Annie Jackson writes clean YA fantasy and fairy tale retellings, including Tattered Heart and Enchanted Storms, the first two books in her Princess Kingdoms series, with no grimdark and no graphic content, ever. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and developed the Agile First Draft method. Open to interviews, panels, and guest posts.
Best fit for
Stories that feel like light in the dark.
With two published clean fantasy novels, comped to Robin McKinley with a more modern YA sensibility, and a fantasy holiday novel currently in progress, Annie Jackson builds fairy tale retellings around real emotional stakes rather than easy resolutions, and an underlying conviction that stories mean something. Her Substack newsletter, Writing Alchemy, offers analysis of stories with theological depth across mediums with a Christian lens in the tradition of C.S. Lewis. Annie developed the Agile First Draft method, an iterative drafting framework born from writing her own novels in focused layers rather than all at once. She shares the method in practice through Ink & Loose Leaves. This same systems instinct carries into her technical work where she builds iOS productivity apps and writes Northlight Letters, guiding authors on how to use AI for their business, not their prose.
Profile Assets
Key Talking Points
01
Why clean romance creates more tension, not less
The case for emotional stakes that don’t rely on explicit content, and why restraint is a valuable narrative tool.
02
Faith and story: a Christian lens on narrative
How a coherent theology illuminates narrative, without flattening it into a sermon.
03
The appeal of YA for adult readers
Why so many adults enjoy YA-style stories, and what that reveals about what we’re looking for in fiction.
04
Why the ‘miscommunication trope’ is bad for women in fiction
Writing for tropes is a modern marketing habit, not a craft principle, and this one in particular costs heroines their agency.
05
Agile First Draft
A practical approach to drafting speculative fiction with iterations.
Sample Interview Questions
Book Covers
