Jen DeLuca: On Falling Back in Love With Your Story

Jen DeLuca was born and raised near Richmond, Virginia, but now lives in Arizona with her husband and a houseful of rescue pets. She loves latte-flavored lattes, Hokies football, and the Oxford comma. Her novels, Well Met, Well Played, and Well Matched, were inspired by her time volunteering as a pub wench with her local Renaissance Faire. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

In this post, Jen discusses how a loss in confidence led her to falling back in love with the story and characters of her new romance novel, Well Traveled, her hope for readers, and more!

Name: Jen DeLuca
Literary agent: Taylor Haggerty, Root Literary
Book title: Well Traveled
Publisher: Berkley Romance
Release date: December 6, 2022
Genre/category: Romance
Previous titles: Well Met, Well Played, Well Matched
Elevator pitch for the book: A corporate attorney literally throws her career away and runs off to join the renaissance faire, which leads to her sharing an RV with a kilt-wearing guitarist.

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This is the fourth installment in my series of romances that take place in the world of the renaissance faire, so it was a lot of fun to change it up a little, take things on the road, and experience the ren faire world in a new way.

I started brainstorming this one in the fall of 2020. I knew I was putting supporting characters Lulu and Dex together and was figuring out the rest when I came down with COVID. Sick in bed, I was scrolling TikTok and came across tarot and witchy TikTok. That gave me the idea to incorporate fortune tellers that you see at renaissance faires as a kind of foil to Lulu’s type-A, attorney personality.

Once I have the basic plot in place, not much changes as far as that goes. But my outlines are very loose. Drafting is when and how I figure out my characters—what makes them tick and how they relate to each other. So, there are lots of great character moments that I discover along the way that I never could have guessed at when I wrote the outline!

This was the hardest book I’ve ever written. There was a period where nothing was going right, and as a result I was very late turning the book in. By that time, the book felt cursed, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the draft I turned in.

But during the editing process I fell in love with the story and the characters all over again, and of the four books in this series, it’s garnered the most positive reviews. I’ve been surprised, relieved, and grateful that all the frustration I went through writing the book paid off in the end!

My regular process is to write a draft all the way through before going back and editing, but for this book I kept going back and rewriting scenes, and nothing was gelling. I finally threw out all of the processes that I’d used for my previous three books—Scrivener software with all its notes—and bought an old-school spiral-bound notebook.

I re-outlined and made notes in this notebook in pencil; something about wearing down the pencil point and resharpening it made me feel like I was making progress. I wrote the eventual complete first draft in Microsoft Word. It’s not my usual way, but allowing myself to get messy was what worked this time!

I hope that readers will see that it’s never too late to start over if you don’t like the life you’re living. I hope that in reading my book they get to vicariously enjoy the sights and sounds of a renaissance faire and fall in love along the way.

Persevere. If a novel you’ve spent years on doesn’t get picked up by an agent (if that’s the path you want), learn from the writing of it and write the next book. I was in my late 40s when my first novel was published. If you want to write and you love to write, keep writing.

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