Buckhead author turns years of telling stories into novels!
Growing up in Kennesaw, Danielle Singleton was the make-believe kid. “I was always the one making up stories, and I still do that,” says the Buckhead resident. “Now, I just write them down.”
Singleton’s imagination has inspired her to write eight novels and two children’s books. Her latest, Revenge, debuted in September after marinating in the back of her mind for eight years.
“I wrote a little bit, then let it sit for a while,” she says. “Then I wrote a different book. But in the past year, I picked this one back up and wanted to finish it.”
A disrupted writing process is par for the course, says Singleton, who left town to attend Georgetown and then Harvard Law school, which she finished in 2012. A corporate law job brought her back to Atlanta, and even while working for nine years for a financial products company, the desire to write didn’t diminish. But life and other events got in the way.
“I was a senior in college when the financial crisis hit, so I went to law school, and writing became a side project and an escape,” she says, though that side project became her first novel, the kidnapping thriller Safe & Sound. “Then my daughter was born at the height of COVID in 2020, since then, I’ve been a mom and writer.”
Singleton still draws on her legal background for many of her ideas. “I really enjoy the research part, which I do because I put my pretend stories in real places, real towns. I want to be accurate as much as possible. For Revenge, the setting is loosely based off a ranch I’ve been to in Colorado.”
Singleton describes her latest as a classic whodunit murder mystery, a genre she’s followed for most of her work with the exception of the romance novel, Every Star in the Sky. Set in Wyoming, Revenge follows a resourceful police chief tracking down a brutal murderer. Singleton assures her audience the idea came “pretty much out of my imagination.” Her daily life is more centered on family life with her daughter, now 5; a 2-year-old son; and her real estate advisor husband, Will Battle. But she’s always on the prowl for new ideas.
“I’m always looking for things that jump out,” she says. “I use the notes feature on my phone a lot for when ideas hit me, and I send myself emails. I keep a Word document open with 10 stories I could work on that are anywhere from one sentence to 5,000 words. I just haven’t gotten focused on any of them and may never focus on some of them. But I keep track of things that are always jumping out at me.”
With all her books, Singleton has opted to self-publish. “Like a good lawyer, I did a lot of research on which path I wanted to take, and I like having the ability to self-publish outside of the vanity presses. I have this product I believe in, so I decided to put it out there myself and see where it goes. I’m not a household name, but I’ve done pretty well, and I’m pleased and hopeful for the future.”
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