Book review of "The Masks We Wear" by B.D. Carpenter + a Q&A with the authors

Hi friends!!

It's time for another Book Review!

I am excited to bring this amazing book The Masks We Wear and a Q&A with the authors B.D. Carpenter to you today. And yes, you read that right, plural authors, because they're a husband-wife duo, which is so cool!

I met B.D. Carpenter about a year ago in the writing Discord server We Write At Dawn, which is now up to 3000 members and is one of the most friendly supportive online writer spaces I've found. It's hard to remember the timeline exactly, but I think when BD first joined, they were still writing The Masks We Wear. It was awesome to get to witness the process of bringing this book to life as an indie published novel and then getting my very own copy! And if you check out their TikTok there are a lot of process videos talking about the struggles and wins of getting the book published.

Both of them are also super supportive in the Discord and more than willing to answer questions about indie publishing when people have them and that's always a delight to see. Writing and publishing can be such a long and lonely process, and it's great to know there are people like BD out there to shed light on the process.

The spoiler free book review...

[Click the picture for the Amazon link or find it at the end of the blog]

This is really the reason you're here, so let's get to it! But also, stick around for the interview with B.D. Carpenter below.

I'd seen a good bit about The Masks We Wear and the premise in the Discord, so I knew going into it there was a beanie-wearing gnome for a main character, and right off the bat that intrigued me. I love a book with characters you don't typically find in the lead.

I am a fan of fantasy, but I've been engrained in contemporary romance so much lately that I haven't been reading a lot of fantasy. And sometimes, fantasy can be so heavy and difficult to get through with all the world-building, but B & D have done a great job with taking our world and making it more interesting without overloading the reader with a lot of world-building and lore on the front end. The characters are on a path of discovery and the reader is along for the ride with them.

The Masks We Wear is alternating POV between Beau and Meep, both of whom are non-humans hiding in human society under the pretense that they can't reveal themselves to anyone. They independently encounter a mysterious little man and curiosity gets the best of them, sending them on a collision course with each other and other friends they drag into the mystery along the way. There's a puzzle to solve, peril, friendship, found family, a hint of romance, and a fantasy world masterfully layered onto our own.

I highly recommend this book for a fun, quick read and, I personally can't wait to find out what happens in the next book!

If you prefer an Audiobook, they also released the audio version in October.

Link || The Masks We Wear Audiobook

There's also an interconnected short story collection!

Link || The Beasts We Are on Amazon

And now, without further ado, I was excited to have a chance to interview B.D. Carpenter about their writing process, the book, and what's in store in the future.

B.D. is a co-writing team so there are answers from each of them individually for each question, denoted with different font-style.

Q&A with Fantasy Authors B.D. Carpenter

First off, I talked a little in my review about how you’re a writing duo, so why don’t you introduce the two halves of B.D. Carpenter and how you decided that you wanted to write a book together?

Brandi (B): Hi, Brandi here. I was an only child with a single mom and no friends. Creating stories was how I played. I have wanted to write a book since I was a tiny child. I wrote a book when I was thirteen, actually. I was very proud of it. It was a historical fiction set in the civil war about a family whose father and older brother were drafted and their mother died, so it was all on the next oldest sister. It was written in a series of letters and diary entries. It was very ambitious. I was so young I knew nothing about publishing and my mom tried to help me but she didn’t know anything back then either. We found ourselves in the middle of a vanity publisher scam who wanted 10k. We didn’t have that and I threw my book away. I wrote a different kind of book in 2007 with a friend and I never published that one either but at least I still have the manuscript. I always felt like the plot just wasn’t deep enough. I still have ideas on fixing it soon. I also took several writing courses in college at all levels. I’ve always been a writer at heart.

Dean (D): I've always loved telling stories. Even as a kid, I'd guide my little brothers on imagined adventures. I would build elaborate worlds, create interesting characters, and send them on epic journeys. I've also always loved reading books, so combining those into writing a book felt very natural. I've always needed a creative outlet, and the nature of that outlet has changed over the years, but when my wife showed an interest in writing a book together that was all the encouragement I needed to turn my attention to writing a novel.

We got married in 2022 and we talked about ideas a ton. One day we actually started writing and we pantsed our way through an entire novel. We encourage each other to keep going. We are both proud of each other.

Piggybacking on that, what is it like to co-write a book? And how does that process look for you all? Do you have set chapters you each write? Does one of you do more writing and the other more editing? I’m just intrigued by this co-authoring process and would love to know more!

