Jenny: A little about me ... What a can of worms! *G* Lessee ... I've been on my honeymoon with my husband now for 25 years. We celebrated our 25th anniversary in December by taking a trip to Sedona, Arizona (one of the most awe-inspiring places I've ever been). We have a son and daughter, both out on their own, so we're experiencing the joys of the empty nest and discovering "Rich and Jenny" again as opposed to being "Price's and Marisa's dad and mom". My son is a lieutenant in the Air Force now, after graduating from Virginia Military Institute in 2001. My husband went to VMI, also, and we dated while he was there, so when my son was there we would walk the post, baffled at how we could be PARENTS of one of the cadets when we still felt like college kids. My daughter is 17 months younger than her brother, working full time at FedEx at night, going to school majoring in art during the day. She was married on June 2nd to a truly wonderful guy.

We mustn't forget the pets, but I can't let them know I lowered their status to "pets" because I think the reality is that THEY own US. At least I'm convinced they think so. Bear, our "baby boy", is a two-year-old, 80-pound Samoyed, and one look at him tells you where he got his name. At times I maintain that he's just a furry, mutant slug, albeit lovable, and when he's not getting the attention he thinks he deserves, he's very verbal about it, "talking" to us in "Bear-speak" that can be anything from weird moaning to, honestly, a kind of yodel, to quiet woofs, to outright "pay attention to me!" barks. He also has a tendency to "sing" along in a MOST heartfelt manner with the train whistles in the distance, or any siren that goes by. None of the neighbors complain because they've all fallen in love with him, and, as one neighbor pointed out, a train will NEVER sneak up on us. *G*

The second picture of Bear shows how he "celebrated" his "brother's" birthday (my son's birthday, who wasn't home and is Bear's best pal). I wanted to do something special for my son, since he misses Bear so much, so I put this slug of a dog in the chair that my son would rock him in (he thinks he's an 80 pound lap dog), put my son's college baseball cap on him, and propped an empty Coors can between his paws from a can of beer that had been in the fridge for YEARS. (We're not big drinkers. *G*) The silly dog is like Gumby or Pokey, because you can pose him and he's so lazy he just stays in the position you put him.

We also have "grandcat" we inherited named Maybell, aka Mabes, who is pretty much queen of the manor, and is especially the boss of me and my husband. She has one cuddly day a month when she forgets she's a cat and is sweet, but whether she's feeling cuddly or not, she's made it clear that our laps are not our own, nor any paper we happen to be working on that she can stretch her body across. Her favorite pastime is taunting Bear into chasing her through the house and getting him in trouble.

My hobbies ... Oh, gee, where do I begin? I'm the type who likes to try different things and have new experiences as opposed to diving into one particular thing, so I'm always looking for something new. (Less charitable people might call this "short attention span".) My husband and I took ballroom dancing classes to celebrate the empty nest syndrome. I LOVE to dance, any kind of dancing, so a friend and I took line dancing for months until the teacher had to stop teaching. I took fencing classes, and was getting pretty good at it, but a problem with my lower back got worse with all the lunges, so I had to put fencing on hold for awhile. Right now I'm learning Tai Chi and loving every minute of it. I'm also taking Greek, because I've found if I don't challenge my brain I get really bored. I can't decide which I love more, learning the language or the retired Greek Orthodox priest who teaches the class. I'm also teaching myself French with the use of video tapes, a computer program, and (my favorite part) going to France. Two French phrases I recommend for anyone traveling to France ... and these will get you a long way, trust me ... are "I don't speak French well" and "Where are the restrooms?" *G* Actually, those two phrases will probably get you pretty far in any language. Since traveling is also a hobby, I've got those down pat in more than a couple languages. I also love to read, of course. And it almost seems like a hobby in itself to stay on the lookout for new things to try and new places to go.

Beaty: From your website I learned that you are well-traveled (that's putting it mildly!). Did you like that lifestyle? And how did it affect your writing?

