ABOUT

Jacqueline Davis is a high school librarian and writer from Indiana. She loves to travel and document her adventures. Her work can be seen in travel magazines, such as Backpacker and AT Journeys. With a degree in psychology, she is fascinated by the human mind and extensively researched mental illness and the history of Bethlem before beginning her Bedlam Series. Loving all things related to books, she reads at every chance. She loves getting absolutely lost in books and spends her days spreading this love to her students. When it comes down to it, stories are in her mind and heart, and she longs to share these with others. 

HOW IT CAME TO BE

In the fall of 2011, I was reading Cinderella to my daughter in bed, and as the words rolled off my tongue, my brain was shouting at me as to how absurd a story it was: talking mice, fairy godmothers, and whatnot. My mouth kept uttering the words on the pages, while my mind tried to convince me that there was more to this Cinderella story than met the eye. I left my daughter’s room that night with a story begging to be written, and deep within me, I knew I had to write it. I just didn’t know how.
I told myself that if there was one thing I could do well, it was study. So, I studied. I checked out from the library book after book on the craft of writing, the structure of sentences, anything related to novel-writing. I studied novels themselves, writing fabulous word pictures down in a little notebook I kept beside me. I immersed myself in books dealing with the time period of the story brewing in my head and took notes. It was nice to be a student again.
In the midst of all this, I tried my hand at writing and found I loved it. I would see scenes in my head and not rest until the words I had written captured the pictures. I would hear phrases as I went about my day and would rush to write them down. I recall writing a somewhat steamy paragraph in my pantry of all places.
So, that was the start of my first novel. It has since gone through alpha and beta readers, critiques, copyeditors, and my own revisions. Pieces I loved are now on the cutting room floor to make room for better words. This first book, inspired by a fairy tale but becoming its own haunted story, paved the way to its sequel, and new story ideas have been finding me since. I'm thankful to be sought after by these stories and to be the one to share them with the world.

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