Jessica Hatch | Novelist + Freelance Book Editor
Jessica has a passion for writing laugh-out-loud fiction with a strong-beating heart—and this month, her debut novel, My Big Fake Wedding, was published by Bookouture! Having worked in publishing since 2013, her bylines include Writer’s Digest, The Millions, and G*Mob Magazine, and she’s a proud alumna of the Mors Tua Vita Mea workshop in Sezze Romano, Italy. Jessica was born outside of Richmond, Virginia, and now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, with her bartender husband, Paul, and their three cats. When she’s not writing, she can typically be found jogging on the local Riverwalk or planning her next international trip.
The Basics:
Hometown: Richmond, VA
Current city: Jacksonville, FL
Alma mater: University of Virginia
Degree: B.A., English Literature; B.A., Media Studies
Very first job: Temporary social media and author consultant, New Leaf Literary & Media
Hustle: Novelist(!!) + Freelance Book Editor
The Interests:
Babe you admire and why?
My good friend and critique partner, Hurley Winkler. She’s the Steve Martin to my Martin Short. We met in summer 2017 when a mutual acquaintance said two kickass young writers like us should know each other. (Yes, I’m paraphrasing, but I’m pretty sure “kickass” was implied.)
What was initially a networking drink quickly became the best friend date of my life. (Any day I get to share Mike Birbiglia’s comedy short, “Fresh Air 2: 2 Fresh 2 Furious,” is a good day.)
Hurley is a force of nature whose energy and determination and zest for life I strongly admire. (Her Lonely Victories newsletter is not to be missed!) She was instrumental in bringing my novel to a place where publishers would be interested in it, and I can never thank her enough for all she’s done for me.
A writer or author you’d love to sit down for a drink with?
May I invite two writers? If so, Amy Poehler and Kristen Arnett, and we’d have the best effing time laughing at each other’s jokes over beers. I find Amy’s oeuvre, especially Yes Please, so relatable, and while I tend to read broadly rather than deeply, I’ve read nearly everything Kristen has published.
Favorite international travel destination?
I love France, especially the department of Burgundy. My husband, Paul, and I dream of retiring to an efficiency flat in Dijon when we’re old.
Describe yourself using book titles.
The quirky, heartfelt humor of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine meets the fun and breathless experimentation with form in House of Leaves.
The Hustle:
Tell us about your hustle.
I balance work as a freelance book editor and a novelist. Unless I’m up against a freelance deadline, after breakfast, I’ll make a fresh cup of coffee and sit down to write for at least half an hour. Then I pivot to active work in clients’ manuscripts, follow-up calls for projects I’ve finished or consulting calls for projects I’m trying to woo. Then, of course, as every small business owner knows, there’s the auxiliary tasks: checking email, keeping track of expenses and income for taxes, creating content for my website, posting on social media. I’ve had a busy summer preparing for my book’s launch, so these admin tasks have been catch as catch can. With that said, I’m optimistic that I’ll be offering more free and paid content (like online and in-person workshops!) this fall.
What’s your professional journey been like so far? How’d you find yourself at your current position?
I’ve been a lifelong bookworm and storyteller. My parents were supportive of my love of reading and writing—to a point. They didn’t want to encourage me to go into a field where I’d (inevitably, they assumed) go broke. With that fear of risk drilled into my head, my professional journey was kickstarted by my aunt Leslie, who worked as an editor in New York publishing starting in the 1980s. I job-shadowed her assistant when I was sixteen, and that was it. Even if I wasn’t writing myself, I could work alongside writers as an agent or an editor—and live in my then-favorite city in the world.
Hell-bent on this goal, I went to college and earned bachelor’s degrees in English literature and media studies before moving to New York myself. I interned at Writers House (twice!), temped at New Leaf Literary & Media and Fox Literary Management, and then worked in St. Martin’s Press’s publicity department. But let’s be real: if you don’t have a trust fund or a partner who works in finance, New York is too expensive to afford on an entry-level publishing salary. I had to leave the city and regroup. (On a related note, hey, Big Five publishers, stop paying so much for political memoirs and pay your assistants and associates a living wage!)