Jenny: Oh, traveling! I'm not sure that there's any better way to learn! My husband and I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, and when we got married he was already stationed as a C-130 pilot at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. He flew home at Christmas, we got married, and we left eight days later to go back to the P.I. (That's Air Force jargon for Philippine Islands.) We loved the opportunities the Air Force gave us to see the world. Since we were already living in the Far East, traveling to Hong Kong, Tai Pai, Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc., was just a matter of flying a few hours, usually sitting sideways on the webbed seating in the back of a C-130. Seeing other countries truly does give Americans an enormous sense of how fortunate we are to BE Americans and have the privilege of living in this country. We also did a bit of traveling in Europe in our Air Force days, and have started going back since our kids are grown. When they were growing up, we tried to take them all over the United States, to give them the appreciation of our country as well as to broaden their horizons.

As for whether the traveling has affected my writing, I can't really say that it has. At least not the world traveling. Vacations and getaway weekends traveling around the South have been a huge influence though, because I'm fascinated by all things Southern, and no matter where I go in the South, an idea for a book will pop into my brain. A friend and I were touring Destrahan Plantation outside of New Orleans, and one of the other tourists asked if the plantation was haunted. The tour guide told us of several hauntings, but I swear I brought one of the ghosts home with me (at least in my mind *G*). There was a story of several different people on several occasions who had looked up toward the upper verandah and saw a soldier looking out toward the river, then he would turn as the image of a woman in ante-bellum dress would appear. They would move toward each other and disappear when they touched. Well, that ghost crawled into my head and kept bugging me to tell a story about him, always beginning with him standing on the upper verandah of a house, looking out toward the river. When I finished writing ECHOES OF TOMORROW (which was the first book I ever wrote, but it was published second), I started on the ghost's story, just so he'd shut up! (For those of you wondering, no, I didn't really "hear" a ghost or see one, but the idea for this story was stuck in my head like a song you can't stop singing.) He insisted his name was Hunter, and he insisted on "living" in Memphis. By the way, Hunter's country plantation in Mississippi, Tranquille, is heavily based on an absolutely fabulous home in Scott, Arkansas, called Marlsgate. It's not open to the public, but on occasion the owner would have tours. A very dear friend called him, told him I was researching settings, and asked if he would give me a personal tour. Not only did he welcome me and my friend into his home, he told us to feel free to roam around the house to our heart's content, and he told us some fantastic stories, some bits and pieces of which I've used, in that book and several others. Hunter liked Marlsgate so much that he decided that he wanted it to be his Tranquille. Hunter's story, after he finally bugged me into writing it, turned out to be LOST YESTERDAY, which was the first book I had published.

Another example of how traveling the South inspires me is ... a friend and I went on a weekend trip down the Natchez Trace to Natchez, and while we were there I told her I wanted to find a place called Windsor Ruins that was north of Natchez. It's the burned out ruins of a plantation. We headed out in the late afternoon, took the obligatory wrong turns (which can be the most educating and fun sometimes), and didn't get to the ruins until just a little while before sunset. We pulled off the road, following the signs, bumping along the rutted drive, and as we came around a bend we were gifted with the sight of almost two dozen huge columns rising up from a carpet of green grass, outlining the original home. Oh, geez, my brain immediately went into idea mode, especially when the setting sun shot through the columns, lighting them up with that beautiful, end-of-the-day gold color. It took two years to write that book because of one crisis after another hitting my life, but my agent is shopping it around now, and hopefully SPIRIT OF THE RUINS will find a home and hit the shelves, and hopefully it will maintain its working title, because there was definitely a spirit that you could feel in those ruins, and that's what I wrote about.

Beaty: Did you always want to be a writer? What made you pick romance stories?

