Hi, there. Long time, no see. Welcome back to my blog! I’ve wiped all of the (old, super dated) content and decided to start fresh. I’ve been out of the game for so long that I feel like a baby writer all over again. So let’s get this all out of the way.

I’m Jenny Perinovic. Half a decade ago, I released a YA Gothic Romance called A Magic Dark and Bright (which you can read about it under the my books tab in the menu). I started blogging regularly about writing in 2010, and for a while, ran a now-defunct writing blog called The Great Noveling Adventure with some of my closest writing friends. We talked about our books, our querying progress, and our forays into the world of indie publishing. And then life intervened, and for a variety of reasons including serious illness, grad school, a new career and a new baby, I stopped really writing. I tinkered with the same story off and on for six years, but something was wrong and I didn’t know how to fix it. I was convinced that I’d forgotten how to write. That maybe I only had one real book in me, that my trunked manuscripts and the scraps of a story on my hard drive would never amount to anything.

Last spring, when my husband was in Germany on his Fulbright and I was at home, solo-parenting our infant daughter, I texted my sweet friend Kyrie and said, “I think I might do something crazy and apply for a workshop.” She texted back “DO IT. I WILL WATCH THE BABY.” And I applied. And I got in. The tuition was exactly the amount of money I had left in my bank account from A Magic Dark & Bright and it felt like fate, and that’s how I ended up in a workshop with Nova Ren Suma at Blue Stoop here in Philadelphia. I’m not being overdramatic when I tell you that that workshop was my first baby step back into writing. I ended up scrapping the book I’d brought to the workshop, but in the magic of the second day, I scribbled down the first and last paragraphs of the book I’m working on now.

They burned my mother for a witch.

I went into that workshop feeling like a fraud. At one point, sitting around that table, hearing everyone talk about my words, I think I started crying. And I said, I’m so glad I did this, because I didn’t think I knew how to write anymore. And I don’t think, that, without Kyrie and Nova and everyone else who made that weekend happen, I would have remembered that the words were inside of me all along.

It took another year of thinking about writing, of messing with the same chapters over and over and over again, before I decided I needed to start fresh with a new book. I had a chapter written of something different, something I had been turning over and over in my head since our first trip to Germany in 2016, something that grew legs when Ellie and I flew back in 2018 to spend Christmas with Eric. I scribbled down a few more chapters. I hit 20k, and stalled. And spun my wheels. The Fear came back, but this time, I pushed on. I was too intrigued by these characters to set them aside. So I outlined (something I have never done before). And I finished a first draft. And now I’m one week and 45,000 words into rewriting that draft, and it’s working and I’m starting to think about what comes next.

So, if you made it this far, welcome. I hope you’ll join me as I share my journey all over again – from revising and writer’s block to querying and whatever happens next. Because believe me, I know what it’s like to feel like an imposter. I know what it’s like to feel like my words will never ever come back. And I’m also here to tell you that they will…you just have to do the work.