Photo credit: http://www.JuliaGerace.com

With more than 20 medical suspenses for Harlequin Intrigue to her credit, Andersen started to conceptualize the Novels of the Final Prophecy about two and a half years ago. Combining an interest in Mayan mythology with a love of writing romance, Nightkeepers, the first book in the series, follows Jaguar Strike, the last king of an ancient race of magi, who must team up with sexy Miami-Dade narcotics detective Leah Daniels, in order to reunite his scattered warriors and fight the gods of the Mayan underworld. Wielding ancestral blood magic, the king must choose between his duty to avert the 2012 apocalypse of the Mayan doomsday prophecy, and his love for the woman who is the gods’ destined sacrifice.             

Andersen recently spoke with MediaBlvd Magazine about this sexy new series that combines paranormal romance with the history of the Mayan Empire.

MediaBlvd Magazine> How long have you been writing, and have you had any formal training, or did you just start doing it?

Jessica Andersen> I grew up in New England, and I’ve lived there all my life. I went to Tufts University, both for undergraduate and graduate studies. And, I got a patent agent’s degree. So, I was in the process of getting ready to go work at a big law firm as a patent agent for biotechnology and, during my thesis, I needed a stress reliever, so I just started working out a story that had been in my head. I started writing it and, the more I wrote it, the more I started to enjoy that a lot more than what I was actually doing. So, I stepped back, took a look at my life and, thankfully, I’ve got a very, very supportive significant other, who said, “If this is something you really want to try, we’ll find a way to make it work.” I actually ended up leaving the lab and going freelance, to make ends meet, as both a writing instructor and a scientific editor, while I tried to get the writing career off the ground. That took a few years, but eventually, I started selling to Harlequin. And then, I started to conceptualize the Nightkeepers. Because it is such a big world, and there’s so much history to it and there’s so many details to it, it did take awhile for me to really get it into a shape where the story and the characters started to emerge. Once it gelled, it turned into a really strong proposal that my agent was able to submit and sell pretty quickly.

MediaBlvd>  Had you always wanted to write romance? Was there something about the genre that appealed to you?

Jessica> I wouldn’t say that I’m a person who has always wanted to write for publication. It really wasn’t until the late 90's that I started to really think about writing stories for a market. But, I have always read, copiously, lots of science fiction, lots of fantasy and, always in and amongst that, the romance. I love knowing that, no matter what bad things happen to the characters I’m reading along with, they’re always going to get their happy ending. And, it may not always be a traditional hearts and flowers happy ending, but there will be a positive resolution that’s going to carry them through to the next story, or through the rest of their lives. I’m the kind of person who loves disaster movies and big loud explosions, and lots of weaponry and danger. So, because of that, I need to know that, no matter how bad things look, eventually I’m going to be able to bring them full circle and there’s going to be happiness at the end.

MediaBlvd> Before you got your first book published, when and how did you know that you’d written something that was good enough to send out?

Jessica> Thankfully, I did fall in, pretty early on, with the New England chapter of Romance Writers of America. That is a local chapter, but it’s a very large local chapter, and there’s a lot of fairly accomplished writers in the chapter. At the time that I joined up, Lisa Gardner, Suzanne Brockmann, Judith Arnold and a few others were active members of the chapter, and several of them still are. So, it was a great wealth of knowledge, really being able to tap into that, and the RWA system itself, with contests to encourage their writers to submit and get feedback. I started attending conferences, and I knew I was on the right track because I had started finaling in some contests. I had attended a conference where the editor at Harlequin had talked about what they were looking for. She said, “Give me cutting edge. Give me DNA.” I sat there and went, “Well, I can do DNA.” That’s what I was trained in. So, I went home and started working on this project. In the same way that Nightkeepers really gelled for me on a concept -- this Mayan 2012 doomsday idea -- I started with a concept, and then evolved the story from there.

MediaBlvd> For those who may not be familiar with it yet, can you talk a little bit about Nightkeepers and what the Final Prophecy is?