Jenny: I never DREAMED I'd be a writer, but I always liked to write things down, challenging myself to make it vivid. When we lived in the Philippines I'd write home several times a week. (This was before the days of Internet and email.) I'd literally write twenty-page letters, describing what it was like to live in a place where we shared our home with geckos (a small type of lizard) because the geckos would eat the other, less desirable critters and bugs that wanted to take up residence, and how we had to haul huge containers of water from the base to use for drinking and cooking because it was nothing to turn on the water spigot to brush your teeth or take a bath and, even after the water had been running for several minutes, a dead spider with its legs all curled up would flow out with the H20. I didn't realize it at the time, but I would edit my letters until I had them saying things exactly the way I wanted them, describing funny things that had happened or just the totally different way of life. People started telling me that I was such a great letter writer, and asking me if I ever "thought about doing anything with that." I, honest to Pete, would think "What can you 'do' with letter-writing?" Duh. It wasn't until my kids were in middle school that I got this idea for a scene that I thought would be great for a romance novel. It was nothing more than a scene, but it kept playing over and over in my head, so finally one day while I was waiting for my daughter's piano lesson to be over, I picked one of her spiral notebooks out of her bookbag (we never did discuss why this notebook was totally blank ... hmmm.... ), and started writing, just to get it out of my system. I guess even then I had the heart of a writer, because I couldn't just write down the scene. I had to start at the beginning of the story and work my way up to the scene. Up to that point, I hadn't even thought about the fact that there was anything before that scene, but when I started writing, I discovered a whole history between these two people before "the scene." I would work on the story in bits and pieces, until one day I picked up the catalog for the Continuing Education classes here at the University of Memphis and saw a writing class that looked interesting. I took the class, met a whole group of other people who also got bugged by characters to write things *G*, and I kept writing that story until it was finished. That story was ECHOES OF TOMORROW, and the infamous scene that started it all was the one where Elise comes home from a trip and finds Reed alone in the ballroom, music playing, fire in the fireplace, and they dance together. Then it was while I was writing ECHOES that I visited Destrahan and brought home Hunter's ghost, who then bugged me to write HIS story ...

As for why I picked romance, it wasn't really a choice. I didn't even think about what I was writing. All I knew was the story I wanted to write down, and that I wanted a happy ending. Life is too short, in my humble opinion, to spend time investing emotions in characters I'm reading about, only to have some tragedy befall them at the end of their story. Life has enough tragedy and unhappy endings for me to go looking for books with unhappy endings. I won't even go to a movie if I know it doesn't end happily, and it KILLS me when I read a book or see a movie that has a terrible ending when it could have easily ended great and had me walking out of there feeling wonderful and thinking "life is good" rather than feeling like I'm leaving a funeral. Of course, everyone has his or her own tastes, and some people don't mind sad endings and a good cry, but if I have my 'druthers, I'll have a feel-good ending every time, whether I'm writing it, reading it, or watching it.

Beaty: Your stories are almost all time travels. I love paranormals, and time travels are some of my favorites - mostly because of the humor factor. *G* Was time travel your preference? Are you going to continue writing them?

Jenny: Yes to everything. *G* Time travel has always been a fascination of mine, even when I was really small. The ghost story for the novella was something I hadn't planned on writing or even thought about, but when my editor told me she was putting me in an anthology and that it was a ghost story rather than time travel, I had fortunately just come from a vacation where I'd had a few bizarre experiences and been told the cottage was haunted, so the brain took over and converted those few experiences into a story.

Time travel is my first love, but unfortunately the publishing industry looks at time travel, paranormal, vampire, and other sub-genres as not as popular as straight historical or straight contemporary, so they aren't chasing authors down and begging them to write time travels. It's getting extremely hard to sell a time travel to a publisher, so, though I plan to continue to write them, the book I'm working on now is purely historical romance. But , the main character in this book is Aidan Alston, the bad boy brother from WAITING FOR YESTERDAY. He (here we go again) bugged me for years to rehabilitate him, so I'm enjoying tormenting him while turning him into a good guy. I haven't completely abandoned the paranormal element, though, because this book is set in the 1890s, when psychics and "table turning" were all the rage.

Beaty: All authors seem to have a preferred method of writing. Do you allow your characters to take over and surprise you? Or do you control them and expect them to behave?

