By Kim Hilsenbeck

Decades after living and attending school in San Marcos, new author Thomas Allen, 72, set his recently published novel in his hometown. This old-fashioned love story, titled “Jenny Kissed Me!” is set during the late 1950s. The story culminates 40 later in Italy.

Allen and his wife Elaine, who have their own decades-long romance, both worked on the book throughout the process, with Thomas as the writer and Elaine as the editor.

They stopped by the Hays Free Press recently to talk about the story and how it came to be a novel.

“‘Jenny Kissed Me’ is the name of a poem…really a quite well known poem,” Thomas said.

That poem was written in the late 1880s James Henry Leigh Hunt.

Allen was in to poetry, he said, in late middle school and early high school.

“I would memorize all kinds of poems,” he said.

Fast forward to 1998. His wife mentioned a co-worker named Jenny while the two were in the car driving. The name sparked something in him.

“I recited from memory that poem,” he said. “After I recited it, a story line came to me.”

When they got home, he grabbed a spiral notebook and started writing.

But as Allen served as an adjunct professor at a Central Texas college and was involved with the ministry at his Copperas Cove church, so his writing was put on hold.

“In December 2008, several things happened that reminded me that I was going to write a novel,” he said.

Every day he would write a little. Allen retired from both jobs in 2011 and started pursuing the book full time.

“Elaine and I worked on it a lot together. She’s better at looking over it for the dangling participles,” he said.

The novel’s storyline starts with a teenage romance that never materialized, but the two become best friends. It ends when the two meet again in Italy 40 years later.

While Allen said the book is not his personal story, it contains aspects of his life.

“It was more autobiographical than I thought it would be,” he said. 

He added that it was fun and nostalgic to write about San Marcos.

“It’s an old fashioned book, not a sexual romance,” he said. “You meet these two people who I think you’re going to love.”

Meet the author

Thomas Allen and his wife, Elaine, will be at Hastings, located at 917 Texas Hwy 80 in San Marcos, for a book signing from noon-3 p.m. Feb. 7.