Jessica> In actual every day life, the date December 21, 2012 has been associated with two different things. On one level, it is the day that the earth, sun and moon are going to align at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, and that only happens once every 26,000 years. And, on that day, the astrophysicists, and some scientists, are predicting anything from sunspot activity to a potential magnetic reversal to the earth wobbling on its orbit. There are some pretty heavy-duty scientific suggestions that that’s a day that’s going to be important to humanity.

Separate from that is the Mayan calendar. They have three calendars, but the Long Count calendar spans a repeating cycle of about 5,100 years. The last cycle of that calendar is due to end on December 21, 2012. Part of that is because the Maya were incredible astronomers, so they were actually able to look forward, tracking the stars, and predict that this conjunction was going to happen on that particular day. For them, it was a day of astrological significance, in the same way it is to the scientists today. Their astronomy was built really strongly into their religion, so for them, it was a day of great change.

It’s open to a little bit of interpretation, what format change is going to take. There is this school of thought that says that it is a shift to a more global consciousness, that we’re already moving in the direction of. Being forced to become a little more eco-friendly and with the Internet breaking down barriers, we’re starting to become globalized, rather than me versus you. And then, there’s the school of thought that says that’s the day that all these sunspots are going to aim towards the earth, and since we’ve destroyed our ozone layer, there’s going to be no protection. And so, there’s going to be tidal waves and things blowing up and firestorms and bad things. Since I like movies where stuff blows up, that was the direction I decided to take with it.

Now, in the context of the conjunction of that 26,000-year cycle, some people believe that the last time that came around, in 24,000 or so B.C., the earth actually went through a whole bunch of these cataclysmic upheavals and that was when Atlantis sank. So, what I did was combine those mythologies, and the Nightkeepers are a group of magi who survived the destruction of Atlantis, and that’s connected, in their mythology, with the Maya demons, coming out of the underworld. They were able to push the demons back behind a barrier of magical energy, and they vowed that they were going to stay alive for the 26,000-year cycle and prevent these demons from coming back to earth and destroying it, finally, in 2012. So, their whole history, coming through Egypt and then to the Mayan Empire, has all been about making sure that their culture persists, long enough to save mankind from 2012. And, in doing so, they’ve influenced these cultures that they lived with, which brings in some of the people who want to draw parallels between the Egyptians and the Maya, and groups of people who should not have had access to each other, at the times that they’ve got some parallels in their cultures. It was really a lot of fun, playing with that history, and then bringing it forward and saying, “Okay, these are a group of people whose job it is to save mankind in 2012. But, at the same time, they’re also modern human beings and they’re being asked to believe in a religious system that hasn’t functioned in several millennia.” A lot of the Maya religion was based on blood sacrifice, orgasm and just some really basic stuff that is not dealt with in the same way today. It’s a culture clash, at the same time, which is a lot of fun.

MediaBlvd> How did you get the idea for the main characters? Was there a specific inspiration for either/both of them, or did they just serve a specific goal or purpose that you were trying to achieve with the series itself?

Jessica> I wanted to carry the history through. It’s about a people who are deeply rooted in destiny and prophecy, and their duty to save mankind. And so, this group has undergone a couple of different population bottlenecks. They’ve been killed off a couple of times, during their history, and each time that happens, they lose some of their magic and they lose some of their knowledge. So, a lot of the characters in these stories were raised as normal human beings. One of the things that I love is that sense of, “What if the phone rang and somebody told you that you were a superhero?” Part of these characters’ story is that they’re learning, as we go, that they are Nightkeepers and they are magic and it’s their job to save the world. You can play it back into the television show Heroes, where these everyday, normal, modern people are, all of a sudden, discovering that they’ve got a greater purpose, and how do they deal with that? How do they interpret it because there isn’t a rule book.

MediaBlvd> How much of the story do you base in real history and how much do you decide to take license with?