Jenny: I think I've probably beaten this horse to death and you can guess the answer by now. *G* When I sit down to write, I know how the story begins, I have a pretty good idea about how I want it to end, and I might have a few twists in mind for the plot, but from there on out, the characters take over. They tell me the story and I write it down. I get to know them at the same pace the reader does. There have been a few times where they kept insisting on doing something that was just downright boring, and I would "rewind" and keep throwing new things at them to pick up the pace. In LOST YESTERDAY, I couldn't get Hunter to get upset with Marin when she kept saying another man's name in her sleep. He just wanted to be mushy. I finally sat there while the ink in my pen dried out (yes, I write longhand) and bargained with him in my mind, telling him that if he'd just get good and upset I'd make it worth his while later. *G* Being a man, that was an offer he couldn't refuse. Most of the time, when the characters take over and do something I didn't plan on, the things THEY do are infinitely more interesting than what I had planned for them. The very first time that happened, my heroine responded to my hero with a comeback that wasn't even close to what I'd planned to write. My initial reaction was "Hey, wait! That's not what I was going to write! Where'd that come from?" Then, almost immediately, I realized, "Oh, yeah, that's MUCH better! That oughta get his attention!" So now when something ends up on my page out of the blue, I've learned that it's probably going to take the story in a better direction than my feeble mind could have imagined.

Beaty: Do you prefer taking your characters into the past instead of bringing them to the present? Or is that just the way that the stories work the best?

Jenny: It's just the way the story comes to me. It's more fun for ME to write a character who traveled to the past, because I can put myself in their shoes and marvel at the concept of time travel. When a character comes from the past to the present, I work really hard on finding minute things that a person from the past would be amazed at. We all know the reactions to airplanes, telephones, TV, radio, computers, microwaves ... Though, of course, reactions to those have to be in there, the fun part is trying to put myself in their shoes enough to discover the small things that they might be baffled at ... ball point pens, the smell of the polluted air, jogging shoes that look like more like pillows on your feet than shoes ... The most fun "experience" I wrote about was in ECHOES OF TOMORROW, where Reed gulps down some Coca Cola from the can for the first time. We forget there's a technique to drinking soda from the can until we try to drink it like water. *G*

Beaty: Your stories contain humor, which is something I love. Is it easy to add the touches of humor to a story? Is it automatic? Or is it something that has to be added as an afterthought?

Jenny: I don't think true humor that people can identify with is something you can "add" because it always seems to come off as slapstick and, well, added. *G* I think you have to be able to laugh at yourself, and I try to give my characters something that's humorous about them, even if THEY don't think so. Writing humor is one of those things, for me anyway, where, the harder I try, the harder it gets. (Anyone out there play golf? You know what I mean then. That's why I don't play anymore.) So most of the humor in my books is something that just flowed with the story and happened naturally as I wrote, and fortunately came out funny. There have been a few times when I had an idea for something funny that I wanted to happen, and if I could have pulled it off it would have been hilarious, but 100% of the time, when I tried to "add" that scene it would fall flat or just stick out like a sore thumb as not belonging there. I love to read humor that I can relate to and maybe even identify with so much that it makes me squirm at little, and that's what I work toward when I write ... human nature foibles, I suppose. Pratfalls and engineered "things" that turn slapstick just don't appeal to me at all, and actually pull me out of the story that I'm reading. It's almost as if the author stopped the story cold just to add something that was supposed to be funny. I've heard actors say that doing comedy was a thousand times harder than doing serious pieces, and I can understand what they mean. So, in order to avoid the "pratfalls" of bad comedy, I try to just let it happen if it's going to happen, but I also help the chances of "funny" happening by (hopefully) giving traits to the characters that will come back to haunt them throughout the story.

Beaty: Jared, in your anthology THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PRESENT, really touched me. You were able to speak to my heart through his story. Is there a harder challenge to get the characters across in a shorter story? Do you prefer having the longer stories to develop the characters?

Jenny: There are advantages and disadvantages for both the short story and the long novel. In the short story, you don't have the luxury of being able to build a lot of backstory and slowly "grow" into a situation. You have to land in the middle of something interesting, put your characters through as much agony and ecstasy as you can cram, and bring it to an end that will leave the reader happy with you. The stories can't be as "deep" because you don't have the pages to really explore their lives, so you have to come up with ways of getting backstory told with a minimum amount of words and try to make it as three dimensional and believable as possible. But sometimes its fun to just take this little slice of time out of two characters' lives and tell it, without worrying about filling in a lifetime of details.

