My Journey as an Author, So Far...
When I was a toddler to preschool age, my mother was in college finishing her degree in elementary education. She read to me a LOT, and I even had subscriptions to both Dr. Seuss and the Disney Collection books. I was so obsessed I was reading at age 4 and decided then and there I would be a writer. In kindergarten (1976-77), I had a teacher who was way ahead of her time. Probably about once a week, she gave us a writing prompt and took turns with us. We would tell her our story and she would write it out for us. Then we would draw pictures and create a cover, and voila! We had a book written by us to take home with us.
As fate would have it, the following year, she moved up to first grade and I had her again. By that time, I was reading at a 6th grade level. She left me out of the reading groups so I could read things that would challenge me. As it turned out, I was crazy about Nancy Drew. So we dropped my Dr. Seuss subscription and started buying Nancy Drew. That same year, one of the networks made tv shows of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. By the end of first grade, I had read all from both series that had already been published by 1978. I was mesmerized. I loved trying to work out the mysteries on my own. At that point, my dream switched from being a writer to being a writer of mystery novels.
I didn’t write again until 8th grade, when I approached my friend David about writing a middle grade spooky mystery novel, complete with a ghost! I’m not sure what happened to the notebook we passed back and forth as we collaborated on our book, but we never submitted it for publication. I like to think that David still has it. Whether he does or not, I hate to think about The Secret Key being lost and gone forever.
In high school, we registered for classes in much the same way as college. Incoming seniors got to pick first, and on down the line to incoming freshmen. We had 1 semester of literature and one of writing. My favorite courses were a lit class called Search For Identity, which was nearly as much writing as reading, and Poetry, where I got to bare my soul like the 15-year-old I was. That was a glorious year. I loved my teacher - still do, although now we are Facebook friends…two adults with lots of the same interests, and it’s great.
Unfortunately, after high school the only writing I did was research papers in college. And I was great at research. My research papers always earned high marks, but I guess I felt like writing novels was beyond my grasp. So I just stopped trying. I continued reading voraciously, but decided I didn’t have what it takes to write novels.
The summer I was 49, I dreamed 3 characters over the course of 2 nights, one of whom told me what was supposed to write. And he insisted on dragons. But I still didn’t start writing. The following summer, I turned 50…the same age my grandmother died of colon cancer…and was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. I had surgery and prepared for chemo, then got in touch with my bestie, who lives 8 hours away, and we started looking for small publishers doing an anthology or shared world type series. We ended up writing in a shared world about an all girl rock band. Each band member was written by a different author, but Kimberly and I were the only ones writing as co-authors. We’ve had a couple of hiccups and I ended up writing without her for a couple of anthologies. Knowing these anthologies only stay on the market 90-180 days before the rights go back to the individual authors, I bought 20 copies of each one, which will be for sale on our Etsy store! They will most likely be the first active listing, and can be signed and personalized by me, but not the remaining 19-ish authors who participated.
Now Kimberly and I have worked out our differences and i’m super excited about what is coming through the pipeline. First, the story I dreamed in the summer 2020, which is a young adult epic fantasy with 2 besties, Lyric and Louise (“Lou”) from modern day small town USA, and a boy, Alaric, sent to bring them to a fantasy realm where they must find the king. We are going to rewrite our first book, Pounding Bass (now titled “Redefining Bex.” It will be a full length new adult rockstar romance novel (it’s currently a 45k word novella). We have a young adult magical academy and an adult motorcycle club. We have another fairytale retelling (one of the books on my Etsy shop is twisted fairytales. I did a vampire Peter Pan, which also has lots of room for expansion). The new one will likely be Little Red Riding Hood or Alice in Wonderland. I hope to be able to publish a story we started quite awhile ago. It’s a tale of friendship across time and space. We have 3 horror story ideas, a sci-fi/portal story, and so on and so forth.
My cancer went into remission, then came back in my liver. I was on hospice, then kicked out because I wasn’t deteriorating as fast as they thought I shoul. My oncologist has said I’m no longer a candidate for aggressive treatment, so I’m going to focus on my writing and the Etsy store as long as I am healthy enough.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jenna D Morrison is an up-and-coming author of young adult and new adult contemporary speculative fiction. She has been an avid reader since she was four and started writing for her own enjoyment in middle school.
She lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with her mother and their very spoiled fur babies. When she is not reading or writing, Jenna is a Zen Buddhist priest, an amateur genealogist, a daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, and aunt.
Make sure to subscribe to Watch Us Sparkle Blog for all Jenna, Kimberly, and Katie's insights.
댓글