We\u2019ll start today with two bits of caution.\u00a0 If you have come to live events, you may have heard parts or all of this story before.\u00a0 That\u2019s caution numero uno.\u00a0 As for number two?\u00a0 What you\u2019re about to read is based on what I believe to be true and may or may not be accurate.\u00a0 In other words, there\u2019s a possibility that parts of the following post may be fake news, so read it at your own risk.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll begin with what I know to be true.\u00a0 My first husband\u2019s last name was Janc.\u00a0 The part of the story I don\u2019t know is the origin of that name.\u00a0 I believe his father\u2019s family originally immigrated to the US from somewhere in Eastern Europe.\u00a0 These days that belief could either be verified or disproved by a DNA test, but almost forty years after his death, that\u2019s really none of my business.\u00a0 My kids may choose to sort that out one of these days, but it\u2019s not up to me.<\/p>\n
I also believe that when those immigrating forebears arrived at Ellis Island, whoever was doing the paperwork may have hacked off the part of the name that was either difficult to pronounce or difficult to spell.\u00a0 Jancovich, maybe or maybe even Jancowitz?\u00a0 The part that remained, however, was the Janc bit, and the pronunciation of that has always been a bit of an issue.\u00a0 Janc was supposed to be pronounced with a soft C–Janc like Jance, but it was mostly mispronounced with a hard C–Janc like Tank.\u00a0 It was annoying, but as long as it was my married name and for some time after that, I shut up and lived with it.<\/p>\n
After Jerry Janc died at the end of 1982, I had to hire an attorney and go to court to be declared my children\u2019s legal guardian in order for them to receive the death benefits from his union pension fund.\u00a0 To say that made me furious would be an understatement.\u00a0 QFC didn\u2019t ask if I was my kids’ legal guardian when it came time for me to buy their groceries.\u00a0 I complied but with grit in my gears.\u00a0 Before my hired attorney and I went to court, however, it occurred to me that as long as I had to pay for an attorney, I could just as well go ahead and fix my name so people would say it properly.<\/p>\n
When I brought that up with the lawyer, however, here\u2019s what happened.\u00a0 He gave me a lecture saying that yes, I was still angry with my deceased ex-husband (Do you think?) but this was my children\u2019s heritage, and I shouldn\u2019t go messing with that.\u00a0 So I shut up about it, and we went to court.\u00a0 And here\u2019s what happened:\u00a0 When the clerk called us up to the window, she said, \u201cMrs. Jank, Mrs. Jank.\u201d\u00a0 The attorney looked at me and said, \u201cHmmm.\u00a0 I see what you mean.\u201d\u00a0 Then when it came time to be called into the judge\u2019s chambers, another clerk said, \u201cMrs. Junk, Mrs. Junk.\u201d\u00a0 And the attorney said, \u201cI\u2019ll get right on it.\u201d A month or two later, for the cost of an additional $400, I had that very necessary vowel, and Janc became Jance.\u00a0 That\u2019s how much King County was charging for vowels in 1983.\u00a0 Please alert Vanna White.<\/p>\n
A year and a half later, in 1985 when Bill asked me to marry him, I told him fine, but I just paid four hundred bucks for my name, and I\u2019m not changing it.<\/p>\n
By the time of that court appearance, I was already writing murder mysteries.\u00a0 When I sent that first manuscript to my literary agent, it went with a title page that said:\u00a0 Until Proven Guilty by Judith Ann Jance.\u00a0 Knowing something about the realities of publishing, my agent changed the title page to read:\u00a0 Until Proven Guilty by J.A. Jance.\u00a0 The second editor saw it called my agent and said,\u00a0 \u201cThe guy who wrote Until Proven Guilty is a good writer.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cWhat if I told you the guy who wrote Until Proven Guilty was a woman?\u201d she asked.\u00a0\u00a0 His reply?\u00a0 I\u2019d say she\u2019s a hell of a good writer.\u201d\u00a0 And he bought the manuscript as book number one in the series.<\/p>\n
A good eighteen months passed between the time the manuscript was sold and when it appeared on the shelves.\u00a0 Sometime in 1984, the marketing team at Avon Books got hold of the manuscript and hit the roof.\u00a0 Their position was that male readers wouldn\u2019t accept police procedurals written by someone named Judy, so Judith Ann\u00a0 became J.A., and that\u2019s been the same ever since.\u00a0 By the way, marketing made sure with those first original paperbacks, there was no author photo on the cover and no author bio, either.<\/p>\n
Am I grateful for that?\u00a0 You bet!\u00a0 JA is a whale of a lot easier to sign than Judith Ann.\u00a0 Since I always autograph books in red, shortening my signature by that many letters has saved me miles of red ink over the years.<\/p>\n
The real irony, of course is that, for all this time, my next door neighbor on the shelves in bookstores and libraries, has been P.D. James.\u00a0 Phyllis Dorothy James had to use her initials on her books for the same reason I did, a generation and a half later.<\/p>\n
I know that, in the beginning, that little bit subterfuge from the marketing department worked, and people assumed the guy behind J.P. Beaumont was actually a guy.\u00a0 Now though, from what I\u2019m hearing from my many male readers, that no longer matters.\u00a0 J.A. Jance readers are J.A. Jance readers, regardless<\/p>\n
And am I ever glad to have them!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019ll start today with two bits of caution.\u00a0 If you have come to live events, you may have heard parts or all of this story before.\u00a0 That\u2019s caution numero uno.\u00a0 As for number two?\u00a0 What you\u2019re about to read is based on what I believe to be true and may or may not be accurate.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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}},"categories":[33,81,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-rants-and-raves","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Fc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554","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=2554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2555,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554\/revisions\/2555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}