Announcing my next novel!
Yes, it's true. I'm alive.
Hello, it’s me! Jesmeen, the author of YA novel TJ Powar Has Something to Prove. I feel the need to re-introduce myself because chances are, you signed up for my newsletter ages ago and may not even remember doing so. Here I am to jog your memory. :)
As you can see, I've moved my email list to SubStack; my old newsletter service shut down, so it was a necessary change. I did this quite a while ago but this is the first newsletter I’m sending since then (I wasn’t kidding when I said this is a very occasional newsletter for important news. But if you want to read my extra, somewhat more frequent ramblings, you can always check out my Tumblr.).
Things have been quiet from the forward-facing, career front, lately. This is due to multiple factors: luck, the snail’s pace of publishing, and me figuring out what sort of books I wanted to publish going forward as a non-debut author. That last one was the most important. It wasn’t that I had any particular troubles writing my next book, but I did have troubles figuring out my relationship with publishing itself, and how the industry might view my work if I wrote it the way I wanted (read: completely whack). It lead to a lot of late-night reflection about why I was even here, writing—and then ultimately, with my agent’s support, I made some career decisions. I feel much freer now (although, honestly, fighting the mindset of publishing is an ongoing process.). So you see, there has been stuff happening behind the scenes, but not much worth sending a newsletter about.
But I’ve been doing so much writing in the meantime. Which is a great segue into this exciting thing I wanted to tell you about today!
See above the formal deal announcement. The way I pitched it to friends, however, was, “Think YA Breaking Bad but Walter White is a teenage mathlete and instead of making meth, she becomes the bookkeeper for a gang to help her friend pay off his debts.” And I can’t wait to share it in fall 2025!
REASONS WE BREAK is a standalone YA rom-drama. However, for those who’ve read TJ POWAR HAS SOMETHING TO PROVE, it’s also a spinoff, and you’ll find several familiar faces in it. Including the two main characters… because yes, it’s Simran and Rajan’s story!
If you’re one of the people who’ve asked me about these two, I hope you’re at least half as delighted about this news as I am. :) But for those who need their memory jogged, Simran is TJ Powar’s straight-A, “good-girl” cousin; Rajan is the resident troublemaker-slacker of their class. I first had the idea that I wanted to write a book about them while writing TJ POWAR’s earliest drafts in 2019. I had stuck them in a scene together for convenience’s sake, and something clicked, chemistry-wise. So naturally I wanted to get into their heads.
Fast forward to 2020, when I was on submission to editors with TJ POWAR. I didn’t know if that book was going to sell, but I’d already decided that either way, I wanted to write a book about Simran and Rajan. By summer of 2021, the plot had taken shape. I wrote several more drafts feverishly through the rest of 2021. And it turned out to be a different sort of story.
Although it’s a bit darker and ended up sold to another publisher, I still like to think of REASONS WE BREAK as TJ POWAR’s cousin. I mean, it literally is about TJ Powar’s cousin, but also thematically. Asides from the familiar characters, it also deals with plenty of coming-of-age issues, this time including: second gen immigrant guilt, grappling with your parents’ mortality, figuring out romance when you feel “behind” your peers in that realm, and the many ways in which gangs target vulnerable teens. The gang aspect in particular will be recognizable to Canadian readers, as it has a very non-fictional inspiration: the bloody history of Indo-Canadian organized crime, with young South Asians often its greatest victims. It’s a very nuanced topic that I could never hope to fully capture, but I at least attempted to explore one facet: how and why this specific group of immigrant kids, many of whom come from seemingly “normal”, stable families, get targeted and recruited into a life that attempts to destroy them.
It’s a slight departure from the very lighthearted contemporary that my debut novel was but I hope you’ll come along for the ride. Initially, I actually did try to write a story that was more tonally similar—but I had to let go of that. My instincts told me to let these characters take me wherever they wanted to go. And Simran and Rajan really begged me to let them spread their wings and show me the most complex parts of themselves. After all, everyone you know growing up is struggling with different problems. Sometimes, very different problems. For example, you could be worrying about whether you missed a spot shaving while the kid sitting in the desk next to you is wondering whether they’ll make it alive to next week (totally RANDOM examples here obviously). Although both experiences are completely real and valid, this story is an ode to the latter. The kids who grow up too fast. The ones who endure horrors and shoulder burdens that even many adults could barely comprehend.
How could I deny Simran and Rajan the opportunity to tell that story? A story that gave *me* just as much growth as it gave them? I COULD NOT. Which is why, even though it made it a bit harder to publish, you’re getting this story exactly as it was intended—and for that, I could not be happier.
~ Jesmeen
