Guest Blog Post:- I am delighted to introduce Jenny Milchman (@jennymilchman)

Award Winning Thriller Writer-

Title Blog Post Part 1 (@ITWDebutAuthors @thrillerwriters )

‘Happily Ever After & What Happened After That’

Have you ever wanted something so badly that it cut a river inside you? Made you ache and howl? Caused you to try and fail and try and fail and try again over a period of years, maybe even decades?

Have you ever needed something so badly that it seemed you were destined for it, so that if by chance a bus hit you one day, before you’d achieved this dream, you would die with part of yourself unfinished, part of your life unlived?

Have you ever had a piece of yourself that was important enough that you put your loved ones second, sacrificed important needs—a savings account, retirement funds, a house—became someone you weren’t even sure you recognized?

You can probably guess where this is going. I have done those things.

My mother tells me that when we drove to Canada from our home in New York City, when I was three years old, I kept quiet the whole way. At a certain point, my perplexed (but probably grateful-for-the-quiet) father asked what I was doing.

“Telling a story,” said three year old me.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. I wasn’t the greatest student, but writing was the subject that gave me esteem. Nor was I especially popular, but in high school, I made up romance stories, and my best friend would ask for them as avidly as any fan. I studied poetry when I went to college.

And then something happened that was completely ordinary on one level, predictable even, but it had the strangest effect.

I fell in love, and stopped writing.

Meeting my husband was so huge, so all-consuming, that for a while it damped my other great passion, writing. I pursued a graduate degree in psychology and worked as a therapist while we did the things a newlywed (and then not-so-newly-wed) couple did. Bought a house. Renovated it. Took some fun vacations.

But writing, and dreams, tend to bubble up like volcanoes after they go dormant for a while. One day I got handed a very difficult case—a five year old child who had killed the family pet—and suddenly it was as if my life were a suspense novel. I realized that was what I had been meant to write all along. Not romance. Not poetry. Crime fiction.

Even as I tried to determine what might be causing my young patient’s violence, I was writing the fictional version on a desktop computer. Without benefit of Google—or email—but armed with a telephone book-sized directory of literary agents and expensive cotton resume paper, I started sending out queries and educating myself about the publishing business, circa 2000.

It took eight months before I received my first offer of representation, and I remember it felt like forever. After I signed with my agent, I fell to my knees—along with a pair of crutches, for on that day I happened to have just returned from the ER with a broken foot—and said something like, “Finally. Eight long months of wandering in the desert of rejection. But I made it through. And now I will be published.”

Eleven years later, my third literary agent sold the eighth novel I wrote.

I didn’t know back then that agents don’t sell every project they take on. They don’t even sell most of them. No, these hard-working souls, book lovers all, in my experience, often toil for free just as I did over my first seven novels.

But now it was 2011 and I was going to be a published author and live happily ever after.

Check out Part 2 coming next week (28th November 2016) – What happened next, will this story have a

Happy Ever After Ending?

Email: jenny@jennymilchman.com

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Books:

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Bio:-

Jenny Milchman is the author of three acclaimed psychological thrillers, Cover of Snow, Ruin Falls, & As Night Falls. She won the Mary Higgins Clark award for best first novel and the Silver Falchion award for best novel. Her work has received praise from the New York Times, San Francisco Journal of Books, and numerous other publications. Jenny is the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, which is celebrated by over 800 bookstores on five continents, and the creator of the world’s longest book tour. Jenny lives with her family—when they are not on the road—in New York State.

https://jennymilchman.com/as-night-falls