Jessica> When I choose to deviate from history, I do it with a really clear sense that I’m doing it on purpose, with really good logic for it. A lot of times, the reason for it is that the Nightkeepers are not exactly the Maya. They’re a culture that existed within them, so their history is slightly different from the history in the books about the Mayan Empire. I try to stick very closely, where I can, to the history because the history is helping to inform the world itself. But, by the same token, their experiences have not exactly been those of the people in the history books.

MediaBlvd> Did you do any research into the police side of things for the heroine, Miami-Dade narcotics detective Leah Daniels?

Jessica> I did research about the locale. I did not do a ton of research on the police work, primarily because I’ve written a lot of suspense novels for Harlequin, so I’ve got some familiarity with the police work itself. And, to be honest with you, that wasn’t the focus of the story. She is a cop and she thinks like a cop and she’s got the same moral grounding as a police officer, but the story is about how she’s a fish out of water. It’s how she finds herself in a world that she knows nothing about, and how she experiences that world and learns to live within it, and falls in love and finds this man that is so far outside of her realm of understanding, yet the Gods have decided that these two are linked. And then, her sacrifice is one of the things that’s going to save the world. Is this man who has fallen in love with her -- this King, this magi -- willing to do what the Gods tell him, or is he going to save the woman he’s come to love? That prophecy versus modern sensibilities versus the power of love is very profound for me.

MediaBlvd> Had you always been interested in the Mayan Empire, or was there something specific that caught your attention?

Jessica> It’s something I’ve always been interested in. I’ve taken a lot of courses in ancient civilizations. I’ve been to most of the Mayan ruins. Back in the late 70's, early 80's, before Cancun was really a cool tourist destination and a lot of it wasn’t very built up yet, you could get access to a lot of places in the ruins that you can’t anymore, and that had a really profound impact on me. The sense of awe that I felt, climbing up on the big pyramid at Chichen Itza, and climbing inside that pyramid -- I don’t even know if you can still get inside that now -- and being able to touch things and be around things that are so spiritual. There’s something there that doesn’t exist in our realm anymore. That’s always been something that I’ve wanted to come back to. I really enjoy the world and I’m fascinated by it. Certainly, I’m not an expert, by any way, shape or form, but I try really hard to bring some realism, of what I’ve experienced, to the stories.

MediaBlvd> When you write a story that has a definite endpoint, as far as having a date where things are either going to end or they’re not, did you know how you would end the story, when you started writing it, or, are you still figuring that out, as you go?

Jessica> I absolutely know. Assuming that the stories find an audience and that people want to keep reading them, I’ve got all of the books mapped out between now and the end of 2012, and I hope to get a couple of books out a year. I don’t know exactly how many books it’s going to be, but I do know exactly where the story arc is going, I know who the heroes and heroines of each of the stories are, and I know a lot of what the subplots are doing. After awhile, it really took on a life of its own. Now, it’s less about what I wanted to do and more about what is organic to these people.

MediaBlvd> How many books have you been contracted for, so far?

Jessica> There are three books definite, and then we’ll have to see. Hopefully, the readers will like it enough that I can keep going.

MediaBlvd> Is each book going to be about a different hero and heroine?

Jessica> A lot happens in the first book, and one of the reasons for that is because I’ve introduced all but a handful of the characters that are going to be central to the stories. So, I know where they are and I know what they’re doing. Each separate book is going to have a distinct hero and heroine that are different. The first book is the man who needs to step up and take leadership of the Nightkeepers, and the human woman that he falls for. The second book is two of the new, incoming Nightkeepers. And, we’re going to go forward from there. There are several love stories that are going to continue through multiple books, until they get their own stories. So, it’s a lot of fun, watching the different relationships build at different paces, very much like how it does in our everyday lives.

MediaBlvd> Does it ever get confusing, trying to keep track of so many different characters? Do you have to really be aware of what you’re doing?

