Writing Version 2.0 

Writing Version 2.0 

A writer’s life, and career, is ever changing. Written and rewritten with every project we take on, each blank page we sit down to.

And there’s another way in which we writers are always getting tossed and turned around and shaken about, which comes down to the tumultuousness of this industry. Rare is the writer who signs with an agent, who then sells the writer’s first book, after which said writer stays with that publisher over the course of a long career spanning many titles. 

An author like that is a unicorn. Mythical, does such a thing really exist? Or maybe a mastodon, some prehistoric beast from back in the days of pulp fiction and a comfortable midlist, which we’ll never see roaming the earth again.

My career has not been linear from the moment I first started trying to get published. 

I wrote seven novels over the course of ten years before my eighth finally sold and became my debut. That book had been roundly rejected by publishers before being offered a deal from an imprint that had turned the same book down six months before. It went on to win the Mary Higgins Clark award and be a finalist for two others, earn praise from the New York Times, hit the USA Today bestsellers list, and some other wonderful things. 

The lesson? If you’re receiving rejections, learn from them, yes—but also don’t necessarily assume they’re the last word. Other elements can come into play.

There’s another lesson buried there too, which comes down to how a book got “double dipped” at my first publisher. When an agent goes out on submission with a manuscript they have to choose THE editor at each imprint or house they believe the book is right for. If that editor passes, the book is dead in the water there, cannot be submitted again.

That was true for my agent and my book, too. 

So how did it make it into a different editor’s hands, one who was higher up on the food chain and thus able to make an offer?

Throughout my long years of trying to get published, I’d been reaching out to authors whose work I admired. Letting them know how much their books meant to me, and supporting them in ways that I could. One such author was good enough to read my unsold novel, find it gripping, and pass it on to her high-ranking editor, who loved it too.

I was finally Pinocchio-real as an author. 

By the time I’d had five books published—same agent, two different publishers—things had changed in the world and in my writing life again. 

First came the pandemic, which meant that my fifth book made for a whisper in the madding crowd. But since that’s a droplet compared to the tsunami of calamities the pandemic caused for so many, it should scarcely be counted.

With the world (partially, and only for some) on track again, my career was not.

I did not have a publisher for my sixth book. In fact, I didn’t even have a sixth book.

My career was at a crossroads, and both I and my agent sensed it. With much love and devotion, we decided the time had come for a change and parted ways.

I signed with a dream agent. That was the (mostly) easy part.

Now to find a publisher just as dreamy and excited about getting my career where it needed to go after a gap. After the world had changed, and me along with it in many ways.

The world was reckoning with different forces, and I was too, both inside myself and out.

At about this point, the head of a publishing house approached my new agent. They were fans of mine over in Seattle, where the publisher is based, and wondered if I would have breakfast, a bookish talk about my work.

Suddenly I was no longer writing a whole novel “on spec” and sneaking it into an editor’s hands through back channels. Now a publisher was reaching out before I’d even written a word to ask if I could imagine a book into existence.

I couldn’t eat a bite even though the publisher kept graciously plying me with pastries.

And I love pastries.

The restaurant we met in was all art deco and gorgeous. It was one of those moments that make a writer really feel like a writer, or more accurately, like an author.

Who now had her first series to launch, because that’s what the publisher wanted to discuss. Whether I had ever considered writing a series character, perhaps one who made use of my first career as a psychotherapist. There are lots of incredible police and PI and legal procedurals, we mused at that breakfast. What about a psychological procedural?

And Arles Shepherd, rogue psychologist, was born.

The forces that had riven the world, riven me over the last few years surged to the surface, bubbling up like lava.

I was about to write a book that would reflect the biggest change in my writing process since I’d been collecting rejections. Creating a character so layered and complex, her story and life could span multiple books, while at the same time introducing her in a novel compelling and engaging enough to stand on its own.

Launching a series held untrammeled joys for me. With each relationship and interaction, I was able to envision its unfolding in unexpected ways over books to come.

For instance, Arles has a stepfather who has done terrible things in his life. In the first book Arles begins to take control over this relationship, holding the reins on her own life for the first time.

But it’s in the second novel that the stepfather really gets dealt with. 

Now the first in the series is about to come out and things are going to change again. Change is the only constant in this writing life. But if we are willing to accept that and lean in, ride the waves, the ups and also the downs, then amazing things can happen.

Anything can happen when we don’t know what’s next.

It can all turn out exactly how it was meant to. 

Just like in a great book.

—

Jenny Milchman is the Mary Higgins Clark award winning and USA Today bestselling author of five novels. Her work has been praised by the New York Times, CrimeReads, New York Journal of Books, San Francisco Journal of Books and more; earned spots on Best Of lists including PureWow, POPSUGAR, the Strand, Suspense, and Big Thrill magazines; and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist and Shelf Awareness. Four of her novels have been Indie Next Picks. Jenny’s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies as well as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and a recent piece on book touring appeared in the Agatha award winning collection Promophobia. Jenny’s new novel, The Usual Silence, already topping Amazon charts, is the first in a series featuring Arles Shepherd, a psychologist who has the power to save the most troubled and vulnerable children, but must battle demons of her own to do it. Jenny is a member of the Rogue Women Writers and lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.

THE USUAL SILENCE

A psychologist haunted by childhood trauma must unearth all that is buried in her past in this twisting, lyrical novel of suspense by Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning author Jenny Milchman.

Psychologist Arles Shepherd treats troubled children, struggling with each case to recover from her own traumatic past, much of which she’s lost to the shadows of memory. Having just set up a new kind of treatment center in the remote Adirondack wilderness, Arles longs to heal one patient in particular: a ten-year-old boy who has never spoken a word—or so his mother, Louise, believes.

Hundreds of miles away, Cass Monroe is living a parent’s worst nightmare. His twelve-year-old daughter has vanished on her way home from school. With no clues, no witnesses, and no trail, the police are at a dead end. Fighting a heart that was already ailing, and struggling to keep both his marriage and himself alive, Cass turns to a pair of true-crime podcasters for help.

Arles, Louise, and Cass will soon find their lives entangled in ways none of them could have anticipated. And when the collision occurs, a quarter-century-old secret will be forced out of hiding. Because nothing screams louder than silence.

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing