It’s A Book Thing Presents: An Author Spotlight Interview with Lena George, author of She’s Not Home: A Novel

Author Bio: Jaclyn Paul writes fiction under the name of Lena George, where she slyly weaves queer and neurodivergent characters into your next book club favorites. Jaclyn is the author of the bestselling book Order from Chaos: The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD. Her writing has appeared in ADDResources, ADHD Roller Coaster with Gina Pera, and Houston Family Magazine, as well as her popular blog The ADHD Homestead. 

As founder of Baltimore-based writers group Red Pen Addicts Anonymous, Jaclyn led the group’s monthly critiques from 2014 – 2023 and remains an active member. Member authors have received prestigious awards and publishing deals and Jaclyn’s first novel, She’s Not Home, published in 2023. 

A native of rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Jaclyn has lived in her adopted hometown of Baltimore, Maryland since 2008. She shares a home with her husband and son and escapes to the Jersey Shore to write and surf as often as possible. 

Deliah Lawrence: What inspired you to become an author?

Lena George: I’ve been a writer longer than I’ve been anything. Before I was old enough to pen stories myself, I’d dictate them to my mom and then draw illustrations. By age 10 I was already using writing as a way to process and remember my feelings and experiences. For some reason I got a four-year degree in visual arts, but then I used an early-2000s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) to restart my life as a serious writer. 

DL: How do you navigate or overcome writer’s block?

LG: I treat my relationship with writing like any other committed long-term relationship. Sometimes it feels like the fairy tale people expect it to be, but there are hard times. There are dry spells. I try to accept the natural ebb and flow as much as possible. The most important thing I can do is keep showing up and putting in the work.

Sometimes the writer’s block has a message. I’m struggling because my subconscious is pulling me back, telling me I need to recalibrate. Resistance to any task often traces back to uncertainty. I need to either clear up the uncertainty or intentionally accept it before I can continue. 

DL: What does your writing process look like from idea to final draft?

LG: I usually begin writing novels from a seed of an idea. For She’s Not Home, I started out thinking about how many of my high school classmates we lost to car crashes, and how easily I could’ve been one of them, and how my much-younger sister’s life could’ve changed completely growing up in the shadow of that. My current project was inspired by a brief conversation I had with a neighbor in our beach town about inheriting her mother’s house, how she wanted to keep it but they were selling it because her brother disagreed.

From this kernel, I write the first draft pretty freely. I jump around a lot, writing whichever scenes come to me. I don’t like to outline until I have a full story written from beginning to end.

After I have that rough draft on paper, I might make an outline to help tighten up the plot. Once I revise it into something worth reading, I’ll start workshopping it with my writing group. Revising and rewriting is my favorite part because I love seeing the story grow into itself. It’s incredibly satisfying, that first moment when I see the manuscript becoming what it was always meant to be. It’s also not something I feel I can know at the beginning, when I find that first seed of an idea. I have to do the work to discover it. 

DL: What elements do you believe make a story truly compelling?

LG: I’m a sucker for complex, even difficult, characters. The mother character in She’s Not Home, Sheryl, is controversial with readers. Some people can’t stand her. Others empathize may not condone her behavior but they understand it comes from a place of deep pain. These differences of opinion are what make for a great discussion at book club, where people have a rich debate about the book instead of just talking about how much they love the food and wine everyone brought.

I also love specificity. Well-crafted detail makes a story sing. Even a scene with a group of teenagers smoking weed, where can we add a grounding detail? They’re not passing around a glass pipe, they’re passing around one shaped like a banana, because that’s the kind of goofball possession the pipe’s owner would choose. Details are like seasonings in a dish. The right ones will make a scene feel exactly the way you want it to. 

DL: What challenges did you face while writing this book?

LG: I had to go to some dark places to write it. The final developmental edits from the publisher basically told me I had to write the one scene I thought I’d gotten away with not writing. I had to get inside the head of a mother driving to the hospital where her child has been taken, not knowing whether that child will be alive when she gets there. As a parent myself, that’s pretty gnarly. It felt much more comfortable to write around it. However, my publishing team felt strongly that the reader needed to go there with these characters directly, on the page. They were right, but that chapter—especially at the tail end of a lot of heavy revisions—took a lot out of me. 

