‘Twist’ of Fate

Month-long labor of love brings honors to author

By Brian Truitt

‘Twist’ author Angie L. Jennings nourishes her writing with cues from her adult life.

“I am so not a morning person!” Angie L. Jennings will tell you if you ask. Yet for a good 45 days once, she had no problem getting up at 5 a.m.— two hours before she normally would set her alarm to get ready for her luxury-car company gig—to work on her debut novel. Oh, if only the revisions were that easy, too.

When she was living in Atlanta a few years back and getting a master’s in professional writing, Jennings was inspired by a writing seminar based around completing a book in around a month and a half, and “Twist” was the result. The Virginia native was honored as a finalist in the First Novel category in this year’s Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Satisfying? You bet. “To be a self-published author, you have to be your own cheerleader,” says Jennings, adding that the recognition “is like when you have a baby and everybody’s oohing and ahhing over your baby and saying it’s the cutest thing in the world.”

“Twist” was a baby Jennings, 30, took a long time nurturing. The story is about Sharin Downs, a 24-year-old who moves from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta to jumpstart her professional and personal lives, and along the way revisits an old flame, rekindles a new one and also deals with her own trust issues with female friends. Downs’ path mirrors that of Jennings’ own, from graduating James Madison University in 2001 to D.C. and then to Atlanta from 2003 to when she moved back to Alexandria two years ago. “I knew I wanted to tell a lot of the stories that I had encountered in college,” she says. “I felt like a lot of people had gone through similar situations—what happens to us in college kind of shapes us as young adults.”

It took Jennings a while to perfect her book, though. The first draft came quickly, but getting “Twist” into publishing shape took a good three years, two different editors and a couple hundred pages of revisions. “Writing is a process,” Jennings says, “and you really have to have a point and an audience you’re writing to.”

Leaving the luxury car world behind and moving back to academia makes sense with her background. Growing up in rural Nathalie in Halifax County, “my only options were to do things school-related,” Jennings says with a laugh. “It’s totally different than being [in] the D.C. area, where everything’s at your fingertips.” She took AP courses, joined the debate team, was a flag girl in the marching band and read a lot. That’s a hobby Jennings has kept over the years, keeping with authors she considers similar to herself while reading classics so her perspective of writing stays well-rounded.

While most writers may keep their next project under wraps, Jennings talks freely about what she’s planning for Downs in the next book. There will be career issues popping up, as well as relationships with two men, one who reminds Downs of her carefree college days, and another who was always her confidante when she needed him during that time. That guy, named Quick, is “loosely” based on Jennings’ husband Omari, a fellow JMU grad she married last year.

As much as Jennings knows what she wants to write, she’s dedicated herself to “Twist” for the rest of the year. “I read about some other authors who produce 11 or 12 novels in three years? I’m on the slow train with my novels,” she says. “I want to take my time—write them, mull over them and make sure the stories are really in the form I want to tell them.”

(November 2009)