iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Today's the last day to grab an ARC of THE GROTTO before sign-ups close. My historical novel — 1228, a friar and a crusader knight, and whether the unforgivable can be forgiven. Honest reviews welcome 👇 booksprout.co/reviewer/re...

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Wrote nothing new. NOTHING. Some wks are for looking hard at what you've already got. What did yours look like?

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Week in review: Pulled my numbers and learned most of my readers aren't reading me in English. Spent 2 days thinking about that instead of writing, which I'm choosing to count as work. Got the Grotto ARC ask out 2x more. 10 days left on that one.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

If you've got a folder (or folders) like the ones I have: the difference b/n the ones I finished and the ones I didn't wasn't time. I merely decided the bad version was allowed to exist first.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

It's out. It has an ending. Somebody in the UK bought it on a Wednesday. I'm not going to pretend that isn't a strange feeling.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I never thought I'd finish LA CAMPAGNE. Not dramatically. In the ordinary way — I started it assuming it would join the other folders, the ones with 30k words and no ending, because that's where books go when you're building a company at the same time.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

It slowed the book right down and made it better. Constraints usually do. I resent (read: hate) it every single time.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Two of my characters don't share a language. That turned out to be the most interesting problem in THE GROTTO. You can't lean on dialogue. Everything is gesture, what gets misread, and the enormous effort of making yourself understood to someone you badly want to understand you.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

They thought they were living now — modern, sophisticated, at the sharp end of history, surrounded by fools who hadn't caught up yet. Same as us. Write them as people who know they're historical and the whole thing dies on the page.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

A thing I keep having to relearn about the 13c: the people in it did *not* think they were living in the Middle Ages. Obvious when you say it out loud. Very easy to forget when you write.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Which means I've been marketing in English, on English-language platforms, to the smaller half of my readership. ... I don't have the answer yet. But I'm not going to pretend I didn't see it.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

The German edition of Love is Blind has outread the English original — 3,771 pages to 2,248. Amazon.de is nearly 4x the size of Amazon.com for me. Italian is bigger than I'd have guessed. Spanish is climbing.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I pulled my sales numbers this wk and found something I wasn't looking 4. 71% of every page anyone has ever read of my books, they read in a language I didn't write it in.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

My Savannah rom-com is sulking in a folder. Anyone else find the asking harder than the work?

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Week in review: Two ARC posts out. The part of this job I'll never get used to is asking people for something. Free book, honest review, an entirely fair trade — and it still takes me 3 drafts to write the ask without an apology buried in it. Otherwise: 1228 all week.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I'm not inserting anyone into history. I'm writing the people the archive was built to leave out.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I've been asked: why write queer characters into centuries that punished them for it? B/c they were there. In 1228, in 1740, in every year nobody bothered to write down. The absence in the record isn't evidence they didn't exist — it's evidence of what was done to the records.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Still open: ARC copies of THE GROTTO, my historical novel set in 1228 — a friar, a crusader knight, and one unforgivable thing between them. Histfic readers, an honest review on release would mean a lot 👇 booksprout.co/reviewer/re...

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Facts you can check. Reflexes you have to notice, and you only notice them when something snags. That's the part of writing historical fiction nobody warns you about. Most of the work is catching your own century leaking in.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Research will never stop being my personal trap. Writing THE GROTTO, I caught myself giving a 13c character a gesture I'd absorbed from a film. Not a fact I'd got wrong — a reflex. The way he'd have shrugged.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

It's the same person, just opposite jobs. Mixing them is how you spend 4 hours polishing a paragraph you're going to cut anyway.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Drafting wants you generous and a little stupid. You have to be willing to write the bad sentence to find the good one hiding underneath it. Revising wants you cold. It wants you to look at the sentence you were proud of on Tuesday and ask what it's actually doing.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Drafting and revising are 2 *very* different beasts, and I've stopped trying to do both in the same day.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

And, if you buy direct from my website, you can own it months before it releases widely in stores on 4 December. If you're curious, take a look at my website: jfevans.com/books/savann...

jfevans.com

Savannah Legal

Savannah, Georgia. A lawyer who bills his life in tenths of an hour meets a man who refuses to be scheduled — and a love story that will not behave.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I'm author J.F. Evans. I write queer fiction spanning centuries. My latest book, "Savannah Legal," is my queer homage to Stephanie Plum. It's a witty, heartflet RomCom.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Also wrote a scene in Savannah Legal that made me lol — a lower bar than it sounds, given I'd spent the AM in 1228 with a grieving friar. What did you get done this week?

