about it too long, it doesn't make much sense.  Like I know this sounds funny but sometimes I'd watch TBAA and be like "Are they committing fraud?"  Like how are they passing background checks for military jobs?!  Isn't it gonna look a lil sus that they don't have parents???  Do they have DNA?  Do they have blood types?  Isn't that something the military would record?  I don't think there's any way to answer those questions.  And the same goes for the spirits.  Can they donate blood?  Would anything in their blood indicate that they're from a gene pool from 2,000 years ago?  But they feel less confusing to me because I've never given them military or government jobs.  I'm an administrative assistant and my workplace has no bloody (ha) idea what my blood type is.  So when John was assisting Fr. Mike, I don't think the diocese or whomever woulda sensed anything supernatural.  But, yeah, the angels remain an enigma to me.  But I do have some head canon including...

- Generally speaking, angels' human forms are visually indistinct from humans... in all aspects.  That means no one looks like a Barbie or Ken doll.  I love Dogma but Dogma this is not. 
- Body hair is at their discretion.  I don't think anyone *needs* to shave.  Like Aziraphale may have decided he just doesn't want to ever be bothered with facial hair so it just doesn't grow.  Meanwhile, because Andrew enjoys the ritual of shaving and having options, his facial hair grows the same as it would were he human.
- Reproductive systems are either not present or simply don't function.  It would be hugely unfair if Violeta had to deal with periods for all eternity just because she has the form of a woman of reproductive age.  So, yeah, not happening except...
- Edgar Rawiri assumedly currently has a working reproductive system because he's human now.  However, because he's in an exclusive marriage to a man, he won't be biologically fathering children.  When he dies and returns to being an angel, he'll revert to as he was as an angel.  If, hypothetically, he was with a woman and got her pregnant, I have no idea where the genetics he was passing down would have come from.  Possibly God deliberately planned to never have to cross that bridge by making the only angel-human a monogamous gay man.  I'm not sure Andrew would have been given the same option... and he's definitely okay with that.
- Angels are protected from sexual violence.  I have no justification for this.  I just don't want to go there.
- Angels in human form can, however, suffer as the result of other types of violence... hence Andrew's TBI from his time in Afghanistan.
- Angels can get colds, maybe even have allergies.  Definitely headaches.  But they wouldn't have to deal with more serious viral and bacterial diseases and infections.  They also can't develop diseases like cancer.  That being said, their every day clothes are just normal clothes.  So that's why Andrew stripped down, showered, and changed every time he went out during COVID.  He couldn't get COVID but, at the time, it was uncertain whether or not he could carry it to others on his clothes.

Anyway, I know there was more but I'm gonna leave it here for now. 



This newsletter is dedicated to John Dye for giving me an excuse to sit for a bit.  I'm tired.  So this is nice.

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