B: When we first started The Masks We Wear (TMWW) we did individual chapters. Dean wrote Beau and introduced Jeremy as his friend and Kyle as his roommate—Chud, Phelony, Kathleen and Samantha, all that was him.  He wrote all of Beau’s chapters pretty much by himself throughout part one.

And I did Meep and Jessie, and took Bella and Jeremy and fleshed them out. 

We pantsed our way through the entire first draft. We would get together and relax in our little hot tub at the end of every day and talk about plans for our next chapters, where we think the plot is going, etc. We talked over any plot holes that might creep up on us and fixed all those before they became a problem. I had some real crazy ideas, and not all of them made it into the final draft, but a good bit of them did. I am the one responsible for all of the cliffhangers and… failures… sorry.

D: We get to compliment each other's strengths. Each of us brings something different to the table, and this yields a stronger story overall. It also eases the workload to be able to share it with someone else.

B: While I was busy editing TMWW, Dean plowed on and drafted books 2 and 3. I still had a say in the plot development—we still had our little hot tub. Now I edit more than I draft. But that’s okay. We get to play to where our strengths are. I still flesh out characters, and add scenery, and emotional (damage)... sorry again.

You all decided to indie publish (or self-publish for anyone reading who might not understand the term indie publish). That’s a big decision, because self-publishing is a lot of work. Did you look for a traditional publisher at all or did you always know you wanted to self-publish? And what has the journey been like so far as an indie author? Pros/cons? Biggest struggles and biggest wins?

We did our research on the pros and cons of each publishing path. We crunched some numbers and talked about it for nearly a whole year. At first we wanted to do traditional publishing (trad pub) because we didn’t understand the options. But in 2023 we finally joined Tiktok and got exposed to so many other authors sharing their stories, the pros and cons that led to them making the choice, etc. and we eventually decided self publishing was what was best for us too.

B: I did a lot of research into the querying process and started trying to write the query letter but no, we never tried to actually query at all. I have a bit of a control freak side too and didn’t like the idea of someone taking off with my baby and making choices without me. I found everyone but the cover artist on Tiktok; editor, formatter, alpha reader, even the discord writing community we are in. Honestly, I don’t think we would have had the confidence to self-publish without the community exposure Tiktok gave us.

The hardest part is marketing. D doesn’t like to be on camera, and doesn’t use social media much (except Discord) so it really fell to me to learn how to market. I’m not complaining, it’s just hard and I wish I had an easier time of it. It doesn’t help that both of us, but mostly me, is what I call “artistically challenged,” I don’t wear make-up, my clothes rarely match, and I’m impatient. Tiktok is rough, but that is where I do most of my marketing. I have recently started trying to branch out to Meta and Pinterest, but I just don’t get the kind of reach I can with Tiktok.

D: A big factor for me was the amount of support you can expect from trad pub. I saw so many people talking about how they were expected to be the ones to market their book, even with a traditional publisher, so I figured if we had to do the marketing anyways, we may as well get the bigger royalties. Compounding this was the fact that a lot of trad pub deals aren’t that great anyways. I’ve seen spreadsheets about the numbers given, and while the averages sounded reasonable, this is really a few outliers dragging those numbers up. Trad pub is far from a sure thing, even if you do get picked up.

The book cover is GORGEOUS! Who did your cover and how did you find your artist? That’s such a difficult aspect of self-publishing. 

takes deep breath Thank you. Finding such a good artist the first try… was luck. We had no clue what we were doing. We got the cover done before we even finished developmental edits, hence why there are three figures on the cover instead of two.

B: I tried to make my own cover on Canva but I had no idea what I was doing, and like I said above, I am artistically challenged. I was not at all offended when D suggested we find a professional.

So we did what all non-artists do with non-artist friends and we went to Fivrr! (disclaimer, we may have lucked out with our cover but we have since been burned so many times by other “artists” on Fiverr that we can’t in good conscience recommend this). We took our time and after about a week settled on a freelance cover designer named Youness Elh from Morocco (@younesselh) He has a 5 star rating and 999 reviews. We chose him because we like the silhouette concept, but honestly we were unable to give him much direction. We gave him the book blurb (which was horrible back then) and told him we liked the color purple, like the artistic nincompoops we are.

B: He did such a beautiful job. And it was so much cheaper than I ever thought it would be. For book 2, I think I will tell him I like the color blue. Thank you for reminding me that it is a great cover because I see it so much, every day, I think I hate it sometimes.

Alright, let's talk about The Masks We Wear. This book is set in the world we know, but it’s also not the world we know. It’s a magical world that’s almost hiding in plain sight with lots of fantastical creatures, many of which we don’t normally see in fantasy books and especially not as the stars of fantasy books. Can you talk a little about the inspiration for this book and why you chose the folklore you did?

