{"id":1449,"date":"2017-09-01T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-09-01T13:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=1449"},"modified":"2017-08-31T19:39:58","modified_gmt":"2017-09-01T02:39:58","slug":"j-p-beaumont-23-proof-of-life-september-5-2017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2017\/09\/01\/j-p-beaumont-23-proof-of-life-september-5-2017\/","title":{"rendered":"J.P. Beaumont #23, Proof of Life, September 5, 2017"},"content":{"rendered":"

Occasionally people will ask me where J.P. Beaumont came from, and I\u2019ll answer, “I met him on a train, thirty plus years ago.” \u00a0That\u2019s the truth, or at least it\u2019s more or less the truth.<\/p>\n

What really happened is this. \u00a0It was March of 1983. \u00a0For months I had been spinning my wheels trying to write what would eventually become Until Proven<\/i> Guilty<\/i>, Beaumont # 1. My kids were still in elementary school, and it was spring break at Seattle Public Schools. \u00a0I put them on a bus to go to Camp Orkila on Orcas Island in the San Juans, and then I put myself on a train to go to Portland to spend a few days with Carol Wray, a friend from my life insurance days in Longview and Pe Ell. \u00a0I boarded the train in Seattle with a stack of blue-lined notebooks and a fistful of ball point pens.<\/div>\n
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As the train pulled out of the King Street Station, I said to myself, \u201cWhat if I wrote this book from the detective\u2019s point of view?\u201d \u00a0I pulled out a notebook and a pen and wrote: \u00a0“She might have been a cute kid once. That was hard to tell now. She was dead.\u201d \u00a0In the course of the next five days, I worked almost around the clock. \u00a0I ate when I was hungry; I slept when I was tired; and the rest of the time I wrote\u201430,000 words by hand! \u00a0(No computer at the time.) I had blisters on my writing fingers that required bandages.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
So, when I met Beau, I was indeed on a train. \u00a0Where was he? \u00a0At a crime scene on the back side of Magnolia Bluff, investigating the homicide of a child. \u00a0But from the moment I wrote those words, I was at the crime scene with him; seeing what he was seeing; walking in his shoes; hearing what he said; and hearing what he thought. \u00a0We\u2019ve been together as author and character ever since. \u00a0When it\u2019s time to write another Beau book, it only takes a few pages for me to be sucked into his orbit. \u00a0I love the things he says, but more than that, I love the things he thinks\u2014the little mental asides that are like private jokes he shares only with me and my readers. \u00a0Does that sound a little schizophrenic? \u00a0Beau would say right about now, \u201cBite me.\u201d<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Last week in Cannon Beach, someone asked me, \u201cWhich of your characters has more of you in them than the others?\u201d \u00a0All of them have some, but remember, J.P. is my literary first born. \u00a0He and I share a birthday\u2014October 27, 1944. \u00a0He gets seasick on boats and turns green on the Teacups at Disneyland. \u00a0Guess where that came from? \u00a0He had a mother who sewed his \u201chome made\u201d clothing on a treadle Singer Sewing Machine. \u00a0The same thing happened to me. \u00a0And when you read Proof of Life<\/i>, (Due out SEPTEMBER 5 at a bookstore near you!!!) and discover Beau has a soft spot for clam strips from Chinook\u2019s at Fisherman\u2019s Terminal, guess what? \u00a0I love them, too.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
So when it\u2019s time to write a Beaumont book, it\u2019s like slipping on a comfortable old shoe. \u00a0It fits in all the right places. \u00a0There aren\u2019t any unexpected rough spots that give me blisters. \u00a0I can write far into the night and feel like I\u2019m communing with an old friend, someone whose every politically incorrect foible is perfectly understandable and whose mistakes are forgivable as well.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\"\"That\u2019s how I felt as I wrote Proof of Life<\/i>, and that\u2019s how I\u2019m hoping my readers will feel as they read it, too. \u00a0And for those of you out there who are J.P. Beaumont virgins and who have never read any of these books before? \u00a0That\u2019s okay, when you finish with this one, I hope you’ll go back and read the others. \u00a0I hope you\u2019ll find you have a lot of catching up to do!<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Before I go, one last word to my audio readers. \u00a0In a career that spans more than three decades, I\u2019ve had several changes in narrators as far as audio editions are concerned. \u00a0For audio readers, the narrator becomes the characters, and changes are tough on everyone. \u00a0Some of my narrators have been great\u2014Gene Engene comes to mind\u2014and some have been not so great. \u00a0Mispronunciation of common geographical words is especially irksome to local-yokel readers. \u00a0Gila Bend\u2014pronounced Gee Lah instead of Hee La. \u00a0And don\u2019t even bother mentioning all the possible manglings of Puyallup or Sequim! \u00a0This time when a previous narrator retired and for the first time ever, my publisher sent me samples of work from several different narrators. \u00a0Together Bill and I together settled on Alan Sklar, and he\u2019s the reader for both the novella Still Dead<\/i> and Proof of Life<\/i>. \u00a0I\u2019m happy to say that in the course of doing the recording sessions, he sent me numerous e-mail inquiries about possibly troublesome words.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
So enjoy catching up with my old friend, J.P. \u00a0It turns out he\u2019s still kicking, and so am I.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
JAJ<\/div>\n

PS: As many of you know, our Cannon Beach trip was interrupted by a quick trip to KillerNashville, a writer\u2019s conference where I had been nominated for an award. I had asked for my fans to vote for me for the Reader\u2019s Choice awards, but given my history with that kind of thing, I wasn\u2019t exactly holding my breath.<\/p>\n

It was my second visit to KillerNashville. I was the guest of honor there in 2009 and guest of honor at Bouchercon in Long Beach in 2014, but the last time I was nominated for an award was 1992 at Bouchercon in Toronto for Hour of the Hunter. I didn\u2019t win.<\/p>\n

This time in Nashville, however, I made up for lost time, walking away with not just one but three awards. Clawback won a Silver Falchion (a broad-bladed slightly curved sword of medieval times) award for Best Thriller Adult Fiction. That one is from attendees at the conference. Clawback also won the Reader\u2019s Choice Best Thriller\u2014that one was voted by my fans. I also won Reader\u2019s Choice Best Author. (Another one voted on by fans.) Obviously my fans came through for me. Thank you to EVERYONE who made that possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Occasionally people will ask me where J.P. Beaumont came from, and I\u2019ll answer, “I met him on a train, thirty plus years ago.” \u00a0That\u2019s the truth, or at least it\u2019s more or less the truth. What really happened is this. \u00a0It was March of 1983. \u00a0For months I had been spinning my wheels trying to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-j-p-beaumont"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-nn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1449"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1452,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1449\/revisions\/1452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}