She is also very much intrigued by other immigrant cultures, particularly how different or similar they are to her. While she was born in Montreal Canada, her upbringing and household was largely Nigerian and hence she developed a fascination with her roots. Her parents trace their routes to southeastern Nigeria and she has been known to sometimes sprinkle in some of that cultural background when writing her characters. McAvoy is that she is proud of her Igbo heritage. After talking with many of her fellow authors, she realized that indie publishing provided more flexibility and income potential and that is what she has done ever since.Īn interesting thing about J.J. Her first-ever work was published in 2014 but after a while, she decided it would be better if she published as an indie author. She got a reply from Nancy Yost’s Natanya Wheeler, who requested the first three chapters but ultimately, only two were seriously interested in publishing her manuscript. During that time, she used to look like a zombie as she focused on her writing and hardly wore any makeup.īy the end of 2013, she began querying and sent more than 80 queries and heard from only four after waiting for months. She was so passionate about getting published that she wrote all the time penning chapter after chapter and averaged about a book every three to four weeks. She got serious in college and cut down on her socializing and sleeping time and even began writing in between her classes. When she was younger, she wrote a lot of poetry but never published any of it until she went to college. McAvoy began writing right after she graduated from high school as a nineteen-year-old, but it was not until she was 22 that she published her debut. She now spends much of her time meeting fans, traveling for inspiration, and writing. Moreover, she always knew that she would one day be interested in penning novels in different genres and did not want to be tied down into a generic genre by readers who had a preconceived notion of her writing.įinding inspiration in anything from modern popular culture to Shakespearian tragedies, her novels have become runaway bestsellers. When she first began writing, she opted to write under a pen name since she was a university student and did not want her life as an author to interfere with her studies and personal life. She has become a prolific author sometimes churning out as many as five novels each year. McAvoy published “Ruthless People” her debut novel in 2014 and has never looked back since. She attended Carleton University to graduate with a degree in the humanities in 2016. The author was born to Nigerian immigrant parents in 1993 in Montreal and is the oldest of three children. McAvoy is the pseudonym of Judy Onyegbado, a Canadian author of historical romance, romantic suspense, and general romance fiction.

Jj mcavoy ruthless series