Kelly Jensen

Coming Soon: Shelf Life

Are you ready for more Hearts & Crafts? Shelf Life, the second book in the series, is now available for preorder. We revealed the cover this week and I was beyond excited for everyone to ‘meet’ Grayson Clery – baker, boardgame geek, and best friend ever.

It’s Release Day for Sundays with Oliver!

I’ve been talking about this book for so long that there shouldn’t be a lot left to say. But, hey, this is me. I can always find another word or two. Sundays with Oliver felt (feels) very much like the next logical step in my journey as a writer. Once again, I drew on my own life as a jump-off point as my daughter packed up her life and went away to college. I then went on to explore other aspects of mid-life:

888 Days Gone

When I finished the main mission in Days Gone, the save screen read: 888 DAYS GONE. I just about felt as though I had been playing for 888 days. Not because it was a slog. Because of the level of immersion I had achieved. The world truly felt 888 days gone.

In actual fact, you start the game at 731 days gone, which is two years and a day after the apocalypse. So I played for 157 days, game time. Deacon and I accomplished a lot in that time.

The Land of Lost Chapters

There is a place in the heart of every writer where fragments of the stories not yet finished reside. I call mine the land of lost chapters.

Some exist in the physical world—paragraphs or pages in one of the many notebooks dotted about my house. Others live in the nested folders of my OneDrive, separated by genre and world. Still more cling to bare outlines in Notion, little more than an idea, but no less compelling for their lack of detail.

My lost chapters cross genres and range in length from a few opening sentences to a WIP nearing fifty-five thousand words. They’re all ‘the book I’d like to write one day,’ but I know I won’t get back to most of them. But I do like to visit from time to time, especially when I’m between projects and looking for inspiration.

And, because I like to blog, I figured one of these visits might make a fun post. So, sit back and relax as I take you on a tour of the Land of Lost Chapters.

Stuck Together

Next up on the trope hit list: Forced Proximity.

Although I love this trope—and its cousins, fake relationship and marriage of convenience—I don’t really like the name. Stuck Together sounds better, whether the situation is forced or not, and I do love writing couples who are stuck together—just ask Marc and Henry!