Season 2: The Art

Hello, Knights! Season 2 has been wrapped on time, despite a highly disrupted production schedule and computer malfunctions, and we’re pretty dang happy with the results. We talk about the story, characters, and production of Season 2 in our Wrap Up (march on over to our “Episodes” tab to listen if you haven’t already!) but we realized we didn’t discuss one particular aspect of Season 2 and our plans going forward that we all enjoy so much: THE ART.

This season’s thumbnail references a very specific scene in Season 2 as well as some obscure matagot lore. In the folklore, matagots most often appear as cats but that is simply their most common form, not their only form. Matagots can also be rats, foxes, dogs, or cows. I really wanted to reference that this season, and found a good opportunity when Minnie notes how the matagot’s shadows cast onto the cave walls in the lanternlight don’t seem to match its current shape. Ultimately, it was such an evocative image that when we began thinking about the Season 2 thumbnail, I instantly thought of that It took Mitch some time to get the proportions of everything right to fit in a thumbnail and still be readable, but we managed to finagle something that worked!

We made two variants: the one we chose is, of course, the thumbnail you see associated with Season 2 on all streaming platforms. The other was this:

Still very evocative (this was actually the first one we developed), but, of course, the “shadows” aren’t shadows on this one, which was what ultimately tanked it.

We also worked on another art asset, though this one is more of the promotional variety. We’ve long planned to make a series of “recruitment” posters that demonstrate what women in the Ordinal Timeline would have seen around their hometowns during WWI (while simultaneously providing links to the podcast), and we were able to produce the first version during Season 2 production:

We’re very pleased with it, and can’t wait to make more! At present, these are for distribution around our local area, but perhaps in the future we will sell them as merch, if people express an interest in that.

While designing the poster, we also made our first iteration of the Order’s seal down in the righthand corner. That is only one version of the Order’s official seal; we’d like to make others in the future to show you guys how it has developed over time.

As for art coming up in the future, we’re already developing the thumbnail for the next interseason arc and brainstorming ideas for more recruitment posters. Believe us when we say we’re excited to share those with you as soon as we can!

So: what do y’all think? Do you like the art of Season 2? We’d love to hear from you! You can email us through our Contact page or you can find us on Instagram @theharrowingofminerva and send us a DM or drop a comment on one of our posts. We’re also looking into other social media options to connect us to you and you to other fans, so stay tuned for news about that! In the meantime, stay safe, dear Knights.

Looking Back at CHEVALIER & Looking Forward to S2

It’s that time again! Whenever we wrap an arc, we take the time to consider where we were before and where we’re going next.

A lot has happened since last year. Our close friend and talented voice actress Miranda passed away, and in her absence we struggled to find our footing again while dealing with her loss. We took some time and re-evaluated the ambitious pace we’d set for ourselves originally. While still feeling her absence, I’m glad to say we eventually got back on the proverbial podcasting horse and invited another friend of ours, Claire, to give voice-acting a shot. She was super excited about the project and rose to the challenge beautifully!

On a personal level, I definitely struggled with the fear that Season One was a fluke and that I wouldn’t be able to replicate (let alone improve upon) its energy and success. But of course, the only way out is through; CHEVALIER was a little late out of the gate, but we’re genuinely really proud of what we produced for our first interseason arc!

The process of recording our wrap-up was, as ever, a little chaotic and a LOT of fun. We upgraded from one microphone to two, added another person into the mix, and moved from the kitchen table to the coffee table. In a semi-organized crush of people and dogs, we sat down, laughed, reminisced, and speculated. It was such a great way to close CHEVALIER, and we had a blast chatting about our podcast production process, from the general “Making Of” segment to the return of the Goblin Booth and even the existence of the forbidden Frau Blücher cut. And, once we finished recording that, we toasted to the end of CHEVALIER and the beginning of Season Two and immediately sat down to do an audio-test for one of its central characters!

Yep, it’s early days yet, but we’re feeling pretty dang good about Season 2!

We hope you’ll tune in later this week when we release our CHEVALIER Wrap Up to hear more about our wild journey so far and where we hope to go from here!

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Ah! And for those of you who do listen (or want a sneak peek at a very brief topic of conversation during the Wrap Up), this is the song I mentioned that ignited the first spark in my imagination for CHEVALIER:

Introducing Our Patreon Exclusive Series: The Delilah Documents!

