I’ve loved musicals from the time an amateur theater troupe from Fort Huachuca brought a production of The Bells are Ringing, complete with an orchestra, to the auditorium of Greenway School years ago. The performance was on a Sunday afternoon. I was allowed to go by myself, and I came away enchanted.
But those were the days of great musicals—Oklahoma, South Pacific, The King and I, Camelot, Man of La Mancha—and I still know the words to most of the songs. But when it’s time for a book to go on sale, the above lines from Kiss Me Kate always come to mind. The songs marks off what it takes for a show to get to that point:
Three weeks—you’ve rehearsed
Two weeks, and it couldn’t be worse.
One week will it ever be right?
Then out of the hat it’s that big first night.
The Taken Ones, Beau #27
The same thing is true for books. It takes months of writing, rewriting and editing for a book to go on sale. The first night, as it were, for The Taken Ones, Beaumont # 27, is November 10. I’m writing this on my birthday. Since I was born in 1944, you already know I’m no spring chicken, and J. P. Beaumont has been part of my life for more than half of it. I started trying to write Until Proven Guilty in 1982, but Beau himself didn’t come into focus until the spring of the following year. In 1983, with my kids at camp for spring break, I got on a train in Seattle, headed to Portland to visit a friend from my days in the insurance.
As the train pulled out of the King Street Station, I wondered, “What would happen if I tried writing this book from the detective’s point of view?” I took out a blue-lined notebook and pen and began to write. “She might have been a cute kid once. That was hard to tell now. She was dead.” Once I wrote those words, I was on the back side of Seattle’s Magnolia Bluff, walking around a crime scene in J.P. Beaumont’s shoes, seeing what he saw, hearing what he heard, but also hearing what was going on in his head. We’ve been together ever since, and having his voice telling me the story is the only way it works.
Over the past forty years both Beau and I have undergone a lot of changes. I’ve see him work his way from being a problem drinker into living in recovery. In the beginning he was estranged from his kids, but I’ve been able to watch from the sidelines as he’s reconnected with his kids and now I’m learning about his grandkids’ lives, too. Mel’s retirement party at the beginning of this book gave both me and my readers an opportunity to check in on his family members, including some of the more prickly ones.
The Taken Ones starts with Gina Holt, a young woman from Anchorage, Alaska, leaving home for a summer internship with an architectural firm in Seattle. After sending a text letting her grandmother know she’s on the ground at Sea-Tac, Gina goes completely dark. Twinkle Winkleman, who’s a friend of Gina’s family and also an acquaintance of Beau’s, contacts him asking for help in dealing with Gina’s disappearance. Soon J.P. and his wife, Mel Soames, are knee-deep in the ensuing, cross-country investigation.
When I write books, I don’t outline. The stories unfold as I go along. Gina had disappeared, all right, but in the beginning I had no idea who had taken her or why. I had to write the story to learn the chilling reasons not only behind Gina’s kidnapping but also the mysterious disappearances of several other outstanding young women. In the process I saw how the various families responded to these disturbing events as well as how the targeted young women fought to survive.
The tour schedule is now posted on my website: https://www.jajanceauthor.com/schedule. Yes, there aren’t that many appearances, and they’re mostly local. In addition to being older than dirt, I’m also my husband’s primary caretaker.
If you want a signed book, please contact Brick and Mortar Books in Redmond, Washington. info@brickandmortarbooks.com. The store is near my location, and I can stop by and autograph books before they’re shipped. On the schedule you’ll see that I’ll be doing a FaceTime Live event with the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale. They, too, will have autographed books available, but those won’t be personalized.
I wanted to be a writer from second grade on, and I regard it as nothing short of a miracle that not only have I been privileged to live that dream for the past forty-plus years, I still love doing it. So happy reading, everybody. I hope you enjoying reading the story as I did creating it.
JAJ
PS – Technical difficulties caused the blog to go MIA for several days. The Blog is back but unfortunately the comments didn’t make it.