J.T. Ellison

I’ve been a writer since I could hold a pencil. As a child, I read voraciously, penned little poems and short stories. I wrote all through high school and college, planning for this to be my life, until a lone professor told me I wasn’t good enough to be published. It was the first time someone had ever told me my writing wasn’t good enough. I was the person everyone asked to edit their papers. I got straight As in every English class. My entire schooling from elementary on was structured around my facility with words.

And that one person derailed me entirely. I quit writing immediately, to the dismay of everyone around me. I took another path into my adult life, a career in politics. I got married. I worked in the White House and Department of Commerce and for Lockheed Martin. I wrote all the time, but technical writing, not creative. Not my heart.

I came back to the page in a moment of sheer duress. In 1998, we moved from D.C. to my husband’s hometown of Nashville. My 19-year-old cat died soon after, I couldn’t find a job, didn’t fit in enough to make friends, and I spent the first two years in a paralyzed state, watching copious amounts of television and feeling sorry for myself.

All that TV must have turned on my storytelling gene. I wish I remember why I decided to try to write again. I only remember the sheer joy, exhilaration, and relief when I did. I wrote a paragraph. Just one. But in my word-starved mind, it was beautiful, and when I put in that last period, I cried.

Fifteen years removed from that glorious reawakening, I am a happy full-time writer. My world now consists of constant deadlines. I’ve written 20 novels, have achieved many of my goals, and I feel so blessed, so lucky, to have this gift, to have it recognized by my readers.

I still get overwhelmed when I think of those eight years without words, though I firmly believe everything happens for a reason. I probably wasn’t good enough to get published when I was twenty. I probably wasn’t good enough to get published when I was twenty-eight. I landed my first book deal when I was thirty-six, and even now, 20 books in, I’m working hard to improve my craft, to get better, to level up each and every time.

What looks like a curse is so many times a blessing. I needed to live. To experience sadness. To travel. To be loved. All those components make their way into my work. Without that eight-year gap, I wouldn’t be the woman, the writer, I am today.

https://www.jtellison.com/

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