Interview with Author Jeneva Rose: Sometimes I Scare Myself

Hello Jeneva, thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview.  Please tell us how this manifested for you? 

J.R.- It first manifested when I noticed my horror ideas had started outnumbering my thriller ideas. I kept collecting them in my Notes app until I realized I needed to do something with them. Some of the ideas didn’t have enough legs for a full novel, but I loved them anyway, and I wanted to tell those stories, so a collection of novellas felt like the perfect home for them. Sometimes I Scare Myselfwas also the first thing I wrote after having my baby. I was sleep deprived and dealing with postpartum anxiety, along with all the intrusive thoughts and terrifying what-ifs that can come with suddenly loving this tiny person more than you knew was possible. Horror gave me a place to put all that fear. I could take the things that scared me, twist them into something fictional, bloody, and occasionally funny, and put them on the page instead of carrying them around in my head.

I was in the middle of so much, and I picked up the book, and wound up reading it. You capture the beauty and fear of horror. My whole life I lived horror. It is a reminder that the real world is scarier than any book or film. What got you into horror?

J.R.- I’ve loved horror for as long as I can remember. I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street when I was three years old, which probably explains a lot about me. When I was around twelve, my brother, my cousins, and I got our hands on the family camcorder and started making our own horror movies. We remade Scream, and then moved on to some very prestigious productions, including The Blair Bitch Project and Wereman. And I never grew out of it. I kept watching horror, reading horror, and loving everything about the genre. There’s something about being scared in a safe environment that I’ve always found exhilarating, but I also love how much horror can do. It can make you laugh, devastate you, or completely disgust you. And sometimes it can do all those things at once. Readers came to know me through thrillers first, but horror has been part of me since long before I became an author. Getting to publish in the genre with Sometimes I Scare Myself feels like I’m letting readers see a side of me that’s always been there.

What advice or words of wisdom would you offer fellow authors or writers that are just starting? What are you working on next? 

J.R.- I’ve always looked at every “no” as a “not right now.” So much of a writing career is outside of your control. You can’t control whether an agent says yes, whether a publisher buys your book, how it sells, or how readers respond once it’s out in the world. But you can control whether you keep writing. My biggest advice is to write through the waiting. Write while you’re querying. Write while you’re on submission. Write while you’re waiting for an editor to get back to you. Write through the rejections. Every time I finished a book and sent it out, I started another one. That way, one “no” never had the power to stop me because I was already working toward the next “yes.” Keep getting better, keep putting your work out there, and keep moving forward, because a “no” only becomes the end of the story if you stop writing.

As for what’s next, my next thriller, Dead Girl Summer, comes out April 27, 2027. It takes place in Tomahawk, Wisconsin, a postcard-perfect lake town where three young women have died over the course of two summers. Their deaths were ruled accidents, but the locals have already given the phenomenon a name: Dead Girl Summer. The story follows a disgraced true-crime podcaster who sees the deaths as the story that could resurrect her career and the town’s acting sheriff, who desperately needs them to remain accidents. Then a fourth body is found in the lake.

I thank you so much for taking the time to do this for Horrornews.net and thank you for sending the beautiful book. Congratulations. 

J.R.- Thank you so much for reading and for having me! Sometimes I Scare Myself is incredibly special to me, so I’m thrilled to see it finding its fellow horror lovers.