Jessica> Yes, and no. I’ve got a binder that’s got the pictures that I use for inspiration, and it’s got their basic pertinent information, so that I can remember what color their eyes are and such. But, to me, each of them has a very distinct personality, and part of my challenge, as a writer, is making sure that I can get that on the page for the reader. The big challenge in Nightkeepers is that there are a lot of characters, and so I worked really, really hard to try to make each of them distinct, so that a reader doesn’t read a name and go, “Wait a sec! Who was that again?” I hope that that worked. I tried really hard to do that. And, obviously, the first book is pretty complex because it’s getting this whole world off the ground. We’re going to get to know each of these characters more deeply, in each of the subsequent stories. But, I don’t confuse them because they’re separate people to me. They exist in this movie that’s playing in my head, in the background. One of my concerns, and one thing that I worked very hard at, was making them not just distinct, but also making their stories interesting, so that you read a little piece of their world and go, “Gee, I’d like to know more about that person.” To me, each of them has something really special about them. There’s a reason why they’re in the world, and there’s a reason why I want to spend time with them, so it’s my job to make sure that the reader wants to spend time with them.

MediaBlvd> This series is a bit of a departure from your previous books. Did that make you nervous about how this series would be received?

Jessica> It doesn’t because I’m not trying to pretend that it’s one of the suspenses. I’m just going ahead and saying, “Look, this is what I want to write. I love the suspenses, but this is the big, sweeping, epic, heroic story that I’ve always wanted to write.” It’s what I like to read. As I’m writing these books, I’m writing the scenes that I want to read and that I would love to pick up in somebody else’s story. NAL (New American Library) has done such a phenomenal job packaging it. It’s got a great cover. And, I’ve gotten some great reader response. A couple of my author friends have been very, very supportive in getting the word out to their fan bases. I think that we’ve positioned it and we’ve made it pretty clear to everybody that this is a dark paranormal, pre-apocalyptic, doomsday set of books. If you pick it up expecting a Jessica Andersen intrigue, that’s not what it’s going to be. But, the cover makes that pretty clear, as does the back matter. And, I’ve got a lot of respect for romance readers. They tend to be some of the sharpest readers out there, in terms of being aware of detail, story and their own expectations. So, I truly do trust that the readers are going to pick it up, if this is the kind of story that they’re going to like.

MediaBlvd> Without giving anything away, what can fans of Nightkeepers expect from Dawnkeepers, the next book in the series?

Jessica> There’s a scene from the second book at the back of the first book, so readers will actually be able to get a sense of the second book from there. It is a different book, in that they feel very different in romance. The first story is about two strangers coming together and figuring each other out, in the middle of this really terrible situation. Whereas, in the second story, these people already know each other and they’ve already tried out a relationship once and it didn’t work, and that’s for a variety of reasons, including prophecies, as well as their own experiences, out in the real world. To me, it’s a much more romantic story. It was a harder story for me, romance wise, just because these people are both very deserving of love and they are very strong characters, but the situation of being Nightkeepers and being responsible for saving the world just makes things impossible sometimes. The push-pull of that was very hard for me, as a writer, to experience, as I was writing it. And, I just love the story itself. I love both books. They’re very different, but they’re both books that I would want to read.

MediaBlvd> Were any of the characters particularly easy or fun for you to write, and have any of them particularly difficult?

Jessica> For me, the main characters of each book are always going to be the hardest because I want them to be so alive to the reader because they’re so alive to me. So, I have to really think about their actions and why they’re doing things, particularly when a story takes a turn that I don’t expect it to take. What were they thinking when that happened? What were they feeling? Why was that the only answer, or the chosen answer, in a particular circumstance? On a more general note, in terms of who’s easy and who’s hard, there are a couple of secondary characters who I just hear the voices of, very clearly. There’s a teenage boy named Rabbit, who, for whatever reason, is very, very clear to me. He’s had a really tough upbringing. He wants to do the right thing, but he’s one of those kids who, in trying to do the right thing, always manages to screw stuff up. He’s got a chip on his shoulder. He’s got an attitude. And, he’s got these incredible powers that he’s just beginning to figure out. It makes me remember, so clearly, high school and college, and not fitting in, and not knowing whether you were coming or going. So, that’s been a really interesting character for me.