I moved down to Jacksonville, Florida, and fell in love with this city. I was still giving friends feedback on their manuscripts and taking on the occasional freelance client. If I was editing for free or for a side hustle at all hours of the night, this was what I needed to do for a living. I built up a six-month emergency savings fund and launched Hatch Editorial Services full-time in October 2016.
Notice that even when I had the chance for a career pivot, I didn’t consider freelance writing an option. That middle-class fear from childhood was still scored into me. In summer 2017, though, I applied to Mors Tua Vita Mea, an international writing workshop I’d learned about from one of Alexander Chee’s tweets, and surprise of surprises, Chelsea Hodson and the late Giancarlo DiTrapano let me in! This was the renaissance of my writing life. Since then, I’ve grown increasingly committed to fulfilling my actual dream of being a published, working novelist.
What/who sparked your interest in writing? Do you remember a specific moment/time when you realized it’s what you’d be most passionate about?
I’ve loved books since day one, but the first time I realized, “Oh, wow, maybe I do have what it takes, beyond getting [biased] compliments from my family” was when my ninth-grade teacher read some of my stuff and said I had to dedicate a novel to her one day. Two years later, I was one of twenty-eight girls in the US and Canada accepted into Teen Ink Magazine’s London Writing Program.
Congrats on your debut novel, My Big Fake Wedding! Give us your ‘elevator pitch’ for the book.
Thank you very much! My Big Fake Wedding is about a woman who doesn’t understand the concept of sunken costs. She drinks hours-old coffee; she sits through movies she hates. So when her name is pulled out of a lottery for her dream wedding venue, after the guy she thought was The One breaks up with her, she says, “That’s fine. I’ll just plan my dream wedding AND find a guy to marry… before next June.” Madcap hilarity ensues.
Can you share the inspiration behind MBFW? What do you want readers to take away from their reading experience?
I have a lot in common, vis-à-vis mental health, with My Big Fake Wedding’s protagonist, Beatrice Corbin. I’m neurodivergent; more than one psychologist has classed me as having general anxiety disorder with OCD tendencies. Bea, bless her heart, is an avatar of Pre-Therapy Overachiever Jessica. Way back when, I would bend over backward to accomplish whatever was on my to-do list, even if it meant I would end my day crying on the floor, emotionally and physically exhausted, at three a.m. In this way I think a lot of people with OCD and anxiety—especially women—are overlooked, because we seem like we’re functioning so well that we don’t need anyone’s help… even when internally we’re begging for someone to notice we need it.
This is where Bea and I overlap. She loves her checklists (there’s a humorous one at the end of each chapter), thinks she can do anything she sets her mind to (consequences be damned), and it is no surprise that multiple characters suggest she may need to book a consult with a therapist!
I want readers who identify strongly with me and with Bea to come away from their experience knowing—or having had reinforced—that it’s okay to not be okay. On my publication day, a reviewer mentioned that Bea seemed coded as “mildly neurodivergent,” and said she felt happy to be “seen” in this novel. Neurotypical or neurodiverse, we all need to respect our wellbeing enough to realize it’s okay to ask for help, to hold space for ourselves, and to admit we’re scared of whatever that Big Bad is (e.g., failure, being alone). Bea ultimately finds forgiveness and solace in her closest friends, and I hope my readers can say the same.
What sets My Big Fake Wedding apart from other novels on the market?
There’s been an explosion of romcoms on the market in recent years. I grew up on parody and pastiche, like the Monty Python movies and old SNL reruns, so though I love the romcom genre, this novel is a wee bit tongue-in-cheek. I pitched it to my publisher as being both enamored by and gently mocking its subject matter—that is, romance, Millennial workplaces, and the bonds of female friendship.
What genre(s) are you most interested in (at the moment, or always) for reading and writing? Do these tend to change/evolve for you?
I have always been more captivated by an individual idea or emotion than I have been loyal to categories. In my reading and writing life, this means consuming and producing content broadly, not deeply in one genre.
I’ve loved titles in categories spanning from literary fiction to memoirs and issues-based nonfiction, to commercial horror, romance, and true crime. (Catriona Ward is a favorite for horror; Beth O’Leary for romance.) Currently I’m reading Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, and I recently finished Abi Morgan’s This Is Not a Pity Memoir, which gutted me.
