Journey to Publication by Wendy Walker, author of All Is Not Forgotten

I'm delighted to welcome Wendy Walker to my blog today to talk about her journey to publication. All Is Not Forgotten is being published by HQ Stories next week. 

Journey to Publication

By Wendy Walker

After I had my first son eighteen years ago, I decided to stay home to raise my children until they were all in school. I felt lucky to be able to do that and so I took the job very seriously! But after about a year, I started to feel unfulfilled so I started to write whenever I had free time (which was not very often!). I had two more children in five years and all the while I kept writing. I even wrote in the back of my minivan while waiting for them at pre-school! I felt like a time scavenger, especially after I found an agent who thought she could sell my work. Of course, life is never that straight forward! It was a long road and 17 years getting to the writing and publication of All Is Not Forgotten. During that time, I published other novels, edited, and eventually went back to work as a lawyer (after 14 years away from the field). The work I found was in the area of family law and it was a wonderful fit for my life experience. I practiced for five years, eventually opening up my own practice, which focuses on consulting.

My first two published novels were called Four Wives (2008) and Social Lives (2009). These books involved stories of women in wealthy suburbs struggling with their identities, marriages, children, and former lives. I have lived in suburban Connecticut most of my life, both as a child and a grown woman, and I find it fascinating! Here, many women quit their highly skilled jobs to take care of homes and families while their husbands work long hours and travel for jobs in finance. This always made me think about Betty Friedan and her seminal work, The Feminine Mystique. I built my plots around these themes of economic dependency and the division of labor within families where both partners are highly skilled and educated.

After I started practicing law again, I never gave up the dream of making a career as a writer. I used to tell my boys that it was important to always have a dream, but to also be responsible. I did not stop working as a lawyer. But I also managed to keep writing! I signed with a new agent and she loved the concept of a psychological thriller based on memory science, an idea I came up with nearly five years earlier but never got around to writing. I was a bit nervous about writing in a new genre, but I had always enjoyed reading suspense and thrillers and I was very interested in this story concept. So I dusted it off and wrote All Is Not Forgotten.  It was great advice and I am so glad that my children may get to see my dream come true (fingers crossed) so that they will believe what I told them about having dreams and never giving up – even if you have to keep your day job!

I am currently writing almost full time- but my doors are open and I still have a few clients. I just finished a draft of a new psychological thriller and am working on revisions.

About Wendy Walker

Wendy Walker has worked as an attorney specializing in family law. She lives in Connecticut where she is at work on her next novel.

Visit Wendy's website to learn more or follow her on Twitter.

Follow @HQStories and #NotForgotten on Twitter.

All Is Not Forgotten
By Wendy Walker
Published by HQ Stories  (E-book - 12 July 2016; Hardback - 14 July 2016)
ISBN: 978-1785770524

Publisher's description

You can erase the memory. But you cannot erase the crime.

Jenny’s wounds have healed.

An experimental treatment has removed the memory of a horrific and degrading attack.

She is moving on with her life.

That was the plan. Except it’s not working out.

Something has gone. The light in the eyes. And something was left behind. A scar. On her lower back. Which she can’t stop touching.

And she’s getting worse.

Not to mention the fact that her father is obsessed with finding her attacker and her mother is in toxic denial.

It may be that the only way to uncover what’s wrong is to help Jenny recover her memory. But even if it can be done, pulling at the threads of her suppressed experience will unravel much more than the truth about her attack.

And that could destroy as much as it heals.

Click here to read my review.

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