In 1933, a shipment of boxes containing old war-time documents arrives at the Boise Order of St. Catherine Cloister from Boston Order Headquarters. Sister-Scribe Marion Dixon is tasked with the tedious job of organizing them and recording them into an audio format for posterity. It’s dull, dreary work—until Ms. Dixon happens upon an unusual box, one that looks rather unremarkable from the outside but turns out to be anything but. The documents she discovers inside will change her understanding of the Great War—and of the Order’s role in it.

* * *

It’s here! The first episode of our Patreon Exclusive series has dropped! We’re very excited about the potential of this series, which will not only feature exclusive stories not explored anywhere else in the Ordinal Timeline’s corpus, but also offer further insight into events from The Harrowing of Minerva Damson and CHEVALIER. On top of that, it will also seed in references and early clues for works yet to come! This series is the first unraveling of a thread that will wind through stories for years to come, if we’re lucky enough to keep telling our tales. Listeners like you help outfit us for each mission, and if you want to learn more about the Ordinal Timeline or just want to chip in a little extra each month, consider joining our Patreon! There are several perks to joining, and the more Patrons we have, the more we can offer you both through our tiers and on our regular show.

*Check out our Patreon here!*

And listen to a little sneak-peak of The Delilah Documents down below!

The 2022 Inter-Season Arc is Almost Here!

Coming July 2022

We’re baaaack! After a quiet few months here at Order Headquarters, we’re finally in a place where we can start dishing out new content, and we sure do have an exciting line-up planned!

First up is our first ever inter-season arc, Chevalier. Originally intended for our highest-tier patrons, we ultimately decided to pivot to a broader release. In this three episode event, we follow Cornelia Dijksma and Rozamund de Graaf as they cross the Ardennes on horseback with an important parcel bound for Rotterdam in tow. But there are many dangers that stalk the Ardennes, and the least of them are enemy soldiers…

Chevalier is an exploration of love, grief, and the stories we draw strength from in the midst of war and horror.

The premiere episode of Chevalier is currently scheduled to drop in the first half of July.

As for Season Two, its script is currently under review. Once it’s approved, we’ll move into the production phase. We hope to release it late this summer or early fall (just in time for spooky season!). Some very exciting things happen in Season Two, and some crucial new characters are introduced that we can’t wait for you to meet!

For our Maiden-tier Patrons, we have several exclusive episodes both planned and currently in production, including two Ordinal World-Building episodes addressing some larger background details of our alternate timeline and a short-form podcast series based in the Ordinal timeline that we will announce in the coming weeks.

Between all this, we’re hoping to update the Archives and keep up/resume with our social media game! We are, however, a small team with limited resources, and our priority is currently on getting Season Two to you, our dear listeners, as soon as possible while maintaining our usual level of quality.

Thank you so much to our listeners who have supported us in various ways and waited patiently for new content. Your enthusiasm really buoys us up and makes it possible to keep doing what we’re doing!

Inspirations and Sources: The Old Kingdom Trilogy

My Holy Trinity

I’d like to introduce you to one of my all-time favorite book trilogies (which in the last few years has expanded into a series): The Old Kingdom Chronicles by Garth Nix.

My sister introduced these books, then only Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen, to me when I was nine or ten. She adored them and begged me to read them, too, so we could gush about them together. I’m not sure if she knew what she was getting herself into, because once I fell for them, I fell HARD. We’ve been talking about them ever since, at times to the point of exhaustion.

As is largely still true now, I was a bit of an oddball back then and had a habit of doing everything out of order. I agreed to read the rest of the trilogy if my sister would read one of my choosing to me first. I ended up picking the last book, Abhorsen, because it sounded the most interesting and that was just how I did things when I was a kid (I also read The Prisoner of Azkaban first before circling around to The Sorcerer’s Stone). My sister filled in context where needed as she read, and by the end I was hooked. I instantly tore through Sabriel and Lirael and loved them, though Abhorsen is still my favorite of the trilogy.

What does this have to do with The Harrowing of Minerva Damson? On a broader level, The Old Kingdom Trilogy made me think, “I want to do this. I want to make stories this rich and powerful!” (Years earlier, Hank the Cowdog inspired me to actually sit down and write my stories out, but I thought of it more as a hobby than as a potential career path. Anyway, that series has little in common with my later work, though I still love it dearly.) More narrowly, you can see the fingerprints of this series on The Harrowing of Minerva Damson if you know where to look. 

