Jen, what scene of IN A WORLD JUST RIGHT was really hard for you to write and why, and is that the one of which you are most proud? Or is there another scene you particularly love?

One scene I spent significant time on was the scene where Jonathan and Kylie go to the art museum. In the scene’s early drafts my readers, including my editor, felt it was long and draggy. I felt like they were questioning the importance of the scene. This was a problem because this scene was super important to me as far as the major themes in the book—responsibility for creation, the definition of “true” love, and the longing for what’s “real.” In this scene, Jonathan has serious doubts and questions about what he’s done by creating a girlfriend for himself. I must have rewritten it a dozen times to trim the excess museum stuff and focus on the essentials of the relationship in a way that didn’t seem too symbolic or metaphorical. I’m not sure how successful I was, as only one reviewer has noted the scene, but aside from the ending, it’s my favorite scene.

How long or hard was your road to publication? How many books did you write before this one, and how many never got published?

My road was fairly long, but I wouldn’t say it was hard. Hard is a relative term. When I set out on the journey, I was still teaching, and I couldn’t at that time imagine doing anything other than teach, so the beginning years didn’t feel “hard” at all. Basically, I wrote two manuscripts as thesis projects for graduate degrees. The first I sent to ten agents and let something like two years pass waiting to hear back from two of them who requested the manuscript. The second I only sent to about a dozen agents, and something like half of them requested the manuscript. While I was waiting to hear back (and, alas, accumulating rejections), I decided to keep writing. I had learned in grad school that if you write a page a day you can have a book done in a year. Since it took 5-6 years to write each of my previous manuscripts, I thought this was a pretty good challenge. In the end, I finished IN A WORLD JUST RIGHT in four months. A few months later I had an agent, and when it went on submission, it caught my editor’s attention fairly quickly. I didn’t have a whirlwind journey, as some do. It took years in total, but it was all good.

What’s your writing ritual like? Do you listen to music? Work at home or at a coffee shop or the library, etc?

The only place I can write is at my desk on my big office computer. I’ve learned to do a lot of things in various places on my laptop, but writing is not one of them. In general, I need complete silence and a long stretch of time to get anything done. I wish I were the kind of writer who could squeeze in ten minutes of writing here, twenty minutes there, and because I’m not that kind of writer, it’s taken until this year, when my son is old enough to go to school full time, for me to feel like I have a real writer’s life.