Hello Jenny, thanks so much for chatting today. Could you please tell us a little about your writing background and how you made your first sale?
Jenny: I have always been a writer of some sort. Wrote for school papers and yearbooks and all that stuff. In college, I worked for the paper (a really excellent paper, I might add) and in radio and TV. After I graduated with a degree in journalism (from Penn State) I worked as a publicist for a US Senator. Then as a photographer--go figure! But all of these things contributed to who I am as a writer now and helped to get me to this place. I started writing fiction by happenstance a few years ago. I hadn't read a book in years, and when my kids got older and I wasn't quite so exhausted at night, I started reading at bedtime. Eventually I started thinking, "Huh, I can do this!" Always fateful words for a potential writer! But for the first time I tried to write fiction and it wasn't so good at first but it was really fun and it took out the sort of "have-to" mentality of journalism, which I never embraced so much.
I went the unconventional route to publication. I'd entered Dorchester Publishing's American Title III contest in the hopes of expediting getting my book in front of an editor's eyes. Much to my surprise my book was chosen as a finalist in the contest. For the six months following that, I had to hunker down and become a marketing maven, spending many, many hours online especially, trying to enlist support for my book in the contest from all sorts of crazy angles. Little did I know I would be laying the groundwork for marketing/publicizing my book. I was just busy trying to stay in the contest, and because of the nature of the contest, and it was sort of before contests started becoming fairly ubiquitous, people were generally pretty enthusiastic about backing me--they felt somewhat vested in the process.
In the meantime, I had prior to all of this been talking back and forth with a lovely agent who had kind of taken me under his wing. We'd been batting about some book ideas, tried to flesh things out, but he was very busy and things kept being sidelined. But ultimately he facilitated my signing with my agent, as he thought we'd be a good match-up, which we have. At around this time is when I won the contest, which meant that I won a book deal--hugely thrilling and I just didn't realize how lucky I was that on top of all of that, I had built up a potential readership along the way.
Readers and writers often like to get a behind the scenes peek of an author's writing routine. It would be great if you could please share your typical writing day schedule.
Jenny: When not in publicity mode I like to start writing early. I'm up before dawn, to the gym and home by 7, then we get the kids up and going, fed, lunched, to school. I come home and sit down to write then, *usually*. Sometimes I'll divert to yoga instead! I do my best writing and my best concentrating in the morning. Plus, it's far easier to do when the kids are at school, because once school's out I am driving all over the place to their various sports practices, activities, etc.
I do tend to be a pressure writer, however, and when I'm facing my deadlines, I will just hunker down and write until my brain is fried. Sometimes that means writing into the middle of the night.
I have three awesome places at home in which to write. In nice weather, I hang out with my laptop on a porch swing on the front porch. When it's cold, I sit in the living room in front of a fire. And my husband just bought me this really cozy sort of fainting couch, which is tucked away in a room where the noises of our lives (i.e. all of my pets, the kids, the TV, the phone, etc) can't invade my brain quite so readily.
Jenny, please tell us about your latest novel SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER and what we can expect from your characters.
Jenny: SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER (Dorchester/now available) is the funny yet poignant story of a woman at a crossroads in life, who years earlier married a man who swept her off her feet, but now finds that her Mr. Right has evolved into Mr. Always Right, and the only sweeping going on in her life involves a broom and a dustpan. As her dreams collide with reality and the one that got away shows up trying to worm his way back into her heart, she must decide if her once charmed marriage is salvageable, and if so, how she's going to go about saving it.
My protagonist, Claire Doolittle, is a woman overwhelmed by her life and trying to regain control of it. Her kids, her husband, her job all demand of her and she's realized that she doesn't even know who she is any more.
Her husband, Jack, on the other hand, is a man whose sense of humor seems to have evaporated. He's so busy telling Claire what to do and when, there's no time for fun in their lives any more.
Claire struggles to remember what their marriage was like when it was good, all the while trying to decide if it's worth trying to salvage. And Jack is so caught up in his own thing, he hardly notices that their marriage is spiraling downward.
Sounds terrific! What's up next? Do you have another project in the works? If so, please tell us about it.
Jenny: My agent will soon be shopping MARY KATE GOES OVER THE FALLS, about a somewhat naive woman trapped in an abusive marriage who goes out to pick up her husband's dry cleaning and instead picks up a handsome hitchhiker along the side of the road, the lure of whom reminds her of the lip of Niagara Falls, said to tempt people to jump into the falls. They embark on a road trip of self-discovery, en route to Niagara Falls, where Mary Kate is determined to take the plunge as her first act of defiance in her life.
It's been a pleasure, Jenny! Best of luck with your writing. Would you like to close with a writing tip?
Jenny: Just do it. If you don't start just tapping things out on the keyboard, or jotting them down on that legal pad, you'll never know what you can do. So you write something and it stinks? Not a big deal. You're still learning from it. Next time what you write will get better. And you'll begin to feel a sense of accomplishment, the better you get and the more you write. And be kind to yourself. This business is notorious brutal to self-esteem. Remind yourself that you're a good writer.
Thanks so much, Kelly, for having me!
Jenny Gardiner’s work has been found in Ladies Home Journal, the Washington Post and on NPR’s Day to Day. She likes to say she honed her fiction writing skills while working as a publicist for a US Senator. Other jobs have included: an orthodontic assistant (learning quite readily that she was not cut out for a career in polyester), a waitress (probably her highest-paying job), a TV reporter, a pre-obituary writer, and a photographer (claim to fame: being hired to shoot Prince Charles–with a camera, silly!). She lives in Virginia with her husband, three kids, two dogs, one cat and a gregarious parrot. In her free time she studies Italian, dreams of traveling to exotic locales, and feels very guilty for rarely attempting to clean the house. Visit her at her website, www.jennygardiner.net, or her group blog, www.thedebutanteball.com, a site that has hosted iconic authors such as John Grisham, Meg Cabot, Meg Tilly and Jodi Piccoult in recent months.