Women with magic swords? Check. Undead threat? Check. World War One trappings (on the Ancelstierre side of the Wall)? Check. And, of course, a “cat” with magical properties? Supersized check. The stories diverge considerably from there, but there is a clear creative influence flowing from Garth Nix’s marvelous work into my own projects. 

If you haven’t read The Old Kingdom Chronicles, I would highly recommend them, especially the original three books. They’re masterfully done, with rich worldbuilding that lends a sense of history and depth to the setting and characters that are admirable and complex. Not to mention the magic system, which is so well executed that it’s simply *chef’s kiss*. They’re truly exceptional, and they inspired a generation of budding authors, myself included, to greater heights. Aspirational qualities aside, they’re just damn good books. Maybe you’ll like them, too!

Inspirations and Sources: 1917

Me, trying to stay ahead of my work

If you’ve had an opportunity to listen to the Season One Wrap Up, you probably already know that the movie 1917, directed by Sam Mendes, was one of the sources of inspiration for the first season of The Harrowing of Minerva Damson. It truly is a stunning movie that does a phenomenal job of pulling the viewer into the trenches and making them feel the immediacy of the dangers present in WWI.

But even before I saw 1917, I was already considering how magic and trench warfare might collide. The backstory of my novel is already deeply involved in WWI; several characters fought in the trenches, so understanding what that might have looked like was pretty important to me. In 2019, Jamie and I attended a family reunion for my dad’s side of the family in the Carolinas. We happened to be staying near Parris Island, an old Marine base which has an excellent little museum covering the Marine Corps’ history from inception to the present day—including, naturally, several displays about WWI. Did you know the Marines were the first American military force to arrive in Europe once America joined the war in 1917? Their immediate deployment and involvement in America’s entry into WWI forever changed the course of the Marine Corps, elevating them from the terrestrial branch of the Navy to an arm of the American military in their own right. Needless to say, I spent most of my time examining the WWI section and taking a ton of pictures.

My dad is an amateur historian of World War II (if you can call studying it inside and out for 50 years “amateur”) and was a Marine officer himself. He’s also interested in the “what-if” scenarios of history and has spent decades reimagining the course of World War II from every different angle, but his alternate histories are of a decidedly more grounded nature than mine. My dad’s a realist, not terribly interested in anything fantastical or magical, but nevertheless I coaxed him into participating in a thought exercise with me: if magic and ghouls and vampires existed, how would you use them tactically in trench warfare? I needed his insight; he’s got a mind for strategy and obviously has decades more experience with military tactics than I do.

For a whole afternoon we bounced ideas back and forth, and for the first time, the edges of the image of the conflict underpinning my novel started to sharpen. It was a nasty, frightening picture, indeed.

Perfect.

Me, trying to get to the head of the line at the Target Starbucks during the holiday rush

1917 is a fantastic movie on many levels. It doesn’t glorify war, doesn’t paint it as some inherently rah-rah patriotic thing. It’s very grounded about the grim, desperate nature of it, about the everyday monotony broken by terror that defined life in the trenches. It doesn’t flinch in showing just how inured the soldiers have become to the sheer, apocalyptic horror of their surroundings, the characters barely blinking at the bodies lying half-buried in the mud around them. But it doesn’t linger on it, either; it’s not misery porn. It presents war very casually, in an understated, “it is what it is” kind of way.

It also masterfully shows the power of a simple story simply told, and how such stories nevertheless have incredible emotional and psychological depth. In some ways, I think Hollywood has by and large gotten away from that, and it’s a shame. (Not that I think all stories should be simple; God knows I enjoy telling a story that has five different subplots that all come together at the end with explosive results. I just mean that Hollywood is suffering from a lack of true depth and diversity in storytelling, and it saddens me.)

And the cinematography! My god, the cinematography. It was truly stunning, and you will definitely see what stuck with me if you watch it yourself. 1917 helped that image of trench warfare in the Ordinal Timeline I had been trying to bring into focus become crystal clear. I walked out of the theater with a much deeper understanding of how it would look, how it would feel, and how my characters would experience (and react to) it.

Typically when the credits roll for a movie, I jump up out of my seat, ready to move on to the next thing on the agenda for the day. When the lights came up in the theater after 1917, Jamie and I just sat there, absorbing what we’d just seen. It’s been a long time since a movie had that impact on either of us.

