Shelby Bach has more than twenty-five years of writing experience.
She is best known as the author of The Ever Afters (S&SBFYR), a middle grade fantasy adventure series about an afterschool that trains young fairy tale Characters.
She is also the founder of The Journeypen Project, where she talks about the pursuit of emotional and creative wholeness through the writing craft.
Currently settling down on the Oregon Coast, she is working on a novel and some new JourneyPen offerings.
I see you looking at my picture, re-reading the first sentence of that bio, and then thinking, with varying degrees of skepticism, “You don’t look old enough.”
I assure you I’m plenty old enough. You can rack up a ton of experience at a young age when you write your first novel at ten years old, which is exactly what I did.
Now, the twenty-five-plus years of writing experience also covered a lot of different territory:
The Practice Novels.
Between the beginning of fifth grade and the end of ninth grade:
I wrote four novels: the first three handwritten in notebooks and the last typed up. I ended up completing seven total before the age of twenty, but the first four are important for one huge reason: I had a well-established and practiced relationship with my own creativity before I took any writing classes. This means that I was self-taught before anyone told me what to believe about writing.
I wish everyone had this kind of early experience, and this is why I always encourage young writers to start practicing as soon as they can.
Training:
Workshop-edition.
Between the end of ninth grade and the end of college:
I took a bunch of writing workshops, ranging from summer camps for high schoolers to the much coveted, application-only Senior Composition class at Vassar College. This is where I first learned to revise, which included learning how to take criticism and when needed, how to ignore criticism that didn’t serve to make the work better.
I also graduated from there with my Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in English. In other words, I am classically trained in canonical literature, much like an opera singer who chooses to join a rock band instead. (Actually, some of my writing teachers hated fantasy, and they are probably about as appalled by my chosen genre as an opera teacher would be when their student joins rocker ranks.)
Training:
Publishing-edition.
Directly after college:
I graduated from the Columbia Publishing Course and worked in New York-based publishing houses, first as an intern at an adult non-fiction press and then as an editorial assistant in a children’s imprint. For several years following that, I also worked as a freelance reader, reviewing manuscript submissions on the behalf of a few children’s publishing houses.
This is the equivalent of the opera-singer-turned-rocker working in the music industry for a while, learning the tricks of the trade and also recognizing its blind spots. I know more than the average writer, and having worked with editors as their assistant, I can understand their perspective without being intimidated by their expertise and experience.
The Ever Afters.
2009 - 2015:
I drafted, revised, published, and promoted the Ever Afters, my first series. You can practice and research being a published author all you want, up to and including to working as an editorial assistant to see what it looks like on “the other side of the table.”
But the real experience comes from really bringing books into the world, from the first idea to a finished copy that you can hold in your hands. The next level experience is getting to know your young readers and hearing what impact your words have made on their lives.
That experience is deeply rewarding, but it’s also where you put all your practice and training to the intense work of day-in, day-out creativity-in-action.
The Sabbatical.
2015-2020:
Because of a family crisis, I started working for my father’s construction business. That’s right—I got a day job after being published, which is not how it usually works.
Oddly enough, this rounded out my education. I was still an author, still writing my next manuscript, still connecting to readers, still responsible for my website and books, but meeting publishing deadlines was no longer my top priority.
Since my family was in crisis (now resolved, all good), and since the wider world also went a bit wonky around the same time, I began to rely on my writing tools in a new way: I started intentionally using them not just to write fun stories with great characters, but to co-create my own story by consciously choosing what kind of person I wanted to be. Seeing this pattern and how helpful it was for me, I founded The Journeypen Project in order to offer the same tools to others.
The Return.
2020 to present:
I am currently revising my next novel. After three years and over 48,000 miles of traveling, I have settled on Cooper Mountain—outside Portland, OR.
In the meantime, I actually created a bunch of content for those who are committed to crafting culture on the JourneyPen Project. (However, it’s currently under renovation. It’ll likely be back up and running by the summer.)
There you have it.
25+ years of writing experience.
If you are feeling all goggly-eyed, especially if you are a young reader who has either just discovered me or has been following me for a while, let me remind you of the bio on all The Ever Afters books:
The Ever Afters Bio
“Shelby Bach grew up reading every book she could find and writing stories in battered notebooks. She also rarely came home with a clean shirt and had lots of accidents that ended with a hunt for Band-Aids. Nowadays she writes on her laptop rather than in a notebook, but not much else has changed.”
I wrote the Ever Afters bio in 2012.
This is still 100% true, but at the time, I also had sixteen years of writing experience I didn’t mention.
Why?
Because I knew that these accomplishments could make me sound less approachable than I am, especially if you were a young reader. So I chose only to convey the information that made me seem relatable.
Since then, I’ve changed my mind. I realized that I’m not doing anyone any favors by hiding knowledge that might be helpful.
But here’s the important bit:
I’m still the same person, sweet ones. You just see more of me than you saw before.