Remembering Rose won a 2022 Watty! I'm shocked and humbled and pleased all at once, and I thought I would say a little bit about why I wrote this story.

When I set out to write Remembering Rose, I had two goals: 1) to write a red-haired hero, and 2) to see a project through to completion. I cut the second goal pretty close. After a last ditch effort to figure out the ending, with just hours to go on the day the 2022 Wattys closed, I marked the story complete.

But back to goal number one, because this is important. It might sound silly, but bear with me. Red hair.

When I came up with the premise for Remembering Rose, my good friend, who is a redhead, lamented the lack of red-haired male heroes in romance. "There are plenty of redheaded women," he said, "but very few men." I was like, "What about Jamie from Outlander?" and my friend was like, "Who?" 😅

I forgave him for being out of touch with one of the most popular romantic heroes of all time. My friend is a dude, after all, and he doesn't read much romance. But he had a point. He didn't see very many romantic leads in media that looked like him. So, I wrote one. It's not easy to write a book, but I think my friend was very pleased to be the love interest in a whole entire story. Jackson is very much based on him.

The point of this story is not that white men need more representation in literature—I think they're doing okay. The point is that when I wrote Remembering Rose, I had my why from the beginning, and that fueled me when the writing got hard.

There is a point in every manuscript where I sit back and say, "This is trash." It usually happens at around the 30,000-40,000-word mark, and I find it very difficult to push through. No amount of outlining gets me through this crisis, because it's not about plot, it's about the point of it all. Why should I carry on when my writing is bad, when finishing the book feels like an insurmountable challenge, when I suck, etc?

Well, this time, I knew why: I had an ideal reader in mind, and I wanted him to feel like a hero.

Maybe that's silly. But it worked.

If you are writing a story and have hit that mid-book slump where you're starting to think, "Why am I doing this," I encourage you to answer that question for yourself, if you possibly can. No matter how trivial the answer may seem, it's important, because sometimes writing a book doesn't feel great, and you'll need a reason to keep going. As Simon Sinek says, you'll need to find your why.

So, to my friend, who probably didn't realize that his simple statement would be the force behind an entire novel, I'll just say this: You're my hero, Bea. Thank you.

And to readers: thank you for reading Remembering Rose!

Love,

Jess 🧡