What I mean to say is, if war movies are something that you’re okay with watching, watch 1917. It’s good. I have no notes.

Have you already seen 1917? What did you think? Can you guess which scenes made an impact on me? Pop by on our social media and leave us a comment, mention us in a post, or drop us a DM. We’d love to hear from you!

From the Archives: A Brief Introduction to the Order

This week’s release from the Archives is from Chapter Three: The Order and Her Suborders, taken from that classic book An Introduction to Medieval Institutions Extant in the Modern Era. Sounds exciting, right? Academia always is!

This excerpt provides a broader look at the Order of Joan and her component parts. With such a long history and a mission that has only grown over time, the Order was bound to develop additional branches. Each contributes something critical to the Order, her mission, and her functioning—even the Order of St. Barbara, the least pleasant suborder and most sobering to the realities of a world where magic exists.

The Order’s development over time is a fascinating topic, with twists and turns and triumphs and failures. She is as complex and varied, heroic and flawed as the diverse women who have served in her ranks, women who lived in different times and places and whose actions and outlooks reflect that fact. And what a tale that makes, one made up of thousands more!

In the future we hope to get more granular with our exploration of the Order’s internal structures, tools, and methods, examining everything from ranks to weaponry and uniforms to bestiaries and hunting practices. If any of those things sound interesting or exciting to you, head on over to our Patreon to enlist! Ranks from Squire up gain access to the Archives, which is updated weekly.

We also hope to make our first AMA/Q&A recording in January, where we answer your questions about the story, the show, and its production! Send us a question on any of our social media pages (or via our Contact page here) and we’ll happily answer it in our Q&A!

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As a quick caveat, I’d like to say that while we may someday hold live AMAs, in the immediate term they will be pre-recorded. This is because I, Jessica Linkhart, am neurodivergent and do in fact have pretty intense social anxiety. This means I sometimes struggle to organize my thoughts, particularly when put in new situations and asked to answer questions on the spot. This is admittedly a disadvantage as a semi-public figure trying to connect with you, my budding audience. Please don’t interpret this as meaning I don’t want to interact at all; I very much do! I deeply appreciate you and am super excited to hear from you, so don’t hesitate to drop by to ask questions or make comments or (dare I say it?) gush!

Released from the Archives!

It’s the off-season, which means we have time here at Order of Joan Headquarters to give you a tour of the Archives, the corpus of knowledge the Order has accumulated over the centuries on everything from magical theory to monster behavior to the history and organization of the Order itself!

Our first release is a seventeenth century transcript of an early sixteenth century treatise on the basic categories of magic and the means by which it is cast. It may appear daunting to read at first, what with all the strange spellings and unusual substitutions for letters in type, but never fear! A modernized transcript follows, complete with footnotes to shed a little extra light here and there on the meanings of more archaic words. You can unlock the full document on our Patreon if you enlist as a Squire or any rank above it.

*Check out our Patreon here!*

I have a long and abiding love of linguistics, and I find historical linguistics particularly fascinating. I’ve had these theories of magic in mind for my setting for quite some time, but I’ve only recently sat down to write them out. While I’m sure there are things I missed, I really did want to give this document the feel of an early sixteenth century manuscript, written in that watershed period between Middle and Early Modern English where everything was mixed together and changing rapidly—accelerated by the arrival of the printing press and further exacerbated by the Great Vowel Shift. Etymologically speaking, nearly all the words I used were extant by the turn of the sixteenth century (there were one or two that were juuust a few decades off, but I couldn’t find another word that quite captured the meaning that I wanted, so let’s just say the Sisters of St. Catherine were inventive with their language and ahead of their time!).

While occasionally frustrating—you wouldn’t believe how many good descriptive words only entered use in the seventeenth century!—I actually found researching this a lot of fun and quite gratifying. I considered digging back into late Middle English to try to find even more weird-but-cool words that we no longer use to sprinkle throughout the document, but Jamie convinced me to have some chill and go with what I had. He also saved you, dear listener/reader, from my impulse to make the non-standard spellings even more bonkers. Thank him for his intercession and his mercy.

If you ever have the time or inclination, just check out how many different, bizarre ways people spelled things before standardized spellings became a thing! Some (a lot) of them are truly hilarious.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions about this document or the show in general, head on over to our social media pages or our contact page here on the website and drop us a wire. We’ll be happy to cable you back!