I’m slated for a two-book deal with Bookouture, and while my second standalone novel (forthcoming in February 2023) is another romantic comedy, the germ of a third project I’m developing is more a melting pot of all my interests: romance, quirky/cringe comedy, issues-based subject matter, and, yes, some spooky stuff.
How have your past professional and academic experiences and lessons prepared you for the work you do today? How have they not prepared you?
I bring my experiences in trade publishing to every one of my freelance clients, and I continue learning from and networking with friends in New York. What’s more, I’ve learned so much about the increasingly professional and polished self-publishing industry over the last six years, and I have great respect for my clients who make a name for themselves in that space.
While I bring these experiences to my new life as a novelist, I keep reminding myself to have a beginner’s mindset. Yes, I’ve spent at least the last ten years of my life in book publishing, but never have I done so as a writer. In other words, I don’t know what I don’t know, and I’ll never get to experience all the frenzied happiness, excitement, and sheer terror of being a debut novelist ever again. I’m buckling in for the ride.
As someone who’s been writing for years, do you still get nervous to have your own work reviewed? Does it ever get easier to take feedback?
By other professionals? No. By readers? Sweet lord, yes! But as your question evinces (“Does it ever get easier…?”), that’s because this is a new experience for me. We writers get calluses the way guitarists do; the more we put ourselves in and among other writers, the more we learn to accept and embrace their constructive criticism. While I currently have to peek through my fingers at GoodReads reviews, I’m sure if I am lucky enough to have a writing career, I will come to appreciate the good, bad, and ugly. (And, as a writing mentor once told me, hey, the one-star reviewer still had to buy the book.)
What can we collectively do to support women in your industry today?
There’s so much that can be done to support women in publishing, from the top to the bottom and in all corners of the industry.
One major issue is trade publishing’s lack of diversity. (Here’s a link to the Lee & Low publishing diversity baseline survey 2.0, conducted in 2019.) When there aren’t agents, editors, publicists, and so on whom writers can not only relate to but trust implicitly to be in their corner, the books we need to read aren’t published—at least not by the Big Five. One way consumers can support and empower women, especially women with intersectional identities, would be to purchase their books, review them kindly on Amazon or GoodReads, and to hype them to fellow readers. When readers “vote with their dollar,” the powers-that-be sit up and take notice. Hopefully this shows publishers that readers want more diverse books from them.
On a local level, try to shop in women-owned bookstores. (If you live in Jacksonville, you should be able to order my novel, and many other amazing books, through Femme Fire Books for delivery or in-store pickup.)
What was it like for you to hold a copy of your first novel in your hands for the first time?
When I unboxed my author copies, I got excited, but I didn’t get emotional. It was only when I decided where to put them on my bookshelf that it hit me: my thoughts, jokes, and words had been given entry into a highly gatekept community of creators for the very first time. The fact that I could put my book next to Shirley Jackson, Beth O’Leary, or, hell, even JRR Tolkien, shook me emotionally. That’s when I cried!
Who are some women in your field that you look to for inspiration?
Oh God, SO MANY. Just to name a few, Amara Hoshijo, an editor at Saga Press, for all the brilliant and diverse sci-fi she’s bringing to market, and Juliet Grames, an editor/author extraordinaire in her own right. Jane Friedman is a great resource for freelance editors, and I love being in touch with fellow freelancers like Hannah Bauman and Tiffany Grimes.
As a writer, I’ve gratefully received advice from Pilar García-Brown, Chelsea Hodson, and Catriona Ward. I’ve commiserated on issues personal and professional with Julie Bloemeke, Michelle Lizet Flores, Linnea Hartsuyker, Anna Kovatcheva, Amanda Radley, Emma Sterner-Radley, and Erin Zak.
Finally, I admire all the women out there, published and unpublished, who are slogging away on their manuscripts or in the querying trenches. This industry is full of such sloggy moments, and so I celebrate them now and hope we get to celebrate our little victories together.
Career and/or life advice for other babes (both inside and outside of your industry?)
When you’re making a plan, determine in which areas you can be flexible and, on the flip side, which requests from the other side of the negotiation table are going to be deal breakers.
Connect with Jessica:
Editing Services // Twitter // Instagram // SubStack
This interview has been condensed and edited.
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