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Writer's pictureSamama Reads

Interview with Jennifer Ann Shore

About the Author

Jennifer Ann Shore is a writer and an Amazon bestselling author based in Seattle, Washington. She has written two novels: "New Wave," a young adult dystopian, and "The Extended Summer of Anna and Jeremy," a young adult romance -- published in 2018 and 2019, respectively. In her decade of working in journalism, marketing, and book publishing, she has won numerous awards for her work, from companies such as Hearst and SIIA.

Do visit her website (www.jenniferannshore.com) and follow her on Twitter (@JenniferAShore), Instagram (@shorely) or your preferred social media channel!


Q. Can you tell us something about yourself that not many people know about? Like your hobbies?

A. When I’m not working or writing, I’m usually posting pictures of my French bulldog, traveling, reading, watching YouTube videos, hiking, biking, or eating some sort of dessert. Even though I’m not as “out there” on social media as some people, I’m not sure I have too many secrets these days!

Q. When did you write your first story and how old were you?

A. Hmm, I honestly can’t remember writing a semi-complete work of fiction until my first book (crazy to think about!) but I wrote poems and newspaper/magazine articles as a teenager.

Q. As a child, what did you want to do when you grew up?

A. Everything before wanting to be a writer is fuzzy and mostly nonexistent. I’m sure I bounced around with a ton of different ideas!

Q. What is your favorite book from your childhood?

A. It was nearly impossible to grow up in the ‘90s and ‘00s and not be a Harry Potter fan, so that was a pretty important series for me, but as I got older and once I got into the groove of reading I loved everything from Judy Blume to non-fiction books on public affairs and philosophy. It’s tough for me to even have a favorite book now—every time I read a book, I learn from it (as a writer, a reader, or a human) so my list is long.


Q. How were you as a student?

A. Pretty average, honestly. U.S. curriculum mostly centers on test-taking, which requires tremendous amounts of studying and memorization for the sake of doing so — and I have always struggled to motivate myself if I don’t see the end result or purpose.

I was very fortunate to have parents who actively participated in helping me (or getting me help), but I never really truly felt that I was doing well until about my second year of college. Kent State University has a top-ranked journalism program, and thankfully for me, they move students out of the theoretical and into the practicals pretty quickly. When I started to report for the paper and focus on honing my grammar, writing and copy-editing skills in classwork, I started pulling straight A grades.


Q. Where do you get your writing ideas from?

A. From my dreams, mostly.

Whenever I tell people this, they kind of laugh it off by saying that they wish they could wake up with these magical ideas and get rolling on them, but that’s not necessarily how it works. I can’t function if I haven’t gotten eight or nine hours of sleep every night, and with that, I get to spend a lot of time dreaming. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a vivid dreamer, pulling in bits of my day with a weird cloudy fog of different situations over it. I’ll wake up remembering a key detail and build from there.

I can’t wait to eventually share the dream that spurred The Islands of Anarchy Series, and while I originally wanted to work it into “New Wave,” it didn’t fit once I established the complete plot, so that scene will likely make an appearance in the third book of the series.

But — I’ve never shared this before — for “The Extended Summer of Anna and Jeremy,” I dreamt about the pool scene, specifically when Jeremy and his friends are all falling in the water. My family spent a lot of summers at our community pool, and as a teenager, I spent a fair amount of time sitting on the sidelines, watching people play and laugh but never kind of having the nerve to join in. I had that dream the night before I was flying out to South Carolina to visit my parents, so I think nostalgia got the best of me.

Also, some of the dialogue that Anna and Jeremy share in the kitchen in the second chapter was from a completely different dream about two months after I had the first one.

Q. Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?

A. I’m really uncomfortable with the idea of basing characters off of people I know, but I can’t say that they’re entirely out of my imagination either, so I’ll say that I’ll pull details from what I’ve experienced, I’ve wanted to experience, and a smattering in between.

Jeremy tapping his leg when he’s excited is something that my husband does, and I’ve seen him do it in the car on the way to the airport and baseball games many times, and I nearly added it in without realizing why I did so. I named Julian, from “New Wave,” after one of my best friends who manages to drive me insane but challenge me, which is something that Mol experiences as well. Anna’s love for action movies is entirely my own nerdy trait. The manner in which Jess speaks and how she purses her lips in disapproval in “Extended Summer” is based on one of my very dear male friends who is the perfect mix of brilliant, judgmental, and fabulous.

Q. If you could have been the author of any book ever written, which book would you choose?

A. Not necessarily written this exact book, but the ones that stick out to me that I’d like to emulate are ones that are wholly different than my own writing style, and I hope to someday to push myself to try and shock and inspire like Colleen Hoover in “Verity” or craft details and write magic like Rachel Higginson in her “Star-Crossed” series. Also, I read a lot of fan fiction, which is home to some of the wittiest and most charming dialogue I’ve ever come across.

Q. Are you working on anything at the present you would like to share with your readers about?

A. Yes! I’m working on the sequel to “New Wave” (so far have planned three and a half [the half is a novella focused on Luca and Julian] total books in The Islands of Anarchy Series), and I’m happy to give you the first scoop that it’ll be named “Rip Current.”

I’ve been picking it up and putting it back down for a little over for a year, but it will publish in 2020. For a while, I got sidetracked by life stuff and then I was going through the process of writing and publishing “Extended Summer,” and I have to admit I have a few other projects in the works that I’m not quite ready to announce yet. I am hoping the coming year will bring at least two new novels from yours truly.

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