Inspirations and Sources: Dead Wake

Inspiration for art comes from an astounding variety of sources. I once had a whole character–and then a whole world!–spring into existence after seeing a particularly playful pair of striped pants. 

The inspiration for the novella that I adapted into The Harrowing of Minerva Damson came from multiple sources. In this series, I’ll be exploring past and ongoing inspirations for this body of work and maybe talk a bit about my process as we go. Maybe you’ll find something interesting here, such as a book or movie you want to check out, or maybe you’ll discover something that gets your own noggin cookin’! 

I must preface this by saying that the original inspiration for this series was First Degree Magic, the novel based in the same world that I completed in 2020. Originally, the series of novellas following Minnie was supplemental to that larger story, a loosely related arc intended to further flesh out the world and give my readers a broader view of what the Order of Joan does. But plans change and in September of 2021 I decided to switch up the order a bit and bam! I threw this podcast together and here we are today.

That being said, how the specific story of Minerva Damson and the time she lives in came to be is grounded in several sources that I came across while researching material for my larger novel. Today we’ll be diving into one of those: the book Dead Wake by Erik Larson.

Dead Wake recounts the story of the last voyage of the RMS Lusitania, a luxury trans-Atlantic steamliner and sister ship to the Titanic. Now, those of you that remember your history lessons may recall that the sinking of the Lusitania prompted the entry of the United States into the first World War. That’s… true, but not entirely accurate at face value. The Lusitania’s sinking by German U-boat changed the American public’s perception of the war in Europe and made them more open to the idea of going to war, but it still took the U.S. two more years to declare war on the Central Powers.

At least, that’s how it happened in our timeline.*

*(Which I will be calling the “Cardinal” timeline from here on out, as opposed to the fictional “Ordinal” timeline.

See what we did there? Order of Joan? Ordinal timeline? :D Blame (or applaud!) Jamie for that one.)

Dead Wake does a beautiful job of establishing the backdrop of American, British, and German politics on the eve of the last voyage of the Lusitania. Erik Larson has a talent for making history truly compelling to read, and he creates a deeply immersive experience for the reader, seamlessly sliding between global, local, and intimate scales. Really, Larson tells history as it should be told and taught: as a story, one with twists and turns and stakes both personal and grand, the tension ratcheting up to a fever pitch to the (from our retrospective perspective) inevitable conclusion. It’s great stuff.  

When I picked up this book, I was already thinking about how to tweak history in my novels to force America to enter the war earlier. As far as actual history, I knew the Lusitania’s sinking was involved, but… well, not much else, to be honest. At least in the American education system, World War I is often glossed over, a footnote included mostly to provide some context for World War II. But I remembered enough about that particular unit to know where to start looking if I wanted to change things in the Ordinal timeline.

I wasn’t disappointed. Dead Wake was a provocative read, one that gave me a lot to chew on. I hadn’t realized that the Lusitania was sunk in 1915–I’d assumed it was 1917, since that was when America joined the Allies. That it happened in 1915 somewhat solved my problem of an earlier American entry into the war. In our Cardinal timeline, the American public by and large were still reluctant to enter the war, though they now had a clearer idea which side they’d rather be on if it came down to it. Despite public hesitancy, Wilson thought it very likely that if he were to ask Congress for a declaration of war, he would get it–so he didn’t ask. There were a few reasons for this; again, the American public, though appalled by Germany’s actions, wasn’t eager for war, but also Wilson was caught up in a whirlwind courtship that by all accounts distracted him from the greater issues at hand. 

In the Ordinal timeline, however, the American public, fueled by anger and anguish over the loss of the Lusitania, was more willing to throw hands, and President Wilson wasn’t so reluctant to act as a result. America moved quickly to join the Allies after the Lusitania’s sinking, declaring war in late May, 1915.

If you want to know more about the final, ill-fated voyage of the Lusitania, be sure to check out Dead Wake by Erik Larson, especially if you’re interested in the Titanic and her disastrous maiden voyage. As bad as the Titanic was, the sinking of the Lusitania was arguably worse for many reasons, and it’s an overlooked part of history that really deserves more attention.

Have you read Dead Wake? What did you think about it? Let us know! And if you have any questions for us, feel free to drop us a message and we’ll be happy to get back to you! 

In Loving Memory

of Miranda “Panda” Samford, credited as Miranda Lewis, friend of the podcast team, fiancé of Mitch Lewis, and voice actress for the first season of The Harrowing of Minerva Damson.