One of the main inspirations was watching True Blood. [Spoilers ahead, but it has been so long I think it’ll be okay]

When you start the show everyone is introduced as human (except the main vampires), and then as you get farther and farther along those “humans” are actually shapeshifters, werewolves, witches, Fae, demigods, etc. etc. 

B: True Blood is one of my favorite shows and D had never seen it. And one day, somewhere in season two or something, he paused it and asked “is everyone going to be something else?” Like… well… Kinda, yeah.

And no offense to vampire or werewolf lovers out there, but we think they are over used and kind of boring. So we branched out. The folklore well is so much deeper than the handful of creatures that are normally written about. 

B: Gnomes started out as a bit of a joke. We would always make up some crazy stories about garden gnomes. I even suggested they were like Weeping Angels from Dr. Who, they move if they are not being observed. Early in our relationship it was a bit of a running gag—Who can world-build gnomes into relevance.

D: I made Beau a Gnome because I think Gnomes are cool. I always liked Gnomes. Most of the time they are either depicted as silly garden gnomes or tinkerers. I went the tinkerer route. But I wanted to make it more interesting that he can build cool things, so I gave him an expanded memory to explain why he could build cool things.

B: I went with Lynx for Meep… because I like cats…there had to be some folklore out there that would support a cat-person. I thought of ancient Egypt, and did some digging. I found one obscure-ish reference to them calling the cats they worshiped Mau’s (or maybe the ancient egyptian word for cat was ‘mau.’) Then I started to find stuff about Native American folklore. I wish I had kept track of which tribe it came from, but Lynx showed up on one of my pages, and my imagination took over from there.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE classic folklore tales from around the world. I have scooped up as much as I can from Audible, you know, those stories are meant to be shared orally. My favorite ones are The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Asbjornsen and Moe by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, translated by Tina Nunnally. Those tales are wild, and I mean WILD. And I also really enjoyed The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore by Micheal Dylan Foster.

D: I was excited to branch out too. I wanted to be diverse and use non-European folklore. Even though I realize that most of book one did turn out to be European.

It is important to both of us to be diverse and also respectful. We tried to avoid religion and other sensitive areas, especially since we are still putting a twist on it all. In our setting many creatures from folklore are real, and we thought it would be disrespectful to only use European ones, with an implicit statement that “only our myths are real”. But approaching folklore from other cultures and changing it can be thorny. We are doing our best to be respectful.

This can be a Yes or No answer, because spoilers, but I have my suspicions about the Kyle/Kathleen thing, will that be cleared up in the next book?

Yes. Before the end of part one. There is not too much longer to wait.

B: I wanted part one of book 2 to be the ending of book 1. D originally wrote it as the beginning of book 2, but during my edits for TMWW I thought it fit better as an ending. Eventually, our developmental editor suggested putting it back where it was originally meant to go—in book 2. Because we introduced Kyle as a POV, she said it was really weird to introduce a new POV in a part 3, and, because it had its own arc, felt like it was a different book. So, I was overruled. (Meep also does some really cool stuff that I am excited for too) but the Kyle/Kathleen arc is the biggest and most important thing there.

There are a lot of great themes in this book, which I think work great for maybe the target audience of upper teens and early 20s, but also for adults. I’m 37 and loved reading it and was still able to really connect with the characters. The themes touch on things like found family, self-discovery, not judging a book by its cover (or smell in this case), and that everyone has some sort of thing that makes them unique. So, what came first, the themes or the book? Did you set out to write a book with these themes specifically or did they grow along the way?

Some themes we knew we wanted from the offset, but most of them we discovered throughout the writing process. We often noticed new themes and worked to strengthen them, but others just kinda naturally fell out of the story and our own worldviews. The central theme has always been Identity, which our titles refer to. Who you really are, what you share about yourself with others, which parts of you are definitive and which are details. 

Another key theme is the power of working together and the value of diversity, in all its forms. 

B: And I always say that “coming-of-age” is a great theme for more than just young adults. Something I am happy we showed in TMWW. Because we never stop coming of age after we turn eighteen—it has only just begun.

I know that there are more books on the way, and I’d be mad if there weren’t because you do leave us on a bit of a cliffhanger! What’s next for our intrepid band of misfits? And how many more books do you have planned and how soon can we expect to get them in our hands?

B: Sorry.

As of 7/17/2024 book 2 has been sent to the developmental editor, as well as part 1 of book 3. We are having a slight disagreement again about where the end of book 2 actually is that we want some third party feedback on.

