NOTE: This article is a republication- Source: CrimeReads (by Rick Pullen).
Jeneva Rose is a whirlwind. When the publishing world didn’t work for her, she created her own.
Like most aspiring authors, she first took the conventional route to hoped-for literary success. For her efforts, agents and publishers turned her down a combined 500 times. After she finally connected, she fired her agent before she found a publisher.
“At the time it sucked, but it makes it so much sweeter to appreciate now,” she says.
Rose wanted to write from an early age, but she could never finish a book. In her gap year of college Rose wrote comedic screenplays, but nothing hit. Her first attempt at a novel began in 2009. She was impatient, maybe a bit unfocused because “the idea of writing one was daunting,” and she could never get beyond writing the first eighty pages of a manuscript.
After college she worked in digital marketing. But teetering on the rim of her bucket list was that novel. When her mother died suddenly, Rose worked through her grief by completing a manuscript of women’s fiction—her first. She realized she loved the process. That said, she still thought she was “one and done.” Back to the corporate world. Fortunately for everyone, she decided to keep writing, which would eventually lead to her debut novel.
“I decided to try writing a new book in a new genre, a psychological thriller, for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo),” she says. “It was born from an idea I had been holding in my head for more than eight years, one that begged to be written. I wrote fifty thousand words in November, took a small break, finished it in January, edited it in February.”
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