A(nother) Conversation With Jenny Milchman

Jenny Milchman made her first appearance here on OBAAT in March. It’s rare that I interview the same author so close together, but Jenny was promoting The Night of the Flood that time, which was edited by Ed Aymar and Sarah Chen, and—no offense to Sarah, who is a lovely person—I thought Jenny was entitled to an interview of her own without the Shadow of Aymar hanging over her.

Jenny is the author of four books, of which Wicked River is the most recent, having launched May 1. Her debut, Cover of Snow, won the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Jenny is also Vice President of Author Programming for International Thriller Writers, and the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day. She teaches writing and publishing for the New York Writers Workshop.

She took time from her Wicked River tour to chat with OBAAT.

One Bite at a Time: Let’s hit the ground running. Tell us about your new book, Wicked River.

Jenny Milchman: Wicked River arises from an incident in real life. No, my husband and I

weren’t stalked through the wilderness by an extremely smart and manipulative madman, but we did set out on a back-country honeymoon deep in the Adirondacks. The only difference between us and my heroine, Natalie, and her husband, Doug, was that my hubby and I had to turn back after just one day. (We wound up going to Paris on a borrowed credit card, and paid it off for-ev-ah). Natalie and Doug didn’t get so lucky, however. For them to make it out of the woods will require the fight of their lives. The question that stalked me as ardently as the madman in the novel was: what if my hubby and I hadn’t turned back when we did? I had to sit down and write a book about it.

OBAAT: Ahhh, the classic “What If?” premise. Think of how many thrillers would never have been written if authors didn’t think like that. Do you find yourself killing time coming up with “What If?” scenarios for the most innocuous things? “The counterperson at Wendy’s seems distracted. Maybe I’ve stumbled onto a hostage situation.” That sort of thing.

JM: You just described my life. I think that if I weren’t such a scared person, seriously living with a degree of fear that would probably strike most people as panic-inducing on an everyday basis, then I never would’ve come to crime fiction. The counterperson at Wendy’s, the guy who stands too close on a subway, the car that swerves on the road, the overly nice babysitter…I could go on and on. That said, it wasn’t a what if that made me first take the plunge and start writing suspense fiction, but a what was.

Here’s how it happened. I was working as an intern at a rural community mental health center when I got assigned this very frightening case. A mother brought her cherubic, blonde, five year old daughter in to see me. This little girl had just killed the family pet.

It was my job to find out why. And with that, life became a suspense novel, a mystery, a thriller all wrapped into one. I sat down and wrote the first work of crime fiction I’d ever tried my hand at. Seven manuscripts later, I would be published. And now my fourth novel, Wicked River, a true “what if” is about to come out May 1^st.

OBAAT: You and I talked before about how your books are essentially a series of standalones that inhabit the same universe built around the fictional town of Wedeskyull. Was this something you thought would be cool from the get-go, or did it kind of evolve as you went along?

JM: Very little of my writing is something I thought would be cool—or thought about at all, to be strictly truthful. It’s not really intentional, in other words. And some of my all-time favorite crime writers would scoff at me for this (politely, of course). They feel writing to be a business, a pursuit, a job like any other, and of course it is.

Just not always.

For me, the creative part feels very much sent from elsewhere. Flowing through me—like a river—wild and out of my control.

The town of Wedeskyull, where all four of my novels are either set or have some close tie to—Wicked River takes place almost entirely in the wilderness, but Wedeskyull’s police chief must venture into the woods at one point in the story—exemplifies this. It feels less like any creation of my own, and more like a place I’ve been shown. A secret parallel universe to which I’ve been granted entry.

 

OBAAT: You take legendary promotional tours. What’s the agenda for Wicked River?

JM: Those legendary tours—dubbed “the world’s longest book tour” by Shelf Awareness—

were unique in a couple of ways. First, the whole family came with. My husband worked from the front seat, kids were “car-schooled” in the rear. We drove a total of 75,000 miles over 15 months for my first three releases. Second, although we had the help of a fantastic independent publicity firm, my husband and I set up each of those tours on our own.

Then a few things changed. The kids got older, and got lives of their own, go figure. (Actually, it’s a freaking miracle, is what it is). And I got something too: a new, dream publisher. One that sets up pretty magnificent tours.

