Local author Bev Jenkins pleases crowd at district library event

Beverly Jenkins, a local author who was named Michigan Library Association Author of the Year for 2018 and earned a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, delighted the crowd with her remarks at the Belleville Area District Library on Saturday.
Jenkins was the keynote speaker at the Local Author Fair that brought together 13 authors from the Belleville area to meet the public and sell their books. This is the second author fair held at the library.
Jenkins said Amazon Prime is showing a movie, called “Deadly Sexy,” made from her writing, and her new book, “Rebel,” is coming out next week.
Jenkins, who writes historical and contemporary romances, was encouraged by those in the audience to tell about how she started writing her new Blessings series.
She said her first book was published in 1994 and since then she has written more than 40 books.
Jenkins said her agent called her one day and asked her to write a series on a small town, but she was too busy for another project and told her agent no. One day the agent called, again, and told her she sold the series. Jenkins said she still didn’t want to do it, until her agent told her how much it would pay. She dug right in.
This is the Blessings Novel series. It starts with a man cheating on his wife and she divorces him. He is a vice president of an oil company and had lots of money so she got a huge settlement and bought a town on eBay. She wanted to bring at-risk kids to the town to the old people who lived there.
“I’m on book 10 now,” she said, adding, “It crossed race barriers. The first book basically wrote itself.”
While her romances appeal mainly to women, she said the Blessings series had many readers who are men. She said one Marine from Texas wrote to tell her one of her books brought tears to his eyes.
Jenkins said she has lived in this area for 30 years and for many years was very active in Trinity Episcopal Church. Many of her church friends were present to hear her speech.
She said the Blessings books have a spiritual base.
“My faith got me through my husband’s death,” she said, noting he was diagnosed in August and dead by Thanksgiving. That was in 2003.
“I’m a work in progress,” Jenkins said. She said her brain wakes up about 9 p.m. and she writes until 3 a.m.
“I’m always behind … but when I’m behind the story starts coming.”
She said she spends a lot of time on Twitter. She’s also on Facebook because readers gather on Facebook.
She said the book she is writing now is due June 1 and she has 30,000 words to do. She can write 2,000 words a day and writes two books a year. She really didn’t have time to give the speech that day, but she wanted to help the library.
When speaking about writing, Jenkins said: “Most of us do it because we have to, it’s embedded in our DNA … There are people in our heads demanding their stories be told … It’s all work, all the time… To write well is a gift … writing matters because it changes lives…”
Jenkins said libraries made her fall in love with literature and she has never charged the Belleville library for anything she’s done, or the Detroit libraries. She said if a library has money, she charges.
She gave local writers two sources for aid with their writing. Janefriedman.com helps people get published and Stephen King’s “On Writing” is very helpful, she said.