Jennifer Jabaley Reveals Her Secrets and Inspiration in Writing Domestic Suspense Novels -129

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Kristi Leonard [: 00:00:03

Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us 15 minutes of your time and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know some of your favorite writers in a new light. I'm one of your hosts, Kristi Leonard, owner and host of Writers in the Wild Retreats, nonfiction voiceover artist and president of WFWA. I'm, I'm excited to share with you a little about today's guest.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:00:36

Today on the show, we're talking with Jennifer Jabaley. She grew up in New Jersey, spent time in Memphis chasing that Southern dream, and now calls the north Georgia mountains home. An optometrist, sports mom and tennis player, Jennifer also happens to be an award winning author. She made her mark with young adult novels and now she's diving into domestic suspense with a debut that's already turning heads. Welcome Jen.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:01:02

Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here. Thank you so much.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:01:06

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. Your book was pretty amazing. So excited that we get to talk about it. But we also have process to our show. So from the intro it sounds like you have several places to choose from. For our first question of the podcast, tell me the most interesting thing about where you're from. And that can be where you're, you know, where you were born, one of the places you've lived.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:01:35

Like, so this is, this is a great story. So I met my husband in Memphis in school. And like he said, I grew up in suburban New Jersey and we dated in Memphis for several years. And when we got serious, he said, well, I'm going home to my small town to take over my dad's practice. So that's where we'll live. We get married. And I said, oh yeah. And then when we drove here and I saw it, I said, no can do.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:02:02

And I broke up with him because it was so tiny in the mountains. And after about a year, we went off and did internships. I called him, I said, I'll move to Georgia. So I'll move here 25 years ago. And with time, it has now become like a Hallmark channel. It is, you know, small town. It actually they just filmed a Hallmark movie last summer. Are you kidding? It's very like Stars Hollow, Gilmore Girls.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:02:33

Love it. Would never ever want to live anywhere else. So isn't that funny?

Kristi Leonard [: 00:02:37

That is funny. Well, Jennifer and I have actually seen each other in Georgia where she lives. It is a very cute little place that she lives. So we like to start off getting to know the person before we get to all the author stuff, so. So if you could hit replay on any scene from your life, front row seat, what would it be?

Kristi Leonard [: 00:03:00

Obviously, that last one was pretty cute. But if you could hit replay, what, what would you want to replay?

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:03:06

Replay because you want to change the outcome or just because it was so fantastic?

Kristi Leonard [: 00:03:10

I don't know. You. You're the writer. You tell me.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:03:14

Oh, my goodness. Okay, so I'm going to say too quick if I can break the rules and have two replays, because, of course, I've had wonderful moments in my life, but nothing is greater than seeing your kids succeed. And both my kids are extremely ambitious, sort of like I am. And my son set a goal when he was really young that he wanted to graduate valedictorian, and he did. And he gave the most amazing speech at our high school graduation. My phone blew up for weeks from people. And we totally relive that.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:03:48

Yeah.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:03:49

And then just this past year, my daughter, she's a starting point guard on her basketball team, small little town in, you know, the mountains in Georgia. And we went on to win state championship this year. And she played every minute of that game. Nobody had us pegged to win. Our tiny little small town girls. And we went on, we beat it up, City Atlantic teams. So, like, watching my kids both achieve their dreams has been amazing. And there's so many more dreams, of course, but those were fun.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:04:21

Well, I bet your launch for your book would be one in the future.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:04:26

That was amazing. We've got a little indie bookstore in our adorable little town, and they've been so fun and supportive, and we had the line, went down the sidewalk. We had so much fun upstairs. We had a party with, you know, wine and hors d', oeuvres, and it was just fantastic.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:04:47

Absolutely amazing. Well, let's just talk about that book. Okay. We really challenge our authors by giving them the directive. Summarize your book in one sentence. Can you do it?

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:05:03

I'm gonna try. Okay. Okay, here we go. When a violent attack prevents one daughter from. From performing in a dance competition, an explosive town scandal erupts, exposing mothers with diabolical secrets and their teenage daughters who appear Instagram perfect, yet are anything but on the inside.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:22

Very good, Very good.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:05:26

One sentence is hard.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:28

Okay, so we've had a lot of run on sentences.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:05:31

Yeah.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:32

In this podcast. Good gracious, Jennifer. That ending. Okay.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:05:38

Ah, thank you.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:39

It made so much sense after the fact. Like, if you had been paying closer attention, you had been like, oh, I. I should have seen that coming. But, yeah, and, you know, for a writer to not see it.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:05:54