For the “Get Wicked” tour I will be in the air and on the road for a total of five weeks. Something like 25 cities and as many events. You can see the whole itinerary here: http://jennymilchman.com/tour/get-wicked-2018

And then, the month after I return, my publisher is doing something equally cool. They are sending four authors out together, coast-to-coast, on the Up All Night Thriller Tour. We’ll appear at events as a quartet. I can just imagine what all four of us will do. Sing? Dance? Debrief every night over drinks, or, in my case, cake? Take a quick, energizing hike before we appear at the legendary Tattered Cover, only to get lost in the Rockies, and have to rely on each other to survive…oh wait, I’m writing another thriller.

OBAAT: You’re the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day. How did that come about?

JM: Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day began back in 2010 when I had two preschool children whom I was taking to story hour at our local bookstore almost every week.

Inspired by Days such as Take Your Daughter to Work, I floated the idea for a special holiday linking kids and bookstores. Bloggers and listserv members took to the web and before I knew it, 80 bookstores were celebrating. By the following year, Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day had grown to nearly 300 bookstores. And today TYCBD is celebrated by over 800 bookstores, including one national chain, on five continents.

During one of the recent years, I turned my attention to the fact that not all children have access to bookstores. In fact, with one in five kids in the United States "food insecure," owning a book can be an unheard of luxury.

Through the help of generous volunteers and donors, we now have TYCBD field trips for kids in an at-risk region of New York State. One day, I hope such programs can be instituted in towns and cities nationwide.

A Conversation With Jenny Milchman

Jenny Milchman gets around, and I mean that in the most flattering sense. She spent eleven months in her car taking her debut novel Cover of Snow—as well as her husband and kids—to 400 bookstores. The book went on to win the Mary Higgins Clark award, was praised by the New York Times, and chosen as an Indie Next and Target Pick. Subsequent books—Ruin Falls and As Night Falls—also earned outsized acclaim. Her newest, Wicked River, drops May 1 from Sourcebooks.

Jenny speaks nationwide about the publishing industry and the importance of sticking to a dream. She is Vice President of Author Programming for International Thriller Writers, and the founder of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day. Jenny led the literary series Writing Matters, which covered the publishing industry during the upheaval of 2009, attracted guests coast-to-coast, and received national media attention. She teaches writing and publishing for New York Writers Workshop.

She’s here today to talk about her involvement with the New collection from Down & Out Books, The Night of the Flood.

One Bite at a Time: I have to start with the obvious question. You have a sizable footprint in the industry. You’re a talented writer, come across as intelligent and you have your whole life ahead of you. What got you involved with Ed Aymar?

Jenny Milchman: Oh, well, you know what they say about appearances. In all seriousness, meeting Ed Aymar made everything in my life easier. Well, not everything. I still have to do the dishes. But given my role as ITW board member, Ed has been one heckuva connection for me because he is just as devoted to helping other writers, doing what he can to further their careers, as I am. This anthology being just one example. A couple of years ago, Ed became Managing Editor of ITW’s debut authors blog, The Thrill Begins, completely revamping it. And it’s grown into one of the best, most lively and interesting resources for writers on the web. (Do people still say “web” when referring to the internet? See, this is why I need Ed.)

OBAAT: Ed and Sara Chen were here a couple of weeks ago to talk about the anthology in general. Tell us a little about your contribution.

JM: Small. That’s what I have to say about my contribution to The Night of the Flood. When Ed described the project to me, I happened to be in a particularly frenetic phase of my career—losing my first editor, on submission for what would turn out to be the dream publishing team, only I didn’t know that then—and still, his idea completely swept me away. A novel in stories—told by writers whose talent I knew firsthand from reading their debuts, and in many cases, their follow-ups. I didn’t think I could add much, but when Ed mentioned that there’d be a sort of forward—an open letter to the townspeople of Everton—two things happened. One, I thought I could handle writing such a piece, and two, the voice of the character came to me, fully formed. She just began dictating words in my head, and I wrote them down. So that’s why I say my contribution was pretty small. And easy.

OBAAT: You’re able to write short stories and novels equally effectively. Is it as effortless as you make it seem? Short stories kill me. I write them, but to me they’re much harder than novels.

JM: Oh no, I completely agree with you. (See above). Writing a short story is like trying to swallow a whole lasagna in one bite. (I don’t know why I came up with lasagna. Could’ve been a casserole. Or a chocolate cake.) You know, the fullness and grandness of a novel loses something when I try to trim it down to 5000 or so words. I’ve written a handful of short stories I’m really proud of; two of them were published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and the best in my opinion is called “The Closet”, about a young girl who takes revenge—hey, shades of The Night of the Flood—but every short story takes me months and months of whittling, shaping, trying to find the core. It’s novels that have my heart.

