We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jen Desmarais a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Jen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

I sometimes wish I had started my writing career earlier, especially regarding co-writing with my husband. We have kids, and it’s sometimes hard to carve out time during the day to write. We usually end up writing until very late at night, so our sleep suffers. If I had started writing with him fifteen years ago when we had first gotten married, I would have had a lot more time.
But then I wouldn’t have had the experiences that I do now to draw on. The books I would have written then would be very different from the ones I’m writing now.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I first started writing on an old Apple computer (black screen, yellow text) in my parents’ basement when I was about 7 or 8 years old. I printed that first story out on our dot-matrix printer (four passes to create one line!) and still have it somewhere. I barely remember it, but there was definitely a treehouse at the cottage. I based it on a family friend’s cottage that we visited every summer.
But I wouldn’t call that “serious” writing.
I seriously started writing in 2008, when I got involved in the Twilight fanfiction community. I was blown away by the writing of many of the authors – they were so good, some better than the source material! It was my first time writing something and actually finishing it.
Then I stopped writing for many years due to depression. I picked it back up again in 2018, thanks to the Voltron fandom. And then the Good Omens fandom in 2019.
At this point, I was much more confident in my abilities as a writer. I knew my strengths and weaknesses, and how to balance them.
This is when my husband suggested we write a book together, which we completed after a whirlwind 2 and a half months. Writing with him was rejuvenating, exhilerating, and stimulating. I couldn’t wait to delve into the world we had created again. And again. And again.
I’m now a ghostwriter for a client, on top of writing books with my husband and under my own name. I haven’t written fanfic in a while, but that’s mostly because my obsession is with the world that I created, rather than one that someone else did. When I write “fanfic” in my world, it’s called canon. ;)

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal is to tell the stories that have been filling my brain. Ideally, getting them into as many people’s hands as possible, so they can care about these characters as much as I do.
The biggest compliment would be people creating fanart and fanfic in our world.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I don’t think people understand how long it takes to create a book. It’s not just the writing of the book, but the editing (multiple times over), the backend creative process (cover, layout, etc), and marketing (shudder). We’re published by a small press, which means we have to go through the acquisitions process just like everyone else, and we can only publish one book a year, even though we have been fairly prolific since we started writing together and have a bit of a backlog! So even though we have content waiting for people, they have to wait. Sorry! We can’t control everything!

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.jeneric-designs.ca/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jendesmaraisauthor/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuHDQ2TgsFIUHvcCDJSpzYg/videos
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@jendesmaraisauthor
  https://edhelwen1.tumblr.com/
  https://open.spotify.com/user/desmaraisjennifer

Image Credits

Images credited to Jen and Éric Desmarais