Some readers may be wondering why so many of my blogs have to do with email correspondence. This blog is now and always has been a window on my world. During the past couple of years for pretty obvious reasons my world along with everyone else’s has become much smaller.
Rather than hearing what my readers think about my books in person, more and more of those interactions occur through my email correspondence. So periodically I open up the mail bag and share what’s come in over the past several days. As mentioned above, let’s just say it’s soup to nuts.
This morning, for example, the first message that greeted me was from a self-professed “gun nut” letting me know that I’d made a firearm error in a book I wrote more than twenty years ago. I’m not going to tell you which one in order to keep some of you from going on a literary Easter egg hunt to find it. And I’m not going to ask my editors to go back and fix it, either. That error will just be there—in perpetuity.
Listen people, I’m a liberal arts major. It turns out, what I don’t know about guns literally fills volumes. As an author it’s sometimes difficult to sort out what you think you know as opposed to what you really don’t know. So for all you real gun people out there, I do my best, but sometimes my best isn’t good enough.
So there you have it, some input from the complaint department, but it turns out that this week compliments are outstripping complaints by a three to one margin. For instance, a wheelchair bound woman who had just read Blessing of the Lost Girls told me that she found the actions of my two wheelchair-bound characters, Brian Fellows and John Wheeler, to be really empowering. Being confined to a wheelchair isn’t part of my life experience, but I was able to write about it realistically enough to touch someone who does live that life.
Then there’s the guy who wrote telling me that he had burst into tears twice in the process of reading my Ali books—once when Archbishop Gillespie forgave his would-be killer and again when Edie Larson offered comfort to the distraught man who had been behind the wheel of a truck when her husband, Robert, stepped in front of it to commit suicide. My correspondent said the tears had caught him by surprise and were probably the result of the ongoing grieving process due to having lost his wife a year or so ago. That one got me.
And then there’s the guy who wrote to tell me that reading about Snow College in Blessing had taken him back to his college days when he spent a semester attending that school of higher learning in Ephraim, Utah, in the late fifties. Since I’ve never been to Ephraim his note got me thinking about how all that happened. As I was writing the explanation to him, it occurred to me that maybe my blog readers might be interested as well. I’m excerpting that letter here:
I’m delighted to know that my mentioning Snow College in Blessing brought back so many memories for you, but I wanted you to know how it came to be included in Blessing of the Lost Girls.
When I write books, I start at the very beginning which, as Julie Andrews said in The Sound of Music, is a very good place to start. And since I write murder mysteries, I usually start with someone dead and spend the remainder of the book, trying to find out who did it and how come.
Blessing was different. I knew from the beginning who the killer was, and the book focused on the victims, their grieving friends and families, as well as on the law enforcement officers assigned to solve those cases. When I realized the serial killer targeted barrel racers, and that the initial victim was someone Jennifer Brady had competed against, that’s how Jenny snuck into the book. That wasn’t something I planned from the beginning. It just happened.
Since Jenny was competing in rodeos at the collegiate level, I went looking for institutions of higher learning with rodeo teams. That’s how I came across Snow College. I’ve never been to Ephraim, Utah. I’ve never visited the college there, and yet by introducing Deborah Russell into the book, I was able to awaken your memories of attending Snow—as you called it, just plain Snow.
Obviously, Utah is Mormon country. Growing up in Bisbee and later living and working in Phoenix, I met lots of Mormons. Considering you grew up in Utah, I’m assuming that you were raised as and most likely still are a member of that faith. I like to think that the way I portrayed those folks in the book did so in a positive light, and I trust I did the same thing for the Indigenous people who appeared in the story.
So that’s the power of words. They took two people to Snow College in a very real way—one who had been there in person and one who never had.
For years writing my Joanna Brady books has allowed me to revisit Bisbee, Arizona, the place where I grew up. It’s also taken my readers there. Many of those folks will never visit the town in person. This morning, my brother Gary sent me a YouTube video of photos taken by him and compiled by his son, Andrew. At this point, the photos are fifty years old, so the Bisbee depicted there is closer to the one in which I grew up rather than the town as it is now.
I’ll be adding the link below, and I’m hoping you’ll enjoy scrolling through what’s there. But as you do so, please notice the red shale hillsides as well as the stark gray limestone outcroppings. While I was writing the second Joanna Brady book, I was trying to describe the town’s physical surroundings. It wasn’t until I was struggling to find just the right words that I suddenly realized, decades after graduating from Bisbee High School, why the school colors are red and gray. That’s also the power of words. They can jolt us into finally noticing something that we should have figured out years earlier.
I’ll probably be reusing much of this in next week’s blog, so thank you for inspiring it. You’ll find the link posted below. If you study the background of this initial photo, you can see a small peak in the sunlight in the distance, just to the right of the hillside in the foreground. That’s Geronimo—the place that was front and center in Downfall.
JAJ
PS: It turns out that when it comes to compliments and complaints, this week compliments are winning four to one. This morning I received a note from an Audible reader who was recently notified that in 2023 she spent 105,126 minutes listening to books by J.A. Jance. That adds up to someone spending 1752 hours on my books in a single year. If that isn’t a compliment, I don’t know what is!