People who have seen me out on the stump may have heard this story before because it\u2019s the one I tell when people ask me if J.A. Jance is my \u201creal\u201d name or my \u201cpen\u201d name.\u00a0 The answer to that question is actually yes times two.<\/p>\n
My maiden name growing up in Bisbee was Judith Ann Busk\/ aka Judy.\u00a0 That was fairly straight forward until my younger brother, Jim, married someone named Judy and brought her home to Bisbee to live.\u00a0 Suddenly there was the \u201cold\u201d Judy Busk, the tall blonde one, and the \u201cnew\u201d Judy Busk who was tall but dark haired.\u00a0 That confusion went away when Jim and his Judy divorced and she married someone else.<\/p>\n
But of course, by then, I had married as well.\u00a0 My first husband\u2019s name was Jerry Janc\u2014Jerry Joseph Teale Janc.\u00a0 His last name was supposed to be pronounced Jance like Dance but it was mostly mispronounced Jank like Tank.\u00a0 In 1983, after my first husband\u2019s death, the kids and I went to court in King County and bought a vowel to put on the end of our name so people would say it correctly.\u00a0 So I went from being Judith Ann Janc to Judith Ann Jance.\u00a0 By the way, buying that vowel cost me $400 in 1983.<\/p>\n
Later on that same year, when I submitted the manuscript for Until Proven Guilty (UPG) to my agent, the title page read:\u00a0 Until Proven Guilty by Judith A. Jance. My agent, who hailed from New York City, knew a little about the ins and outs of publishing.\u00a0 Since UPG and the other Beaumont books are all written in the first person through a male point of view, my agent redid the title page before sending the manuscript off to potential publishers, revising it to read:\u00a0 Until Proven Guilty by J.A. Jance.<\/p>\n
Weeks later, John Douglas, called her and said, \u201cThe guy who wrote Until Proven Guilty is a good writer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat would you say if I told you the guy who wrote Until Proven Guilty is a woman?\u201d my agent asked.<\/p>\n
To which John replied, \u201cI\u2019d say she was a hell of a good writer,\u201d and he followed up that statement by offering me a two book contract, and that\u2019s how John Douglas became my initial editor at Avon Books.<\/p>\n
A few months down the road, John called to report that marketing had gotten ahold of the manuscript.\u00a0 Worried that \u201cmale readers won\u2019t accept a police procedural written by someone named Judy,” they wanted to use my initials instead, and that\u2019s how Judith Ann Jance became J.A. Jance.\u00a0 The irony here is that for the past thirty-plus years, my next door neighbor on the shelves of bookstore and libraries has been P.D. James.\u00a0 Baroness Phyllis Dorothy James, who passed away in 2014, had to resort to using her initials for the same reason in the mid-fifties, thirty years earlier than I did.<\/p>\n
And why am I reporting all this ancient history now?\u00a0 Because today, I\u2019ve just spent the last six hours of my writing life autographing tip-in sheets for Field of Bones.\u00a0 Tip-in sheets are extra pages that can be autographed first and then bound into the books at the time they are printed so the books come from the printer pre-signed.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure this amounts to a special order for some retailer or other, and if it\u2019s going to sell books, I\u2019m going to do it. But I can tell you that every time I signed my name, all fifteen hundred times, I was incredibly grateful to be able to scrawl J.A. Jance rather than Judith Ann Jance.\u00a0 Lot\u2019s fewer letters there, and when it comes to signing autographs, having a short name helps.<\/p>\n
The week before Until Proven Guilty was published in 1985, I met Bill Schilb at a widowed retreat, and the two of us hit it off.\u00a0 A few months later, when he asked me to marry him, I told him, \u201cSure, but I just paid four-hundred bucks for this name and I\u2019m not changing it.\u201d<\/p>\n
And now, with those tip-in sheets boxed up and off to UPS, I\u2019m headed back to Ali #14.\u00a0 Can\u2019t give you a name so far.\u00a0 The new baby still doesn\u2019t have one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
People who have seen me out on the stump may have heard this story before because it\u2019s the one I tell when people ask me if J.A. Jance is my \u201creal\u201d name or my \u201cpen\u201d name.\u00a0 The answer to that question is actually yes times two. My maiden name growing up in Bisbee was Judith […]<\/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":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-qd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625","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=1625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1626,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625\/revisions\/1626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}