The story began in a blue, three-subject spiral notebook when Margie Janes was just 13. It was the summer following eighth grade and the Calumet City St. Victor’s graduate started writing whenever she could, giving life to characters that would accompany and grow with her for the next three decades, throughout high school, college and into marriage and motherhood.
And finally, 32 years later, the story that started with a pencil, that spiral notebook and a young woman’s imagination will be published and shared with everyone else.
True Companion, a young adult novel written by Mokena Elementary School teacher and longtime resident Margie Janes, is being released for e-book pre-orders today, January 21, on Amazon here.
As a bonus for today’s pre-order release, the e-book is just 99 cents. But just for today.
“It’s a heck of a deal for 32 years of work,” said Janes, laughing during our recent conversation about the novel as we sat in Mokena Library. The e-book will download to devices on February 1st. Information on paperback versions of the novel will be available soon.
It’s also a heck of a chance to even get published, Janes explained. She was introduced to her editor and publisher, Hilary Jastram of Bookmark Publishing House, by Mokena resident and author Shirley Guendling, who told her only about four percent of submitted manuscripts actually make it to publication, Janes said.
But back to that notebook. When you look at its pages, you can tell it is a young person’s handwriting. It’s large and round and written in pencil, and the look of the cursive sentences says “13-year-old girl” all over it.
Janes is thrilled to be at this point. She had written short stories throughout high school at Marian Catholic, picking it up, writing, then putting it away. She went to college at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, where she made lifelong friends and met Bill Janes, her husband of 20 years.
“I worked on the story, and then life happens, and then you pack up and move to college, and then you come back,” Janes said. “I was moving in with Billy and going through all my stuff, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, my notebooks!’
“I had never finished this (story), and it was my favorite guy character. And I just had this inspiration that (the characters) can meet back up, because now I had had the college experience. I was fresh out of college.”
So that is what she did for another 20 years.
Though the novel is not autobiographical, Janes said the people she met along the way in Charleston and beyond definitely added depth to the novel’s main female character, who experiences and emotions reflected Janes own.
“She’s a compilation of people that I’ve known,” Janes said. There are characters inspired by real life friends and Billy? “There’s a lot of pieces of Billy in a lot of characters,” she said.
These people and life experiences shape the novel’s timeline and plot development. There are college parties and heartbreak, and relationships that ebb and flow, just as they tend to do in real life.
And while not reflective of her personally, “a lot of things I wrote about came to fruition in my life,” Janes said. “My character is a soccer player in high school. My daughter plays soccer. There’s an injury that occurs with the character, and the same injury happened to my daughter – at the same age!”
“Isn’t that weird?” Janes asks.
Not so much, maybe, when you’ve been the character in every stage of life, as a young girl, a college student and a mom, editor Jastram pointed out.
The novel is definitely PG-13, Janes stresses. It is best suited for high school and college-aged readers. Half of the book is about childhood, Janes said, and is told in alternating flashbacks between current day and the past.
The main character Rebecca - Beck - is 20 years old, and she re-connects with TJ, a childhood guy friend. When Beck realizes she hasn’t been the same without him, she wonders if TJ can help her escape the shadow of her sister’s death 16 years prior.
The Janes have lived in Mokena for 20 years, and Margie is largely known as “third-grade MES teacher Mrs. Janes,” a title she has held ever since she was hired by former District 159 Superintendent Steve Stein.
And now Janes is waiting for a day that has been a very long time in coming.
“This is my baby, Janes said. “It’s really difficult to put it out in the world because I have been working on this for 32 years.
“This is something I’ve been holding onto forever,” she said. “No matter what happens, I love my story. And if someone else likes it, that’s great.”
Learn more about True Companion and Margie Janes at the following links:
True Companion Website
Follow Janes on Instagram
Like Janes on Facebook
Margie Janes’ Must-Read Y-A author List:
For Younger Audiences:
1. J.K. Rowling (The G.O.A.T.)!
2. Barbara O’Connor
3. Barbara Park
4. Louis Sacher
5. Kwame Alexander
6. Andrew Clements
7. Gordan Korman
For Teens:
1. Morgan Matson
2. Emma Lord
3. Jessica Park
4. Stephanie Meyer
5. Suzanne Collins
0 Comments