In a full length novel, you have the chance to create more detailed histories for your characters, which can translate into lots more conflict, and you can have them experiencing so much more that a reader might relate to. But you also have to be extra careful to tie up all the loose ends, and fill up all the gaps and holes in the story, so you don't leave the reader closing the book and saying "But what happened to the guy who stirred up all the trouble at the beginning of the book? He just disappeared from the story." It drives me crazy to read a book and get to the end of it, then realize that in the back of my mind I'd been waiting for the author to resolve some issue that she never addressed again. It's amazingly easy for an author to leave these holes in a story, though, because WE know the answers and we're so intimately acquainted with all the details. As we focus on writing the twists and great conflict, we forget that the reader doesn't know the entire story. I especially see this in new writers who are trying to get published, but it's just part of the writing process that you have to learn. I have a friend who reads my work as it's in progress, and we brainstorm and talk over the plot. I rely on her to catch holes in the story, but I also work hard at finding those holes myself. After I finish a book, I'll set it aside for several weeks or so, letting my head clear and just stepping away from that particular story and characters. (I call this "letting it cook.") Then I'll go back and read it, trying to read it as though I'm not familiar with it, and reading straight through without editing. THAT'S when the holes are visible, because I've removed myself enough from the intimate details that I can then realize that I didn't tell enough about what was going on, or that I left out facts that needed to be told. Of course, in a perfect world, there would be no holes, but in a perfect world the publishing industry wouldn't be so afraid of time travels and paranormals. *G*

Beaty: Speaking of Jared (a favorite topic of mine *G*), you mentioned on your Website that your novella contained actual personal "hauntings". GIVE! We'd love to hear about it.

Jenny: Talk about fortuitous timing! I had rented a Victorian cottage that overlooked Penobscot Bay north of Camden, Maine for two weeks, to escape the Memphis heat and to get some concentrated writing done. The owner had told me that the cottage wasn't far removed from its original state, and she spoke the truth. We did have running water, a bathroom, and a kitchen with an oil burning stove, but that was about it for modern conveniences. (There WAS a microwave. I no longer consider microwaves a luxury. *G*) There was no phone, and though there WAS a television, there was no cable, so we had a major dose of summer Olympics when we got fogged in for three days. My husband flew in for a weekend, but my sister spent the entire two weeks with me. The house was across the road from a spiritualist camp, and we jokingly had said we hoped we had some spill-over ghosts. Since bizarre occurrences seem to follow my sister and me around whenever we're together, we didn't think much of it at first, just writing it off to the weird chemical reaction we cause that makes us "weird magnets." At first, there were just little things, like my sister getting an umbrella out of the closet and when she pushed the "up" button, the umbrella part went shooting across the room and out the door, leaving her holding only the handle. (We decided that�s where the term "flying off the handle" came from.) The first really strange event (which didn't end up in the book) happened one morning when my sister was sitting outside in the sun and I had just finished a bowl of cereal for breakfast. A stray cat had made friends with us (we named him Rhett because he had obviously lived as dissipated a life as Rhett Butler), and we would leave food out for him or a bowl of milk. When I walked out onto the porch to pour my left over cereal milk into Rhett's bowl, I let the screen door bang behind me, just as I had all the other times I'd gone through it the three or four other days we'd been there. When I went to open it, though, the door wouldn't open. I yanked and tugged, thinking the wood was just swollen, but the door wouldn't budge. I started looking then and could see the old "hook and eye" lock. The hook was firmly and fully hooked into the eye. I thought it was odd, because when we'd locked the door at night, we'd had to push the hook down to get it to catch, but I just assumed that when the door banged shut the hook bounced up and caught just right. (We decided then and there to never again follow the advice of the snide remark "don't let the door bump you in the butt on the way out ...") Since it was so chilly, we hadn't opened any windows, and I hadn't opened the back door yet, so there was no way to get in. I HAD opened the sliding door to the balcony upstairs when I got up, so I ended up, much to my sister's delight, climbing up onto the platform holding the (highly explosive) fuel oil for the stove, climbing onto the actual fifty-five gallon oil barrel, then onto the roof, crab-walking across the roof to the side of the house, dropping down several feet to the porch roof, squeezing between the balcony rails, and getting into the house through the upstairs sliding door. I believe it was later that day, or possibly the next, when the owners sent a neighbor by with some lobster, and the neighbor asked us if "Andy" had been bothering us. We figured Andy was the cat or one of the bazillion raccoons, but he went on to tell us that the owners believed the cottage was haunted by the previous owner, because odd things were always happening, and when no one was upstairs the floorboards would squeak as though someone were walking up there. We'd definitely had our share of odd little things, but as I said, that wasn't unusual for us. And we HAD noticed the creaking upstairs (where I slept), but we'd written it off as the house settling ... in a regular rhythm, somebody-walking-up-there kind of way. Needless to say, the case of the self-locking door leapt to mind immediately, and the neighbor said that was just like one of the tricks Andy would pull.

