Jennifer Echols

Happy Monday, my friends! Today, courtesy of the Teen Book Scene, I’m lucky enough to have Jennifer Echols, most recently the author of Love Story, here to guest post. Enjoy!

Guest post about myself? That’s pretty hard for me to do. I love my life,
but I think it would look boring to somebody else, which is why my
characters usually are daredevils and extroverts–the opposite of me.
I had a lovely childhood growing up on a beautiful lake in Alabama, and my
world was full of books. My brother was always reading, and whenever I
needed something from my mom, she would say, “Just let me finish this
chapter.” I have the fondest memories of reading on the patio or the dock in
the summertime, listening to the water.
I guess a lot of people who love reading as much as I do have the urge to
write a book, but maybe they think actually writing books is for other
people, not for them. I never had that thought, because my grandmother was a
writer. I figured if she could do it, I could do it. The thing was, she
never got her stories published because she gave up too soon. She received
one rejection from *The New Yorker* and never sent anything out again. It
was such a shame because this story in particular was really beautiful and
timely in the 1950s when she wrote it, and it could have been published
somewhere. I vowed that I would not make the same mistake–that I would keep
sending my work out until it was accepted. And that’s what I did.