OBAAT: Let’s talk about your novels. I write two series, mainly because once I get a universe down my ideas tended to come in that form. You’ve written three well-received standalones with a fourth to come. Are there any connective threads? Similarities in protagonist or location or themes?

JM: Actually, the dirty little secret behind my books is that they are a series that can be read as standalones. That secret isn’t so dirty actually. If it were, it’d probably get a lot more press. OK, rewrite! The secret behind my books is that they are a series that can be read as standalones.

Here’s how: They all take place in the same fictional town. It’s called Wedeskyull, and the town becomes a character in the books. A mountain village, largely lost to time, and riven by a cultural chasm between the old-timers and the newcomers, the locals and the expats. When those two groups share a land and their lives, it makes for a great deal of drama. Even though my forthcoming novel, Wicked River, is set in the back-country, the town still plays a role. The local police chief is first on scene when my honeymooning couple fails to arrive back home. People who read all four of my books will see small characters from one tale play bigger roles in another, and vice versa. It’s one of the joys of writing for me—to see this town come alive in layers and ripples.

OBAAT: In 2013 you and your family traveled to 400 bookstores over nearly a year. You’ve repeated the tour for each book since. What gave you the idea and how did you keep up with the rest of your life while you were living out of suitcases for so long?

JM: In 2013, after a thirteen year odyssey to see my “first” novel published (it was actually the eighth one I had written), my husband and I rented out our house, traded in two cars for an SUV that could handle Denver in February, and pulled the kids out of first and third grades to “car-school” them on a 35,000 mile drive around the country. I did a book event nearly every day, sometimes two. And my publisher thought I was nuts. They actually convened a call to tell me I was nuts. And here’s the thing—I was nuts. The whole idea was crazy. Who goes to one book event for an unknown novelist, traveling far from home, where she doesn’t know anyone—let alone 250 of them? Then my debut novel went into six printings in hardcover, and all of a sudden, well, I was still nutty, but the nuttiness had somehow worked. I think that may be because in this virtual world, we still crave the face-to-face. The handshake, the smile, the words exchanged in person. I was introducing my book to the world, but really I was introducing myself—and meeting people in return. Much as I appreciate all the riches on offer online, truly great was to see Facebook friends become friends IRL. As for keeping up with regular life—we didn’t for the most part. Book tour was like a step out of time for us, and we all really embraced it, and enjoyed the 24/7 aspect of being together. The humorous or ironic (or wonderful) punch line to all this is that I’m now with a publisher that believes in relationships and word of mouth and bookstores and libraries just as much as I do, and for my fourth novel, they’re sending me out on a mega tour again!  

OBAAT: You’re a board member and Vice President of the International Thriller Writers and run the Author Programs operation. How did you get involved in that?

JM: A long, long time ago—actually it was five years, a blip in publishing terms, which is roughly the scale of geological time—I was a newbie author, and ITW’s Debut Authors Program helped introduce my book to the world, and teach me about the biz. Being a writer is one thing, and usually by the time we’re published, we know a thing or two about craft. But becoming a professional in a very high stakes, major media industry is a whole other ball of wax, kettle of fish, pick your cliché, and ITW guided me as I began. I wanted to do as much as I could for the next wave of authors. First I served as Chair of the Debut Authors Program, then I joined the board as Vice President of Author Programs. This includes overseeing the Debut Program committee, a podcast featuring ITW members as guests called the Inside Thrill, a yearly program in Palm Beach that showcases debuts alongside one headliner—this year it’s R.L. Stine—our newly expanded YA/MG arm, and of course, all of Ed Aymar’s brainstorms.

OBAAT: Clearly we’re talking about two different Ed Aymars, but that’s a discussion for another time. What are you working on now?

JM: Well, it’s a story about this guy named Ed who’s sort of a Jekyll and Hyde figure…OK, actually, right now I am at the delicious, rubbing-my-hands-together-in anticipation stage of being about to begin a new novel. I call this the sprinkle-frosted cupcake stage. Nothing I enjoy more—about writing and the biz anyway—than a first draft. Now, this is because I suffer from a perseverative delusion that I am writing the world’s first perfect first draft, and I get my comeuppance come editing time, so don’t hate me. But right now, I am a happy, happy writer. The new book is called Mercy Island, and that’s all I can say, except that it’s a stranger-comes-to-town story, written from the perspective of the stranger.