{"id":7246,"date":"2025-12-09T09:47:17","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T15:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/?p=7246"},"modified":"2025-12-09T09:47:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T15:47:17","slug":"professor-engages-students-alumni-in-crafting-new-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/?p=7246","title":{"rendered":"Professor Engages Students, Alumni in Crafting New Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe data-testid=\"embed-iframe\" style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/1fktz9NmBuOKk9XF0PHZSI?utm_source=generator\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameBorder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Assistant professor of English Anton Jones\u2019 new novel, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The March of the Blood Red King, <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">was published on November 28, by Page + Plot Press. Enlisting the help of Concordia students and alumni for beta reading, cover art, and other aspects of the novel, the project was deeply rooted in the Concordia community.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><i>The March of the Blood Red King <\/i>is Jones&#8217; first novel, following his 2024 lyric memoir, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is Not a Death Sentence<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The novel is the first book in what Jones anticipates will be a four-book series. The setting is a low medieval fantasy, and the story centers on a family of three siblings in the midst of a war.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cOne of the things I\u2019m dissatisfied with in contemporary fantasy is when it feels too easy for the main characters to just win everything,\u201d Jones said. \u201cSo, I wanted to make something that is much more grounded in historical combat.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The grounding of the novel\u2019s combat was derived from Jones\u2019 own experience in buhurt, a full-contact sport where opponents go head-to-head in armored melee combat. Competing for the Chicago Hydras, Jones says that the experience of wearing the armor and knowing how it feels to get hit informed the writing of the combat scenes<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Jones began writing the novel in the summer of 2025, and the manuscript was put in the hands of beta readers in August. Several students from the Concordia creatives group Jones runs on Monday nights were involved in the reading process.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cHe was very clear and persistent on empowering his students who were beta reading his novel, saying to be hard with him and give him the straight-up truth,\u201d said sophomore Isabella Gentile, a member of the creatives group. \u201cThat made it less daunting, and I knew he wasn\u2019t showing us the novel to hype him up, but to be nitpicky. It was clear that he trusted his students to give him that feedback.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Many students in the creatives group previously had Jones as a professor, either in English Composition or in a creative writing class.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cI was thinking this is almost payback. He\u2019s very honest with his feedback, which is what I like,\u201d said 2025 CUC graduate Abby Porter. \u201cBecause he gave feedback on my work, it was easier to know what he was looking for in his work because I knew his thought process already.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7249\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7249\" style=\"width: 375px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-7249\" src=\"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/March-of-the-Blood-Red-King-Ebook-375x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"375\" height=\"600\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7249\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The cover of Jones&#8217; new novel, designed by CUC alum Caleb Egland.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Porter, who is now pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, is also Jones\u2019 social media manager.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cWe have had some good feedback, people saying they like what\u2019s happening,&#8221; Porter said. &#8220;He\u2019s gotten new followers, gotten people who have now started to buy the book so it\u2019s been pretty good.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Students were also involved in the artistic elements of the project. In spring 2025, Jones held a competition for cover art and maps. Caleb Egland, a 2024 CUC graduate, won both contests with his entries, and his work is featured on the cover of the novel and inside in the form of maps.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Egland is now a freelance graphic designer. Approaching the competition \u201clike any old client interaction,\u201d Egland worked with Jones throughout the process, beginning with preliminary sketches and adjusting those sketches as needed to be workable for a book cover.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIt gave me a structure with which to frame the process. There\u2019s so much in graphic design that isn\u2019t about the skills,\u201d Egland said. \u201cSo much of it is the client and interaction portion of it and those soft skills rather than the actual design work itself. So I\u2019d say graphic design gave me a framework to help position the creative work in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Egland, in addition to designing the cover and book trailer, was also a beta reader.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cI\u2019d been with him in the writing club for a while so what I tried to do was go into it with that kind of critical feedback in mind,\u201d said Egland. \u201cI tried to give him that level of attention, and I think he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of feedback I gave him.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The beta readers helped to make character interactions more grounded and earned, Jones said, helping him to recognize and fix what he dubbed the &#8220;tremendous amount of unearned angst in the beginning chapters.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cI am learning a lot, mostly as I go, and seeing the comments from my own students who are commenting like I would is really, really interesting and helpful for me learning,&#8221; Jones said. &#8220;I know that the second book already has a lot of major improvements in the prose as well as the structure and has a lot more earned moments.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With the second novel already in progress and plans for an audiobook casting theater students to voice act the four different perspectives, the project is still ongoing.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThere is a stereotype in academia and with professors that they may be too pretentious and too uptight to take criticism,\u201d Gentile said. \u201cAt least with Concordia and with Professor Jones, that was not the case. I really admire the sort of integrity he has with students at Concordia. Instead of reaching out to AI artists or other people to partake in his novel writing, he reached out to Concordia\u2019s students and created more opportunities for them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><i>The March of the Blood Red King <\/i>can be purchased at <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/the-march-of-the-blood-red-king-anton-jones\/638324127fa84c99?ean=9781957430331&amp;next=t&amp;srsltid=AfmBOop6pnHmI7ky2w1oP8gVXwSmd3O_K0TWDbsLt2GZJ6OSHVpPZ7VvJns\">Bookshop.org<\/a>, on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/March-Blood-Red-King-Anton-Jones-ebook\/dp\/B0G3B7G9C7\/ref=sr_1_1?crid=35NNGRVUG9HJK&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Lh1yPijPA0J1hweUYs5Fh-5WfBMM5O9ckt_lZGKVL5RBjjVXtIXuSn7wpfltdV-0IoWmG05WGUX6Cf4pm8AL3ZwR4oxCGPuESbtS1Dyl6W5-XInCM2kMvoXkJyKf3adPTS7NeYLkp90HXcYATj70OQP1bUXsdXBDlTyggst6W9vBALv--Qb03BlixHMsWDGg9rtf1IUNy0JWL3sLgsHnr-41zTA8OTQYAjd519xVBnHJOhuzLMCmsWs3OHfpoCgq8hhF0uGcXe-nAlQxO7whl89gqEkkh220kmizLvAAPNI.V-uqJonfJ5jFNSns1JcRmvIX4A3H0XlXOCodgwKSIk8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=march+of+the+blood+red+king&amp;qid=1765038767&amp;sprefix=march+of+the+blood+red+king%2Caps%2C107&amp;sr=8-1\">Amazon<\/a> in Kindle or paperback and anywhere books are sold.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Assistant professor of English Anton Jones\u2019 new novel, The March of the Blood Red King, was published on November 28, by Page + Plot Press. Enlisting the help of Concordia students and alumni for beta reading, cover art, and other aspects of the novel, the project was deeply rooted in the Concordia community. The March [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":7230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-showcase"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spectator.cuchicago.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}