Contemporary Romance, Romantic Drama, Women’s Fiction
Date Published: 11-21-2025
A pandemic is spreading across the globe. A national lockdown looms in the United States. A Southern journalist sees a chance to protect her health and jumpstart her career by escaping north to a Minnesota wilderness. Feisty and wary of entanglement, she piques the interest of a bored Native American rock star on his way home.
Robby Song’s career may be on hold, but Grace Wheeler is on a mission to build hers. To Robby, she’s an intriguing challenge. To Grace, he’s a distraction she’s not ready to handle. But the brutal Northwoods winter is coming. Grace flees back south . . . to soul-searching isolation and a puzzling middle-of-the-night call.
What is the hardest part of writing
your books?
That life gets in the way. I have to stop writing to
attend to other things, like clean underwear, or food, or visitors, or sleep. I
want to write constantly.
What are your most played songs?
While writing STRINGS, all of Jakob
Dylan, The Wallflowers’ Exit Wounds, and Lyle Lovett’s Step Inside
this House
Do you have critique partners or beta
readers?
A few valued friends, a writers’ group in Minnesota,
and a manuscript review person
What book are you reading now?
The Known World by
Edward P. Jones
How did you start your writing career?
I started writing at 4:30 a.m., Monday, 7 February
2022, to quiet the characters in my head who were having a conversation in an
airport. I thought if I wrote down what they were saying — got it out of my
head — they would be quiet and I could get some sleep. Didn’t work.
Tell us about your next release.
The novel I’m writing now is BREATHE. It’s
contemporary fiction about
a piece of land near the Canadian border and the complex network of people
connected to it. A grieving daughter moves fifteen hundred miles and takes a
job with her childhood idols to be near the land she sees as a connection to
her dad. An Ojibwe guide seduces her to gain legal right to it. A mammoth dog
comes out of its woods and becomes her companion. Ojibwe cousins fall in love
with her. One of them nearly kills her; the other saves her life.
Jan lives on the coast of South Carolina with strong ties to northern Minnesota. Growing up was filled with rich but conflicting narratives. Her dad told stories about his pioneering Minnesota family, egalitarian values, and the importance of self-reliance. They made annual trips to family cabins on a lake north of Duluth. But in her friends’ homes back in Charleston, she was immersed in plantation lore, tales of the Confederacy, and exclusive traditions of a social set that she was not born into. She is married to a musician who is also a mental health therapist. They have three children.
https://mybook.to/STRINGSJanMerritt
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