EAST BRUNSWICK — For just about as long as she can remember, Jennifer Salvato Doktorski always wanted to be a writer.
“I always wanted to write — I started off as a journalist, but in the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to write a novel someday,” she said.
Well, someday has arrived for the resident of East Brunswick. In the next two months, Doktorski and her two publishing companies will be releasing two youngadult novels.
The debut author said the idea for her first novel, “Famous Last Words,” came to her more than 15 years ago when she was working as an editorial assistant for the North Jersey Herald-News. She wrote obituaries for the newspaper for eight months.
“I thought [the experience] would make a cool story one day,” she said.
Samantha, the story’s protagonist, relives the author’s journalistic past in the novel. Surrounded by a cast of interesting characters, Samantha starts off writing obituaries for a local paper, and soon begins learning her way around both the newsroom and the real world, Doktorski said.
“She starts to make some momentous realizations about politics, ethics, her family, romance and most important — herself,” the author writes in the novel’s rundown.
Her second novel, “How My Summer Went Up in Flames,” surrounds the crosscountry adventures of Rosie, an adolescent New Jerseyan whose parents send her on a cross-country trip to distance her from a cheating ex-boyfriend.
“Rosie’s always been impulsive,” a synopsis reads. “She didn’t intend to set her cheating ex-boyfriend’s car on fire. And she never thought her attempts to make amends could be considered stalking. So when she’s served with a temporary restraining order on the first day of summer vacation, she’s heartbroken — and furious.”
Rosie’s parents send her on a road trip with a responsible neighbor and a few of his friends. With every mile marker that passes, Rosie discovers a new sense of self, and that sometimes the best revenge is moving on, Doktorski said.
Doktorski has always used real-life experiences to guide her writing.
“I think every writer begins with what they know or things they’ve experienced, and people they’ve met in creating fiction,” she said. “I think that’s what makes [these books] feel real and helps people relate to the characters.”
Each novel took Doktorski about a year to complete, and she said her labor of love often brought her to dead ends before this most recent success.
“I don’t think when I began this journey that I realized how much revising there would be — how much rejection before you get the novel into the best shape possible. I was well into the double digits in rejections before I landed [this deal] with an agent and made a sale,” Doktorski said.
However, the author said the revision process, which took about five years for “Famous Last Words,” greatly improved her novels.
Her editors and agents took the books to another level, Doktorski said.
“I think ideally you find an agent who you mesh with. If an agent reads your work and likes it enough to want to represent it, then you are on the same page anyway,” she said. “My agent believed in my book from the start.”
Doktorski is about halfway through her third novel, which she hopes to finish by the end of the year.
“How My Summer Went Up in Flames” will be released by Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on May 7.
“Famous Last Words,” published by Christy Ottaviano Books, a division of Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, comes out on July 2.
Both novels can be preordered on the author’s website at jendoktorski.com.
Contact Thomas Castles at [email protected].