In case you don’t recognize that line, it’s from the musical Man of La Mancha, sung by Don Quixote’s servant, Sancho Panza. When asked what he thinks about his boss, the song goes this way.

I like him.
I really like him.
He’s my master
He’s my friend.

Given that introduction, you’ll never guess what book I’m reading right now—Until Proven Guilty, J.P. Beaumont number one. The last time I read through the entire book was in June of 1985. My first author copy of the book had arrived in my hands that morning, and what a thrill it was to open the envelope and take out that slim little paperback. There was a single red rose on the cover along with my name, my new pen name—J.A. Jance. It just now, all these years later, occurred to me how ironic it is that both the author and character of that book used their initials—J.P. rather than Jonas Piedmont and J.A. rather than Judith Ann. Clearly it took me a VERY long time to figure that out.

I’ve said before, that when I was writing that book, I was under the mistaken impression that I was writing a stand-alone book. Back then, I couldn’t imagine that 44 years later, I’d be looking down the barrel at writing J.P. Beaumont # 28!

On that summer day when my author copy showed up, my daughter was in Brownies and I was her troop leader. For three years in a row, she singlehandedly sold 1000 boxes of Girl Scout Cookies and earned her way to camp, something which, as a single mom, I couldn’t have afforded. I drove her around with a trunk loaded with cookies so she could be resupplied if she ran out of Thin Mints along the way, but she did all the selling.

The night she sold the last of her cookies, we would celebrate with a dinner out. One year, another girl from the troop wanted to stay over that night and would have been part of the celebratory dinner. Because I had distributed the cookies, I knew the girl in question had been given a carton containing twelve boxes. I told my daughter to ask if the other girl had sold all her cookies. The answer, of course, was no. Then I told my daughter to ask why not. The answer? “Because people told me no.” At that point I told my daughter the other girl would not be able to join us, explaining that more people had told my daughter no than had said it to the whole rest of the troop put together, and that it wouldn’t be fair for someone who hadn’t sold her 12 boxes to join in the celebration for someone who had sold 1,000.

But by the time my author copy showed up, Girl Scout Cookie season was months in the rear-view mirror. Based on sales, however, our troop received a monetary award, and I used the money to take the girls on a daytrip to Victoria on the Victoria Clipper. Writing this now that seems odd. Someone setting off to a foreign country as the solo chaperon for eight little girls seems a bit farfetched and scary even, but away we went, without a passport in sight. And while I settled down in a seat in the lounge with my new book in hand, the girls had the run of the ship! By the time we got home late that evening, I had finished reading the book, and yes, the ending made me cry.

Since UPG was my first published book, it was also the first time I ever received an editorial letter—the first step in the editing process. Even after all these years, I can still quote the second paragraph verbatim. “The action in Until Proven Guilty takes place over a two-week period at the end of April and early May. Unfortunately, between Tuesday, May 3, and Wednesday, May 4, there’s an extra unnamed-day. Please fix.”

So I did. I had to take all the action that occurred on that “extra” day and duct-tape those scenes into some other spot in the book. The problem was, my favorite scene from that day, one that cemented the blossoming relationship between Beau and Anne Corley, took place during the evening hours. Since no other evenings were available, that pivotal scene ended up on the cutting room floor. Gone, maybe, but NOT forgotten.

For a number of years in the eighties was part of Seattle Freelancers, an organization for professional writers. Years earlier I had read The Egg and I, a humorous book by a Pacific Northwest author named Betty McDonald. At one point, Betty’s sister, Alison, was the guest speaker. She told us that one of Betty’s rules was that, as a writer, you should never throw anything away because there will come a time when you want to use it.

And now that time has come. As I started thinking about Beaumont #28, I remembered that missing scene and decided to use it.

Over the years, people have asked me how I keep “fresh” after writing so many books about the same character. Now that I’ve read the first 31 pages of Until Proven Guilty, it’s pretty clear. I don’t introduce him as a homicide cop. He introduces himself, walking around the crime scene of a murdered five year-old named Angela Barstogi. I don’t tell readers that he’s divorced. He mentions it in passing when he talks about losing his only cooking skill when his barbecue grill went away as a result of the divorce. And his sense of humor comes through as he grouses about his new partner’s almost-vegan tendencies opposed to his own almost exclusively fast-food existence. And in just those thirty or so pages, he feels like someone I want to know better—someone who might well turn out to be a good friend.

Is he grumpy? Yes. Does he drink too much? Indeed he does. But to quote Sancho Panza, “I like him. I really like him,” and fortunately my readers tend to do the same.

So today, with Bill watching the Grand Prix from Mexico, I’ll be sitting here in my writing chair, reading rather than writing, and visiting the world that was back in 1983.

Life has changed a lot back then. At the time, I was working on a dual-floppy, Eagle desktop with 128 K of memory. It took three floppies to hold an entire 100,000-word manuscript.

But as that Brownie song says:

Make new friends
But keep the old.
One is silver
And the other gold.

Someone gave me a coaster that says: Writer’s Block—when your imaginary friends stop talking to you, and it’s true. I may have made J.P. up, and he may be by far my oldest imaginary friend, and he’s still talking to me, and I’m still listening.