You can’t fully capture what it really smells like, feels like, and sounds like. She’s not the type able to conjure a place without being there.

While researching, she actually has to go there. This was a high-pressure way of learning how to write a good book, but she just cared so much and wasn’t about to let this chance slip by.

Jenna was given one year to rewrite it and she rewrote it three times before having something she loved. She kept saying that it was much too painful to revisit, yet without her knowing, he showed this book to his own publisher, who saw some potential in it and made an offer. She was working with him on his books for about six to seven years, helping out with editing and research and a scene here and there, and along the way he’d ask where her book was. Her dad’s a writer that’s been publishing since Jenna was really young. Then she was lucky and came into publishing in an atypical way. She attempted for a couple years, before putting it in a closet. She knew what sort of book she wanted to write, and knew what good books were, yet couldn’t do it yet and couldn’t come with a way to fix it. There wasn’t any plot to speak of, and it was incredibly tough to write. She had known for so very long that she wanted to write for teens, however, while 23, after she’d written her first draft of “Love & Gelato”, she was simply devastated. When she got to her twenties, she floundered. It is a growing awareness that she really likes bringing to books for a teen audience because she believes they’re already in this mindset of being excited about what their lives could be like. It was very exciting to her to see more of the world and realize how much she did not yet know. She’d grown up in a bubble in Salt Lake City, so moving to Europe expanded her world in major ways. Jenna turned and stomped to the adult section, never forgetting.Īt the age of fifteen, her family moved to Florence, Italy, where Jenna lived for two years. Where was that adventure? Jenna had been reading books about magical worlds, spies, and secret gardens, but now that magic was gone and popularity was the main topic. She wanted the same fun and adventure she had fallen for in all of her favorite childhood books, just in teen form. It was disappointing, with just a tiny little shelf and many of the books were just about cheerleaders. She writes for young adults because in 1998 she stood in her library’s pitiful YA section, realizing the book she wanted to read that did not exist. When Jenna’s not busy writing girl abroad stories, she can be found making elaborate messes in her kitchen or chasing her kids around. Author Jenna Evans Welch was the sort of insatiable child reader that had no choice but to grow up and become a writer.

Jenna evans welch books in order