Jessica Scott Talks Military Romance

USA Today bestselling author Jessica Scott is here today to chat with us about her Coming Home military romance series, in celebration of BACK TO YOU's paperback release. Welcome, Jessica!

Your Coming Home books feature military members who struggle to balance romance, family, and duty. What is unique about the love stories of soldiers?

I think soldiers go through things – even when we’re not at war – that are just different than most other groups. Even before the war, soldiers were asked to spend a year or more at a time away from their families. There are pressures on military families that many other families simply won’t ever experience and I find those stories compelling.

How did your experience as an Army second lieutenant influence your fiction writing?

I think it allows me to pull from my daily life. I get to mine an incredibly rich field for story tidbits and ideas and emotions that I don’t get otherwise.

In your non-fiction works, you write about the difficulty of balancing life as a mother and your history as a soldier. What prompted you to share your personal story in addition to your fictional works?

I think it’s important that other women know about stories like mine. We’ve come to believe this myth that the other woman’s life is perfect, that it’s only mine so to speak that’s going to hell. No one prepared me for how difficult it would be to deploy and no one certainly gave me any idea that coming home was going to be so doggone tough. So I shared my stories because I wanted other women to know that hey, it’s going to be okay. You are not alone.

The third book in the Coming Home series, BACK TO YOU (initially released in e-format in January), was just recently released in print. How does it feel to be in print for the first time?

Terrifying, exhilarating, you name it. I get ridiculously excited when I see it in the wild. It’s so doggone cool!

When you aren’t writing, what do you like to read? I love Nalini Singh and Shawntelle Madison’s urban fantasy series. They’re both simply fantastic. Otherwise, I read a lot of non-fiction about cognition and the mind. I’m kind of a nerd like that.

Thanks, Jessica, for chatting with us today! Readers, find out more about Jessica and her books on her website and check out all the books in the Coming Home series here.

About Jessica

USA Today bestselling author Jessica Scott is a career army officer, mother of two daughters, three cats and three dogs, wife to a career NCO and wrangler of all things stuffed and fluffy. She is a terrible cook and even worse housekeeper, but she's a pretty good shot with her assigned weapon and someone liked some of the stuff she wrote. Somehow, her children are pretty well adjusted and her husband still loves her, despite burned water and a messy house.

She's also written for the New York Times At War Blog, PBS Point of View Regarding War, and IAVA. She deployed to Iraq in 2009 as part of OIF/New Dawn and has had the honor of serving as a company commander at Fort Hood, Texas twice.

She's pursuing a graduate degree in Sociology in her spare time and most recently, she's been featured as one of Esquire Magazine's Americans of the Year for 2012.

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