The Notes Between
A Little About Me, and Why I Write
I’ve spent most of my life helping other people tell their stories. For more than thirty years, I’ve worked as a graphic designer, artist, and marketer. My day job was finding ways to bring ideas to life, give them meaning, and help them connect with the people they’re meant to reach.
But my evening job also let me enjoy what I love most…more storytelling! For more than twenty-five years, I’ve been reading to my six children nearly every night. We’ve traveled through wardrobes, wandered unfamiliar worlds, met unlikely heroes, and found ourselves thoroughly invested in the lives of people who never actually existed. (Although I might argue that some fictional characters are every bit as real to us as the people we encounter in everyday life.)
I’ve always loved the stories that do more than entertain. The ones that excite your imagination, prick something deep in your soul, and leave you thinking long after the final page. Stories that make you reconsider what you thought you understood about yourself, the people you love, or the world around you.
Because I believe the best stories don’t just help us escape our lives. They send us back to them seeing something differently.
And perhaps, if we’re fortunate, a little better for having read them.
The Music Between the Notes
There’s another part of my life that has found its way rather insistently into my writing: music.
I’ve played piano for as long as I can remember, and I’ve spent more than sixteen seasons performing viola with the Tempe Symphony Orchestra, along with other smaller musical ensembles.
If you aren’t familiar with the viola, think of it as the slightly larger, deeper-voiced sibling of the violin. It occupies the alto range in a string ensemble, and I’ve come to love that particular musical space.
Here’s something I’ve learned from years of sitting in the middle of an orchestra.
The melody is what you hum in the car on your way home. The bass is what you feel in your chest or find yourself tapping your foot to without even realizing it.
But between those two voices is an entire world of sound.
The inner voices fill the spaces, create tension and resolution, and give the melody and bass a relationship with one another. They turn two independent musical ideas into something richer and more complete.
And often, you don’t consciously notice them at all.
Until they’re missing.
Take away those middle notes, and you may still recognize the tune. You may still feel the pulse beneath it. But something isn’t quite right. The music has lost its fullness, its balance, some essential part of what made it beautiful in the first place.
You might not even be able to put your finger on what’s gone.
That is the voice Ashiel holds.
And in many ways, that is where his story began.
Why Light? Why Music? Why Ashiel?
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that who we are is more than the sum of what we can remember about ourselves.
We are shaped by the people we’ve loved, the things we’ve lost, the choices we’ve made, and perhaps even by things we don’t yet understand.
Who were we before we became who we are today? How much of that person remains? And how much of who we might yet become depends on what we choose to do next?
Those questions became the foundation of ASHIEL, an urban fantasy story spanning a celestial existence, medieval Ireland, and the modern world.
In Ashiel’s world, light and music are more than atmosphere. They are expressions of identity. Each soul carries a distinct voice, a quality of light that is uniquely its own. Together, those voices can create something extraordinary. But harmony is not the same as uniformity. Each must remain free if it is to become all it has the potential to be.
Ashiel is an inner voice. An essential part of a harmony shared with two other souls he loves beyond reason.
And when that harmony is broken, he struggles to understand who he is without it.
His journey is one of friendship, grief, belonging, sacrifice, and the sometimes painful distinction between loving someone and needing to keep them. It’s about the choices that can diminish our light and those that might help us find it again.
It’s also about the possibility that the bonds we form may leave impressions far deeper and more lasting than memory alone.
Music became the natural language for exploring those ideas because, to me, it has always been capable of expressing things words can’t quite reach.
I’ve even taken up learning the feadán, an unusual instrument that features prominently in the books. Bringing its music into my own hands has been a particularly enjoyable part of bringing this fictional world to life. I suspect the characters would have a few things to say about my progress.
A Different Kind of Storytelling
After three decades of helping businesses, brands, and other people find their voices, there’s something both exhilarating and slightly terrifying about finally putting one of my own stories into the world.
I’m still an artist. Still a designer and marketer. Still a musician. Still a mother who believes that sharing a wonderful book with a child is one of life’s great privileges.
Now, I’m also an author.
And I suppose all those identities have found their way into these pages in one form or another.
I didn’t set out to write a story with all the answers. I wanted to create characters whose struggles might make us consider our own relationships a little more closely. Characters who remind us that love and fear sometimes occupy the same space, that our mistakes need not be the final word on who we are, and that becoming something more may require us to release something we desperately want to hold.
Most of all, I hope readers find something in these books that stays with them.
A thought. A feeling. A question they hadn’t considered before.
Perhaps even a note they didn’t realize was missing from their own particular harmony.
I’m so glad you’re here at the beginning of this adventure. I hope you’ll follow along as I introduce you to Ashiel, Elias, Cormac, Wren, Wade, and the worlds they inhabit.
There is so much more of their story to share.
And if I’ve done my job well, perhaps when you turn the final page, you’ll return to your own world hearing something in the music of your life that you hadn’t quite noticed before.
With light,
Jennifer M. Allen
Artist. Mother. Musician. Storyteller. And now, author of ASHIEL.
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