Where it all began..

Wanting to be an author is one of those childhood dreams, like wanting to be a firefighter or a fighter pilot or an astronaut. To be fair, I still want to be all of those things. But, since I’m older now and know how much it hurts to break a bone or pull a muscle, writing seems like the safest bet for living out childhood dreams.

Picture this: Third-grade Joy going on a tour of her dad’s boring (not really, but to a third grader it was) workplace where he was a boring (again, not boring. After all, I married one and my oldest son wants to be one) computer programmer. I was not feeling the tour. That is, until we entered the warehouse part of the tour where they were printing books. I told my dad on that tour that one day we would stand right here and watch my book come off the printing press.

Thus, a dream was born.

And through fanfic of Hey, Dude! on Nickelodeon and more fanfic of Interview with the Vampire I learned what made a story. Now, let’s be honest, my first book is still hiding under my bed where I will love it forever but no one will ever read it. My second book—the one that got me an agent but never sold—is still in a Google Doc and I am still playing around with that one because I feel like it deserves to see the light of day. Book three is somewhere between a second and third draft because that’s when inspiration struck for book #4. NaNoWriMo 2012 is the only time I’ve won that writing challenge, and boy did I win it. Because Harper Teen published Rites of Passage in 2014.

I’ve been through quite a bit since then. My boys have grown up, we survived a pandemic, and I’ve written lots of partial works. So publishing a ten-year anniversary paperback edition of Rites is my first step back into the world of publishing. I’ve got lots of stories in me, and I’m hopeful that now is the time they’ll all start pouring out. Here’s to hoping!

- Joy N. Hensley