(A VERY loose version of this next incident and the following blinds story made it into the novella.)

The morning after discovering we were haunted (which we took with a grain of salt, even smugly suggesting that Andy was a figment of active imaginations), my sister called up the stairs to me, asking me if I was awake, then telling me to come downstairs because she wanted "a witness for this." Now, let me state, this is not my favorite phrase to hear first thing in the morning. Especially from my sister. I made my way downstairs and found my sister staring at the electric clock on the wall. This was the same clock we had been using for over a week to tell the time, without incident, I might add. *G* "Jenny," my sister says, "correct me if I'm wrong, but, is the clock running backward?" Both of us stood there with bed-head and bleary eyes, staring at the second hand on the clock as it moved counterclockwise. We stared. We cocked our heads and moved in closer. We blinked and made little clockwise motions with our index fingers to verify that the second hand was, indeed, moving in the opposite direction. "I noticed my travel clock said 8:30 but the clock said 10:30," explained my sister, "and then when I came back from fixing my coffee, the travel clock said 8:40 and this one said 10:20." By this time it was 8:45, but 10:15 Eastern Andy Time. Now, my sister and I have a way of entertaining ourselves by taking the mundane and dramatizing it to the point of absurdity, so watching a perfectly good clock running backward was too good to let pass. We, of course, discussed the possibility of Andy and his shenanigans, but dismissed that scenario as too obvious. We pondered whether my sister, in her pre-makeup early morning state, shocked the poor clock into running backward, or if we had somehow found a portal in time, upsetting the time/space continuum and the proof of us traveling into the past was the clock running backward. Since we had plans for lunch that day, we decided we didn't have time for time-traveling, so, on a whim, I unplugged the clock and plugged it back in. It started running forward again, setting the universe back on track and apparently upsetting Andy, because he wasn't through with us. The next night we were sitting in the living room of the cottage. Our nightly routine had been to make sure all the doors were locked once we were in for the night, then go around the living room, pulling down the old fashioned pull-down blinds on all the windows. We'd gone through this routine every night without incident, and that night wasn't any different. But as we sat watching TV, hours after closing up for the night, one of the window blinds across the room just flew up and rattled on its roller. After jumping out of our skins, then confirming that neither of us needed CPR, we started laughing and telling Andy how amused we were by his little joke. No sooner had we uttered our irreverence than the blind right behind us flew up. We decided, once we got our hearts started again, that we'd show Andy a little more respect. That seemed to satisfy him, because he went back to mainly walking around upstairs and creaking the floorboards.

Right after I got home from this trip, my editor called to tell me she wanted a ghost story for the anthology. I went into panic mode, since I�d only written time travels, then as I sat there with a blank piece of paper facing me, Andy must have taken pity on me. He didn�t seem to want a story written about HIM, so he stepped aside and allowed the kind of ghost we�d REALLY like to be haunted by to come to the fore.

Beaty: Since many here at RBL are new to your stories and will need a place to start, which one generated the most fan mail? Is there one that seemed to catch the fancy of more readers?

