All of them told her the book needed to be more religious to fit into the inspirational book market, or that it needed to be more scandalous to fit into the mainstream romance market. “Putting your mind in a different time and location and connecting with imaginary characters is hard to do when you are getting interrupted,” she says.Īfter Juilanne finished the book, she pitched it to several book agents. Inevitably, one of her kids would come in and ask for a drink, and she would be sucked out of picturesque England back into reality in seconds. She laughs when she thinks about how she would she would try to write at home. Julianne wrote during nap time, after her children went to bed and on writer’s retreats. The plot’s book is centered around Marianne Daventry, who leaves her home in Bath, England, to spend time with her sister in Edenbrooke and becomes entangled in an unexpected adventure.

“In the beginning, I was just writing for myself and my sanity,” she says, “I had pie-in-the-sky dreams of it becoming a success, but I never thought anything would happen with it.”

Over the course of four years, Julianne wrote Edenbrooke. These projects gave her the publishing bug and she began writing a novel. She started writing picture books, magazine articles, essays and poems. When Julianne Donaldson had two young children and a husband going to school, she decided she needed an outlet that was creative, intellectually stimulating and free - and writing checked all three boxes.

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