About Heart and Home by Jennifer Melzer

I wish I could say Heart and Home was a direct byproduct of losing my mother, but the truth is I started writing it in 2006, the year I graduated from Bloomsburg University. It was the first time I'd ever participated in NaNoWriMo, which at the time seemed like a ridiculously silly thing to do, especially considering I was literally about four weeks away from graduating college. But I had a fabulous writer's group in my corner, and it was going to be fun.

It was actually a lot of fun. As I started writing, I immediately fell in love with Janice, my main character. She was smart, a little tired, but she seemed to know exactly who she was and what she wanted from life. As the words flew from my penny pencil... wait, sorry, I lapsed into A Christmas Story for a second there... As the words flew from my fingertips, I found myself falling in love with Troy Kepner, alongside the few friends in my writer's group who were reading chapter by chapter as I posted the first draft on our site.

And then life happened, as it all too often does. I graduated, found myself overwhelmed with freelance work and the 70,000-some words I wrote between November and January got pushed aside. I started working on other projects and nearly forgot it existed until my laptop took a dive last fall and I realized it wasn't saved on any of my thumb drives.