Kim Turner's Journey to Publication

 

Kim, now that we've heard a little bit about Christmas in the Wylder County Jail--which sounds amazing, by the way--do you mind filling us in on your early writing career? I'm wildly curious about it and I'm sure other readers are, too. 

How did you get started writing? What was your journey to publication?

I was probably about eight years old when I started writing  simple poetry and I always kept journals and wrote out ideas and thoughts. I still do some of that or at least I did until I started working on my novels. But I always had pen and paper in hand and I have always lived inside my head with stories. And I always had a book in my hand no matter where I went. As a child I would imagine more to a TV movie than happened and I would make up the rest of the story inside my head to make it more satisfying and so I didn’t have to tell the characters good-bye. 

In 2001 I went to a writers conference with my childhood friend Sherrilyn (Kenyon) McQueen just to hang out and after attending I decided to go home and try to write something. But, life side tracks things at times. I ended up back in school for my Masters, got married, had a baby, adopted a child and then it was many years later. 

So when my girls were older I started playing around with a story and joined Romance Writers of America and Georgia Romance Writers and realized how much I had to learn. But I pitched Sawyer’sRose in 2014  to Wild Rose and the rest is history. I had thirteen rejections on that story and so when word came through I was at work and opened what I thought was another rejection email and I read it and then I read it again and then I started screaming!



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