This week my guest is internationally bestselling author Jenna Blum. Jenna's books include “Those Who Save Us,” “The Storm Chasers,” and “The Lost Family.” Her newest book is a psychological thriller called “Murder Your Darlings,” which involves authors, book tours, deadlines, love, and stalkers.
Jenna is the co-founder of A Mighty Blaze, an online author interview company, which if you're listening to this podcast, I know you will love the interviews that they put out. And she has taught at Grub Street Writers in Boston for years. Many of the authors I've interviewed on this show have taken classes with Jenna and/or worked with her at A Mighty Blaze. She's a true supporter of writers, readers, and booksellers alike. As evidence of this fact, for her first novel, “Those Who Save Us,” Jenna visited over 800 book clubs in the Boston area alone.
We covered:
- How she caught the writing bug from her dad, who wrote the news for Walter Cronkite
- Applying to grad school five times before she was accepted
- Why she’s still committed to writing and teaching now that she’s a few decades in
- What gives her hope about the future of writing and reading books
- Accepting your own creative process–especially when it doesn’t look like what you think it should
- The value of talking about your ideas with people you trust, without sharing so much that you lose the drive to get it on the page
- How her creative process is like a volcano
- How writing is like making sausage
- The parts of the writing process that happen only in her head
- Why her first drafts look like instructions for assembling IKEA furniture
- What she does right before she goes to sleep that helps her dive back into the writing the next day
Visit Jenna at JennaBlum.com, Substack (Writer Girl in the World), Facebook (Jenna Blum author), or Instagram (Jenna_Blum).
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!

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[Jenna Blum, practical matters: The magic of letting yourself be a little bored Ep 1260