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Woes of a writer: I'm at the stage with THE GROTTO where if I reread a chapter, I genuinely cannot tell whether it's good or whether I've simply looked at it 200 times. Both, probably.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

What doesn't work: believing I'll write in the evening. I have NEVER once written in the evening. I keep planning to. If you're building something and making something, protect the hours nobody else wants. It's the only trick I have.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

I run a company and I write novels. People ask how. The honest answer is that I'm bad at it roughly 3/4 the time. What works: the writing happens before the company wakes up. Not because mornings are magic — because nobody emails at 4.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The part nobody warns you about is that the bad 90 minutes aren't optional. You can't skip ahead to 08:30. I've tried.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

A drafting day, honestly: 04:30 — coffee, re-read yesterday's last paragraph, hate it 06:00 — write badly for ninety minutes 08:30 — the first sentence that's actually alive turns up 11:00 — stop while I still know what happens next That's the whole method. (Also, insomnia.)

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

None of it appears. But every time my two characters travel, I know exactly how hard it is, and the prose moves differently because I do. That's most of research, honestly. You learn it so the reader never has to.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

The best research note I took for THE GROTTO never made it into the book. Three pages on what a thirteenth-century road actually was. Who maintained it. Who was allowed on it. What it cost you to cross another man's land.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Writing 2 books @ once isn't just twice the work. AM: I'm in 1228, in a language that thinks in Latin and grief. PM: I'm in a Savannah law firm with a man who makes jokes when he's frightened. The mental whiplash is about 40 mins. I've stopped pretending otherwise.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I wrote a novel, and today I'm asking for readers. THE GROTTO — 1228, a friar and a crusader knight, and whether the unforgivable can be forgiven. Out for ARC review now. Grateful for honest reviews 👇 booksprout.co/reviewer/re...

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

It's here. LA CAMPAGNE is out today. An American inherits a life he never asked for, in a village that won't let him leave. Funny, then not. A mystery he can't stop pulling at. Book 1 of Bienvenue à France. Start here. geni.us/tK88T #booksky

geni.us

Amazon.com: La Campagne (Bienvenue à France Book 1) eBook : Evans, J.F.: Kindle Store

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

You can also still find it on Amazon, too. a.co/d/02yzSkwb

a.co

Amazon.com

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Hey everyone! My book, “Thread and Nail,” is finally available on Kobo! Thread and Nail is a sweeping work of literary historical fiction set in the raw, contested landscape of pre-Revolutionary America. www.kobo.com/fr/fr/ebook/...

kobo.com

Thread and Nail eBook by J.F. Evans - Rakuten Kobo

Lisez « Thread and Nail » de J.F. Evans disponible chez Rakuten Kobo. Savannah, Georgia Colony, 1740. Thomas Hendricks came back from war with steady hands and a rule he's kept since boyhood...

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

I appreciate you taking the time and sharing your thoughts. As someone who also entered into the Church through RCIA, some of Vance’s “insights” bore a dangerous resemblance to puffery than genuine conversion. It reads as “WTF?!” It’s vapid and yet it’s being presented as sage insight.

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Reposted by Johnathen Evans-Guilbault

Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

Read Ch1 of my current work-in-progress, “The Grotto.” 1228 Languedoc, France. A Franciscan friar arrives at a small castrum. What will he find in the land scarred by war and marred with blood? Pre-orders on Amazon. Read the chapter on Medium: medium.com/@johnathenev...

medium.com

Chapter 1

The Arrival

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

medium.com

Chapter 1

The Arrival

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Hugs 🫂 I’d advise doing those things you love that are outside your typical routine.

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Reposted by Johnathen Evans-Guilbault

Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Pre-orders are up on Amazon, here: a.co/d/09YsxIwL

a.co

Amazon.com

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Hi everyone! I’m J.F. Evans, newly self-published indie author. I focus on LGBT+ stories, particularly those of a historical literary nature, but I also write contemporary romantic works. I have 2 novels out currently. You can read them on KU or order them here: www.amazon.com/stores/autho...

amazon.com

J.F. Evans: books, biography, latest update

Follow J.F. Evans and explore their bibliography from Amazon's J.F. Evans Author Page.

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Working on a new literary historical fiction novel called, “The Grotto.” I’ve written about it here: www.goodreads.com/author_blog... Feel free to follow along as we construct this world set in 1228-1229 Languedoc, France.

goodreads.com

J.F. Evans's Blog - "The Grotto" - May 30, 2026 14:42

If you follow my social media on Threads, then you'll know I've begun to work on my next literary historical fiction book, The Grotto.This book was i...

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

If you haven't: queer historical fiction, colonial Georgia, 1740. A blacksmith, a tailor, a tavern keeper. A household the world has no name for. a.co/d/06qNCslx

amazon.com

Thread and Nail

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Johnathen Evans-Guilbault @johnathenfevans.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Thread and Nail has been out for almost two months. If you've read it: I'd love to hear what landed for you. Reviews on Amazon or Goodreads mean more than I can say — they're how the book finds the readers it was written for.

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