You did. You did good. You did, really.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:05:55

Thank you. I. Thank you. I always ask people, did they figure out the twist? And. And very, very, very few people have. I will tell you. The one person who did was my daughter. She was reading it, and she hit the halfway mark, and she said, I think this is what's going to happen.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:06:11

And I was just like, oh, okay. And then I was like, what? And I was like, I wonder if I said something out loud and she heard me. Maybe she backtracked, though. She backtracked and said, no, I think that's wrong. And then, of course, when she finished it, she said, ooh, I got it.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:06:27

Oh, my gosh. That's hilarious. So, yeah.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:06:30

Thank you.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:06:31

I really like to. I do not write domestic suspense, so. And this is your first domestic suspense. So did your, like, characters hijack the story and take it somewhere you didn't think? Like, how did you pull it off?

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:06:45

Well, that's so. That's so sweet. Thank you. Honestly, in the original draft, when it all comes down to it, it's a story about mothers. Right. And how difficult it is to parent children, especially ambitious children. And the original idea was to sort of show how you could really easily be on either side, either camp. You could be the mom, like Valerie, who's sort of hands off, doesn't want her daughter to have this big dream.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:07:16

She wants her to be more secure and pragmatic.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:19

Right.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:07:19

Or how easy it is to slip into the role of being the mother who kind of lives vicariously through their kids and will do anything to help them achieve their dreams.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:28

Right.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:07:29

And my agent was like, well, that's nice, but wouldn't it be fun if one of them kind of goes off the rails? And I was like, okay. And so. And then, yeah, then it did. Then it became a lot of fun to kind of sort of watch her spiral down. It's hard for me because I think I always want to write people as being good but flawed. And this time I had to. Had to write it. You know, someone who people don't like.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:54

Yeah.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:07:55

But once you start, it's kind of fun.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:07:57

I can imagine. Well, yeah, I could totally imagine. Well, and you had so many. Well, you had three, four. How many perspectives did you have?

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:08:07

So it was three. It was from the two mothers and the one teenage daughter, and then there was sort of a fourth POV from the other teenage daughter through her diaries.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:08:18

Oh, that's right. Okay. Yes. Very, very clever. Well, I think when I was writing My book, one of the earlier versions, my sister who read it was like, I just don't like your character, and I'm only one point of view. So I can see where if you have multiple point of views, you can get away with that a little better.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:08:36

A hundred percent. What's interesting about Tone is when I pitched this project to my agent, I pitched it as domestic suspense. She told me, actually, it's more book club. I was that okay. But then my publisher has branded it for sure by the COVID and as domestic. And on bookstagram, a lot of the bookstagrammers, they'll. Some will say, like, it's definitely not thriller. It's definitely more suspense.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:09:04

Some people will say it's domestic drama, not domestic suspense. So sort of like a hybrid.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:09:11

I love that. So did this book come from real life drama, or are you just really good at making it up?

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:09:19

Well, let's say it was inspired by real life drama. And in a very short nutshell, my family's very, very athletic. My nephew was being recruited for college football. He wound up playing for uga, which, you know, is big. Yeah, big. Yeah. When I was watching the recruiting process from the outside, I was like, God, these parents are crazy. Crazy.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:09:46

They're spending thousands of dollars on private coaches and et cetera. And then a few years later, my daughter is very, very athletic. And we had a tennis coach say, she has no limits. She could go through the roof. She could go. She could be proud. And I went home, and I was like, Chris, they said, she has no limits. And I started going down that rabbit hole, and I thought, wow, it really is a slippery slope, you know? And thank goodness my daughter was evolved enough to say, you know, mom, I kind of really don't even like this that much.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:10:24

And I was like, oh, okay, there you go. Okay, then let's step back, you know, because I'm not the crazy mom. So, yeah, that was the inspiration.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:10:33

That's awesome. I think the beauty of being a writer is getting to take an idea and just see where it goes. Did you have any of your characters voice or story? Did they, like, take your story in a different direction than you originally thought? Again, I feel like there's authors who are like the characters wrote the story themselves.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:10:57

Yeah. I will say probably not the main characters so much, but some of the secondary characters kind of popped in, and I was like, oh, yeah, okay. Okay. Like, I needed another red herring in there. Okay. You know, without. Awesome. I am very type A, and I'm.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:11:16

I'm a planner, and I outline very Meticulously. And when something pops up that's not in my outline, I'm always a little surprised. But for example, Kate's father, his whole little backstory and how he showed up was not originally in the. In the plan.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:11:37

Okay, awesome. I love that. That is kind of the fun part of writing, I think.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:11:43

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:11:46

So which part of writing makes you think, okay, this is why I do it? Like, what is it the writing itself? Is it the editing? Is it the all the fun afterwards?