Book 3 is fully drafted and B is working hard to complete the self-edits on that draft before we send it to some beta readers. After that it will be ready to go to the editor as well.

Book 4… is being outlined. By mid book 3 we had to stop pantsing stuff—we have way too many arcs juggling to continue to do it well. We are confident in what we have now but B…

B: Sorry.

… suggested a pretty disruptive… thing. The results of the reactions of the beta readers and our editor to the ending of book 3 will determine the course of book 4.

We expect book 2 by the end of this year, book 3 coming in hot right after that. And between book 3 and book 4 we have one final surprise we started working on November 2023. A False-kin short story collection exploring different time periods, different characters, and different types of Kin, that we are unable to explore in the main series—this is also already drafted.

BD has granted us a peek at the (again) gorgeous cover for book 2 in The False-Kin Chronicles coming in early 2025, The Ways We Err.

Aside from The Masks We Wear universe, do you have other books in the works? Do you ever write things separately that you intend to publish as solo authors?

B: oooo, I am so glad you asked. So, I still have that book I wrote back in 2007, the one with a shallow plot full of holes, yeah. I have been considering turning that into a sapphic why-choose spicy vampire/magic fantasy. This is really scary for me because I don’t write spice normally, but my good friend  is willing to help me figure it out.

Then I have a cozy fantasy that I am calling “Whisked Away” about America in the far future when everyone has magical abilities for the past 300 years except my poor MC, Asher, who is the only one in his family born without magic in ten generations. He’s a black sheep, mistreated, like Ash-lad from the Norwegian Folklore stories. He sets off on his own to try to make it and ends up with a group of restaurant-pirates. He finds a racoon that he thinks is a cat (pets are really rare where he comes from). It’s still a work in progress but so far no one has told him that it is not a cat, everyone just assumes everyone else knows what it is. It’s a really fun project. It’s about half way done and I can’t wait to have the time and energy to finish it. 

I have one more idea for a mystery but… my last attempt at a mystery for the short story collection didn’t go super well—I psyched myself out and couldn’t finish it. 

D: I have a book on the back burner that I’m currently calling “Twin Souls”. Its about soulmates, and a pair of worlds which are mutual afterlives - after dying in one, you reincarnate in the other, back and forth for eternity. It will deal with what makes you the same person throughout these reincarnations, and part of that is the relationships you have that matter enough to persist across lifetimes.

Any parting advice for writers?

D: Perseverance is key. You don't need to write a ton every day, but you do need to keep putting in the time and effort to make progress. Don't get too caught up on soundbyte advice—the  quick snappy rules people love to toss around. It often takes a lot of digging to really understand what the advice actually means, and even more importantly what problems it's meant to address, and you'll still need to make the judgment call as to how applicable it is to your writing.

B: Editing software is great! I’m actually dyslexic, so I use a lot of software to check spelling and grammar. But it’s not the word of god. Sometimes it flags stylistic choices as mistakes—it doesn’t know the difference. You have to decide if those “mistakes” are intentional or not. Sometimes they will be. And as long as it is intentional, then it is fine. It's a mistake when it is NOT intentional. Like starting a sentence with the same word several times in a row. Sometimes it's an accident. Sometimes it's for style. Computers, AI, all that editing software, whatever else, it doesn’t have a VOICE. You have a VOICE. Use it. Prowriting Aid used AI to rewrite sentences for you, which can be helpful if you are really really stuck on wording, but if you use it too much it becomes unhelpful, your sentences sound samey, and it becomes easy to spot because it's no longer your voice. Here is piece I did about things I wish I had a better handle on before I published my book

Link || BD Carpenter's Blog of Five Things I Wish I Knew or Did Differently Before Publishing My First Book

Where else can you be found online? 

Link | BD Carpenter's website

Link | BD Carpenter's Linktree

Link | BD Carpenter on Facebook

Link | BD Carpenter on Instagram

Link | BD Carpenter Pinterest

Link | BD Carpenter on TikTok

Link | The Masks We Wear on Goodreads

Link | The Masks We Wear on Amazon

Let me know in the comments if you pick up The Masks We Wear and what you thought. Or if you've already read it, I'd love to hear about that, too!

Be sure to follow BD Carpenter on social media to keep up-to-date with when the second book in the series will release and to hear about their journey in self-publishing.

If you do check the books out, don't forget to leave a review for BD on Amazon and Goodreads!

My next book review is TBD but I have a couple people in mind. Before that, though, I have a backlog of blogs about my experience at DragonCon and Multiverse, and an update about all the exciting things happening in my writing journey!

Until next time, friends.

Rose

Link | Linktree for Rose

Link | We Write At Dawn Discord Server

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