MediaBlvd> Do you write every day, and do you have a particular location or time of day that you prefer to write in?

Jessica> I definitely like to write every day, when I can. Each book is a little different, in terms of when it writes best. Overall, if I’m going to write a fairly hot sex scene, I do best if I set my alarm for like 3 am, and get up and write it in the middle of the night. I think my internal editor is asleep then, so there’s no little voice in the back of my head, saying, “Oh, my God, my mother’s going to read this!” So, I have a tendency to write sex scenes at really weird times. Sometimes, I can just write through them because I’m so deep in the character’s emotions. But, if I’m just having a little bit of a hard time with it, I’ll try it again at a weird time of night because, that way, I’m not thinking about what I’m writing, I’m just writing it. When you start to think about what you’ve actually just put on the page, you can gross yourself out a little. Find a way to not think about the words too hard. Sometimes, if I’m not in that place, I’ll just put a place holder and write, “Come back and fill in the scene later.” In the context of The Nightkeepers, I have to say that because the stories and characters are so clear to me, I haven’t really hard a lot of problems getting that kind of thing down on the page. I know these people are in love and I know how they feel about each other. I know that they’re completely hot for each other, even though there’s this other stuff going on in their lives. Because I’m so deep into that emotion, I’m actually finding it’s not as hard as it has been for me, in the past. Sex is healthy and it’s good and it’s fun, so there’s no reason to be uncomfortable taking about it.

But, other than that, I write somewhere between five and eight hours a day, generally. I’ve got an office and a desktop, and I go ahead and let it be a job. I get up in the morning, I get my tea, and I sit my butt down. I’ve got certain things that I want to accomplish in a day, and I don’t get to be done until I’ve accomplished them. Writing full-time, you’ve got to be able to have a level of discipline. That’s not to say that everybody has to write every day, or that they’ve got to do a set number of pages, but you’ve got to have the discipline to get the job done.

MediaBlvd> Do you like to have everything plotted out before you start to write, or do you like to just follow the characters and the story?

Jessica> Interestingly, particularly in these books, what I’ve done is I’ve sketched out the arcs. I know what the main characters are going to do, I know who my hero and heroine are, and what needs to happen. I’m writing a number of books, all aiming towards the 2012 end date, so I know the steps that each character needs to have taken by the end of each book. That being said, I synopsize those, and I have some ideas of what’s going to happen from A to B to C to D, but a lot of times, what I’ll do is get to a point and the decision that I had anticipated making, and that I’ve been assuming I’m going to make, and that I’ve been writing in the direction of making, I’ll stop and ask myself, “What else could happen here?” It’s not generally a gigantic shift, in terms of the story, but a lot of times, it’s a very big shift, in terms of character, and what different choices these characters could make and what repercussions that would have.

For me, setting it up, not the obvious way, but the flowing way first, and then getting there and turning that flow on its head, makes the story a little bit more unexpected, is something that I really appreciate, as a reader, and as a moviegoer and television watcher. I like the unexpected. I like sitting there and going, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming,” but then looking back and understanding that it was absolutely consistent with the characters. It doesn’t work to give you a plot twist that means nothing, or is inconsistent with the characters. But, if you give me a plot twist that I didn’t expect, that’s consistent with the characters of the story, then I’m way more interested in that than the one that just goes, “Yeah, I saw that coming.” There’s a certain comfort in formula, but it doesn’t stick with you. I’m a huge Battlestar Galactica fan and one of the things that I love about the new series is that, a lot of times, they’ll do stuff that I don’t see coming and I don’t necessarily understand right then. And, three, four or five shows, or even another season, down the road, I’ll look back and go, “Oh, that’s why that happened.” That’s something that I’m really trying to carry into my stories -- that sense of not just the unexpected, but things that build towards later things. I don’t want to have to explain everything and tie up everything in each story. Each story has a fully realized romance, and each story will answer questions asked in the previous one and in itself, but there will also be some over-arching things that might show up in the first couple of books and won’t become important until the 7^th or 8^th. I enjoy that, as an entertainment junkie, so I’d like to give that back to the people who will hopefully become fans of the series.