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:11:56

I'm very dialogue heavy and that's one of my biggest editing is I have to go in and edit out excessive dialogue. As my agent has said, Jen, you're very gabby. And I'm like, yes, I know him. But probably the most fun part of drafting for me is when these scenes pop in my head and the voices just, the dialogue just kind of shows up and it's so fun and funny. I'll go back and I'll read it. I'll be like, that really is funny. You know, I love that.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:12:28

And some of it has to be cut because it's, you know, not necessary because that is the challenge is my writing style is quite light and trying to keep the suspense there inside a light beach read is tough. My editor. My editor perfectly summed it up and said, you write beach reads, but you got to keep the shark, shark in the water.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:12:54

Oh, that's great. Wow, That's a good point.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:12:58

Thank you. Thank you.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:13:01

I thought it was perfect. Totally. If I asked your friends, what advice would they say you're always handing out? It could be about writing. Could be your writing friend, it could be other mom.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:13:14

I mean, that's very easy because I am like the eternal optimist and I'm always, you know, finding the bright side, no matter what. Even on the tennis court, we could be down, you know, love five, and I'll be like, I have come back from worse, you know, So I am, yeah, I just to a fault, am pretty positive in all aspects of life.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:13:36

That is awesome. And would you say that you have a favorite reader, like, who is the person you go to when you're writing that you love their advice the best? That makes you a better writer.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:13:50

So that is a great question. I do have a pretty tight knit writing circle, but I have to give a shout out to Lydia. I can't pronounce her last name. Who I know you've interviewed.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:14:02

Yeah, I just interviewed her.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:14:04

Yeah, she runs our book club. She's brilliant and I don't use that word lightly, but she has I've done two inside outlines with her and she just, sometimes if I'm stuck in a plot hole or a plot loop, she just has an amazing ability to just give me a one sentence like, what about this? And it fixes everything. And what's even more impressive is that, you know, she's very literary and I am very commercial, and yet she's, she still has the ability to hone what this story is. So she helped me with this story, she helped me with, you know, what I'm writing right now. So, yeah.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:14:47

Awesome. Well, if people want to find out what you're writing right now, where would they find you? Do you have a website?

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:14:53

I do, yeah. jenniferjabaley.com Easy, easy enough. Very easy.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:14:57

And we'll put that in the show notes for sure. So we always end, we're at the end already. Can you believe it? We always end with the same question. What book or story inspires you the most?

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:15:10

Okay, so now I was able to describe my book in one sentence, but I cannot, I've got, I've got to have a two part answer for this one. So probably the most inspirational book for me is the Kite Runner by Halad Hussein.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:15:24

Good.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:15:24

I can't say his name.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:15:25

Yes, that's a great book.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:15:26

Came out in the early 2000s and it's brilliant. But that book, when I listened to it on audio, it was really the book that sparked me to want to write. Even though his style, of course, is entirely different from mine. It was like he could immerse you in a different culture, he can immerse you in a different geography, and yet you still were so emotionally attached to this teenager. So that was, that's, that's part one. But because it's not my type of writing or anything like that, truly the most inspirational book for me in my journey has been Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies. Oh, I read that way before it became Maurice Withers. I read it when it first came out and I love her so much.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:16:19

She, like me, writes very light but has a dark thread through it. And I feel like she can just take your typical suburban families and open up this world into drama and scandal. But it's so funny and so relatable and I love everything she writes. But that book particularly kind of gave me permission to think like, okay, I can write just about typical moms, you know, so.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:16:47

Oh, I love it.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:16:48

That's my two, that's my two part answer. That's perfect.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:16:51

That is phenomenal. Yeah, that, that is excellent. So we are so happy to have had you on the show, and I'm.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:17:01

So honored that you asked. I appreciate it so much.

Kristi Leonard [: 00:17:03

I'm excited for everybody to read your book and to see what comes next. Thanks for being on the show.

Jennifer Jabaley [: 00:17:08

Thank you so much. Kristi.

Jean Sinclair [: 00:17:13

Thanks for joining us. We hope you take a second to give us stars or a review on your favorite podcasting platform, and we'll be here again next Wednesday. Follow us on Instagram at Author Express Podcast to see who's coming up next. Don't forget, keep it express, but keep it interesting.