Jenny: That�s a really tough question, because, surprisingly, the reader mail I get is pretty even in the readers' opinions of their favorite. I still get several letters a month at my post office box, and several emails, even though my last book was released in 1999. (And let me take the opportunity here to tell you that hearing from readers means the WORLD to authors. It�s what keeps us writing.) If I had to hazard a guess at which book got the most response, I�d have to say ECHOES OF TOMORROW, by a slim margin. I think the reason is because the hero is not the typical romance novel hero, and I wrote him that way on purpose. I wanted to write a story about a strong man, but one who was gentle and loved the heroine right from the start, without all the back and forth, Alpha male, I-love-you-but-I�m-going-to-fight-it storyline. So many people say "Oh, you can�t have the characters in love through the whole story. You have to have a macho, brooding hero." Since this was the first book I wrote, and never dreamed it�d be published, I wrote exactly the kind of hero I wanted to see in a book. And I KNEW this kind of hero could be just as romantic, if not more so, because I�m married to him. *G* My husband is the model for Reed in ECHOES, and nearly everything sweet or romantic that Reed says in the book, my husband said to me first. When he read the book, he kept saying, "Hey! I said that to you!" I just grinned and said, "Didn�t realize I was taking notes, did ya?" Now I think he tries to outdo himself.

Beaty: I've been watching and watching for a new Lykins! Are you still writing? Will we see one soon?

Jenny: Yes, I�m still writing, and I do have a completed time travel that my agent is trying to find a home for. Just as my last book was hitting the shelves in 1999, "life" started hitting me, with a family illness, a death in the family, and then it seemed like it was one disaster after another. I started writing the story that came to me at Windsor Ruins, but I didn�t want the worry of a deadline during all the crises I was living through, so I just decided to take my time, write the entire book, and then sell it after it was finished. In the meantime, my editor left the publisher, I fired my first agent, and trying to sell the book myself was just more than I could handle at that time. Life is finally settling down for me, and hopefully my new agent will have some good news for me soon with a sale of SPIRIT OF RUINS. As I said earlier, it�s getting harder to sell time travels to publishers (they seem to think they aren�t popular, which is exactly the opposite opinion of the people I hear from), so I�m working on a historical right now. But time travel is my first love and what I enjoy writing most, so I don�t plan to ever stop writing time travels unless the stories stop coming to me. Considering how many ideas I have logged, though, I�ll have to live for a couple centuries if I want to get them all written. *G*

As soon as I hear news on the sale of the time travel, I�ll post the news on my Website. If anyone would like to be on my mailing list to get a postcard when a new book comes out, you can email me with your mailing address, or write to PO Box 382132, Germantown, TN, 38183-2132. If you email me, please put "book mailing list" in the subject, so I won�t accidentally delete you as spam.

Beaty: Mr. Gideon is one of my favorite characters. Is it OK if I ask him a question? Mr. Gideon, are you only Barrett's guardian or is there a chance we might see you again in future stories?

Jenny: Bless you, my child. *G* Actually, Mr. Gideon has stayed surprisingly quiet, but I think that�s only because Aidan Alston, the bad brother in the same book (WAITING FOR YESTERDAY), monopolized my brain with a challenge to reform him. That�s the book I�m working on now, and don�t think I�m not enjoying torturing Aidan for his past misdeeds while I transform him into an upright citizen. I wouldn�t be surprised, though, for Mr. Gideon to start bugging me, now that he knows someone wants to see him reappear. The funny thing is, I can�t seem to control which characters demand a story. My plan, while I was writing DISTANT DREAMS and RIVER OF DREAMS, was to write Molly Hawthorne�s story next, since she was such a strong personality. (Molly is the sister of the hero in DISTANT DREAMS.) But try as I might, I haven�t found a hero worthy of Molly. I have no doubt, though, that one day when I least expect it, I�ll be sitting at a stoplight, or doing something else that has nothing to do with writing, and Molly will pop into my head with the man of her dreams beside her, filling me in on at least part of the details of their story. And she�ll stay in my head until I give in and write her story down.