MediaBlvd> Do you enjoy getting feedback from readers? What have you already been hearing from people who have read the book?

Jessica> It got some very good, very strong early reviews. For me, I can admit that I’m not the best at taking criticism, so it’s hard to have somebody say, “Well, I didn’t like this, this and this,” because one person saying, “I didn’t like this, this and this,” is going to stick with me way more than 10 people telling me it’s wonderful. As writers, as creative people and as females, we will tend to gravitate towards that one negative thing. I don’t generally read my own reviews. I haven’t with the Intrigues, but in this particular case, I had to because I needed to excerpt the quotes for my website and the promotional stuff, and it’s been scary. The reviewers have been super-enthusiastic. It was made a top pick at Romance Junkies. I’ve been invited to do a whole bunch of guest blogs, on Enchanted Reviews and Romance Novel TV. So, it’s exciting people, and that’s exciting me, but I know that that first, “What is this pile of crap?” review I get is going to probably sit me in a corner for a week. I know that about myself. That’s the artistic temperament, and it is what it is. To be honest with you, the book wouldn’t be as interesting as it is, if it didn’t ask some weird questions, but there’s going to be some people who don’t like the questions I ask, or that don’t like the answers I give them, and that’s okay. I’d rather have the book create a strong response in somebody than have it be forgettable. But, strong responses aren’t always going to be positive. As many times as I tell myself that, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be fun when it happens.

MediaBlvd> Is there someone whose advice you rely on, if you get stuck on anything character or plot related?

Jessica> Character and plot related, not so much, having written the number of Harlequins. I also do a lot of work with up-and-coming writers. I help mentor a lot of people, which has made me deconstruct and think about my own writing a lot. So, I feel pretty comfortable in the decisions that I make and in the stories that I write. My agent, Deidre Knight, is amazing. I’ll send her stuff and go, “Does this work? Does this not work?” My critique partner is J.R. Ward. She does these amazing vampire books (the New York Times best-selling Black Dagger Brotherhood series), and I’ll send stuff to her and say, “Does this play for you? Does this not play for you?” But, in general, particularly in a storyline that’s this out-of-the-box, because there’s not a lot of stories out there like it, I think that I need to be left alone to make my character decisions, and then take the responsibility for them, whether they work out or not. In terms of who I turn to for advice, it would be my agent, Deidre; my critique partner, J.R. Ward; Judith Arnold, who is also a chapter member of mine, has been great when I need help; and Suzanne Brockmann, who is another fabulous writer and is somebody who has mentored me since the very beginning. She’s a very busy lady because she writes these wonderful books, but I know that, if I really get stuck, she’s always there for me to give a holler out to. But, in general, for me, the writing itself is fairly solitary. My questions tend more to be about the market and business decisions and promoting and really just trying to get the word out, so that I can try to get these books into the readers’ hands and hope that the writing stands up for itself.

MediaBlvd> What has been your proudest professional accomplishment, thus far?

Jessica> This is it. I’m so incredibly proud of these books. I’m excited to have had the idea. I’m proud to say that I wrote them. I’m putting together a fabulous website with a message board that I hope is going to be pretty active, in terms of just talking about the end-times prophecies. There is a section for what you’re watching on TV, and stuff like that, but a lot of it is just about talking to me about this end-of-the-world idea and social change and transformation. That’s what a lot of these books are about. They’re about prophecy, and whether you have to fulfill a prophecy or get around it. As the world careens its way towards this date, a whole lot of people are saying something’s going to happen.

MediaBlvd> Do you know what’s next for you? Is there something that you’d like to write in the future that you haven’t gotten the chance to write yet, or do you have something that you’ve written in the past that you’d still like to get published?