DL: If you could have any superpower, what would it be and why?

LG: I’d want to be able to change the speed of time as I lived it. Like I’ll go to the beach by myself to work on my writing, and there’s a maximum number of days I want to be gone from my family’s lives, but not necessarily a maximum number of days I want to be alone with my work. In a perfect world I’d stay in my beachside time warp until I felt completely satisfied and ready to come home, but when I got on the train only a few days would’ve passed in the real world. 

DL: What strategies have you found most effective in marketing your book(s)?

LG: Word of mouth. It’s easy for authors to get caught up trying to crack the marketing nut, but I always tell people to think about why they buy books. I’ve never purchased a book because I saw an advertisement for it or because the author made a lot of social media posts. I buy books because I saw the author speak at a conference, or they did an event at my local bookstore, or I heard them interviewed on NPR. If my book club picks a book I can’t get from the library, I’ll buy it. Same with recommendations from friends. Sometimes I purchase a book whose cover draws me in as part of a bookstore display, or because the staff wrote a great shelf talker about it. These are all very human, offline connections. They take work because you have to make a long-term investment building relationships. But I’m a huge believer in old-fashioned, human-to-human, algorithm-free marketing. 

DL: What advice or resources would you recommend to aspiring writers?

LG: Give yourself opportunities to connect with your peers. Go to writing conferences, including smaller local events where you’ll meet writers you can actually hang out with in person. Join a writing group. Quit that writing group and find one that suits you better if you need to. Take a class with an industry legend, but know the friends you make among your classmates will be as valuable as any direct teaching you receive.

Sure, it’s great to get an in with a more established or influential writer, but the people you come up with are the ones who will hype your book to everyone they know. They’ll come to your reading and invite a bunch of their friends. I don’t even know how many times my writing group read the manuscript for She’s Not Home as I revised it. We’ve given so many hours to each other’s work, and now three of us are successful published authors. Having a supportive community will help you grow, lift you up, and connect you to opportunities you may not have found otherwise. 

DL: What are three fun or unexpected facts about yourself?

LG: 1. Several years ago I couldn’t find the exact to-do list app I wanted, so I learned how to code and built it myself. It’s called Do The Thing and you can find it on the iOS App Store. This was long before generative AI and “vibe coding” so I’m really proud of how much I was able to learn and accomplish. It’s also a nice change of pace from writing. I like engaging different mental muscles.

2. As a teenager I believed music was my true calling. In ninth grade I printed out all the application materials for Berklee School of Music so I could spend the next few years preparing. Playing music with a group of other people was truly a lifeline for me. I could (and may!) write a whole book about why I ended up on a different path, but even now I still sometimes pine for a music career. It’s like the One That Got Away.

3. I first wrote Mariana’s character from She’s Not Home when I was in seventh grade! That original story was called Into the Night Air. Pretty much the only similarity with She’s Not Home is that Mariana runs away following an incident between her and one of her parents. 

DL: What projects are you currently working on?

LG: I’ve been writing a lot of shorter-form non-fiction while I decide what to do with a few unfinished book projects. It’s a way of keeping my name out there, but also of getting a little bit of instant gratification in the midst of a long process. Right now, I’m trying to send at least one pitch per month for service pieces and personal essays.

Aside from that, I’m wrapping up a revised second edition of my book Order from Chaos: The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD before I dive back into a novel-in-progress. 

Readers can learn more about me and my work here: 

• Website: https://www.jaclynpaul.com/
• Amazon Author Page: Lena George / Jaclyn Paul
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JaclynLPaul/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lenageorgeauthor/
• Blog: https://www.jaclynpaul.com/ 

DL: Thank you for joining me for this feature! I’m excited for readers to learn more about you and your work. 

LG: Thank you!

Photo Credit: Skyler Cole Photography