Jessica> Not really, no. For me, right now, the focus is the next four years. I do get a little panicky when I think about what happens after 2012 for me, as a writer, but I figure that I’ve got a lot of books between now and then. By the time I get there, for all we know, readers tastes will have shifted a little bit and there will be something new and interesting. I’m keeping myself open to story ideas, but to be honest, these books are long, so there’s no room in my head for anything else. I get a little weirded out when I think, “Well, this is it! In 2012, we’re done.” But, so much can happen between now and then that I’m just putting my head down and trying to make each book as special as I can make it. I just think that this series is so fun and so interesting, and I just want to make sure that I get that across to the reader and make the reader go, “Hey, this is fun and interesting!”

MediaBlvd> Do you have any plans at all to do any short stories in the series, or will it be all full-length novels?

Jessica> I’ve already done two short stories that are being posted on the website as bonus features. There are pieces of the stories that I’m just not going to be able to get in the books, and there’s a bunch of deleted scenes. The first version of the first book was like 200,000 words long. It was just immense. My editor was very, very supportive and she was willing to work with a really big book, but that was just too fat. So, there are some excerpts of deleted scenes from Nightkeepers that are going to go up on the website, and then I wrote two short stories that basically address aspects of the world that I didn’t feel like I had an opportunity to really explain as well as I wanted to, in that first book. In the first book, I tried to explore the world and write a fully realized love story, as these people’s lives are changing. You’ve got 14 people on the page whose lives are changing in this enormous, fundamental way, so there wasn’t all the room in the world for me to go, “Okay, here is why this is the way it is.” So, I wrote a couple of short stories that dealt a little bit with, “This is why the world is what it is.” And, I think I’ll probably continue to do that, as I move forward. In the second book, there is a thread that I allude to, but can’t develop fully, and I can see that story. I know what happens and I know how it changes the world, going forward. So, there are definitely some shorter stories that will come to light, whether they be website stories, or whether they be turned into some novellas. I have nothing against it. I definitely enjoy writing a variety of different lengths.

MediaBlvd> What advice can you offer to aspiring writers who are not just looking to get published, but who would also like to have a long-term career?

Jessica> I would strongly recommend getting involved with a writers’ group. I think Romance Writers of America is incredibly strong, in terms of advocating for their members and for setting up systems that help you to learn, as a writer. Depending on your genre, there are other writers’ groups. There’s also local writers’ groups. Find yourself a critique group. Any time you reach out and put yourself out there, there are the risks that maybe the people you are giving your work to and you’re getting feedback from don’t have the same vision as you, so at the same time that you ask for help, you also have to have a sense of your own feelings, as a writer, and not try to necessarily write to please one other person. But, if you’re consistently getting the same comments, over and over and over again, from a bunch of contests or a bunch of other beta readers, it might be a good idea to step outside and look at that. When I get feedback from readers and from my critique partners, if both Deidre and J.R. ping the same scene, I’ll look at it. I won’t necessarily change it the way that they’ve suggested, if they’ve even suggested something, but I’ll look at it and say, “Why is this not working for my reader? Why did this just bump them out of the story?”

In terms of making a career out of writing, treat it as a job. Treat it as something that you’re serious about. Make a schedule, make deadlines, sit your butt in the chair. I don’t write brilliantly, every single day, but I do write pretty much every single day. There’s a great Nora Roberts quote that you can’t revise a blank page. So, even if you have to write 10 pages of absolute shite, and then go back and fix that later, at least you’ve moved forward from point A to point B. In the course of writing that first book, I probably threw out 400 pages worth of written stuff that just didn’t work because I was trying to deal with this enormous, massive amount of information, yet still have a story, and still have a love story, and still have characters that were important. Were those hundreds of pages that I chucked wasted? No because I found 400 pages worth of things that didn’t work. So, just keep writing. Write every day, as much as you can. If you’re not writing, think about your story. Just keep it up. You’re not going to sell overnight, but you’re never going to sell, if you quit and you stop writing.