{"id":3257,"date":"2025-03-28T06:08:10","date_gmt":"2025-03-28T13:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=3257"},"modified":"2025-03-28T06:09:25","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T13:09:25","slug":"a-bit-of-help-from-id-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2025\/03\/28\/a-bit-of-help-from-id-discovery\/","title":{"rendered":"A Bit of Help from ID Discovery"},"content":{"rendered":"

This blog is due to post on March 28. That means the next Ali book, Overkill<\/em> will go on sale next Tuesday, April 1. So happy April Fool\u2019s Day everybody.<\/p>\n

The sole Seattle area Overkill<\/em> event will be at Third Place Books at 3 PM on April 6. J.A. Jance at Third Place Books<\/a>. Seating is free, but must be reserved.\u00a0 \u00a0Also here is the link to the Poisoned Pen event earlier this month: Overkill at Poisoned Pen.<\/a><\/p>\n

Please remember that when I did the Poisoned Pen appearance, I was fresh off that hair-raising, three-hour drive through a raging dust storm, so I wasn\u2019t exactly at the top of my form.<\/p>\n

Now, on to the real topic of this blog.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re probably thinking, \u201cID Discovery? I thought she didn\u2019t use real cases to write her books.\u201d The truth is, I don\u2019t and I\u2019m not. However, one of the side benefits of my career as a writer has been the unexpected and enduring friendships I\u2019ve made over the years. For example, someone named Loretta once plucked a tattered copy of Until Proven Guilty off a \u201cfree to good home\u201d bookshelf in the waiting room of a VA hospital where her husband was being treated for Agent-orange-related brain cancer. She\u2019s read everything I\u2019m written since and was my intermediary with James, the guy who inspired Blessing of the Lost Girls.<\/p>\n

Teresa is a fan from Yuma who drove all the way from there to Surprise, near Phoenix, to see one of my talks. Since she had come farther than anyone else, we ended up having lunch. Gerri is a fan from Willcox whose cousin turned out to be the now-deceased real-life serial killer whose death was mentioned in last week\u2019s blog. It turns out that Teresa and Gerri were college roommates long ago, while Teresa\u2019s husband, Eric, was a high school quarterback who once played a football game at the Warren Ballpark in Bisbee. That was long before the athletic field\u2019s aging lighting system was replaced. He said it was so dark that night that, he could barely see his receivers. Years later ballpark\u2019s lights were replaced in part by monies raised by my parents collecting aluminum cans.<\/p>\n

The above paragraph is designed to prove, once and for all, that Walt Disney was right and it really is a \u201csmall, small world.\u201d My apologies if I\u2019ve just infected you with a persistent and very annoying ear-worm.<\/p>\n

Two other friendships of note I need to mention are the one with my At Seventeen singing idol, Janis Ian, and the other with everyone\u2019s favorite Homicide Hunter\u2014Joe Kenda. Yes, I\u2019m a television true crime buff, and both Homicide Hunter and American Detective are among my favorites. Joe\u2019s off-the-cuff and oft-quoted comment, \u201cMy, my, my,\u201d is an iconic piece of dialogue that\u2019s burned into my memory. I met Joe and his wife, Kathy\u2014my fan\u2014when she dragged him to one of my speaking engagements a number of years ago. Since then they\u2019ve become friends with Bill and me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned a lot by following Joe Kenda on ID Discovery, and that gave me a big boost this week. Please be assured that our friendship isn\u2019t completely one-sided. When Joe and Kathy moved into a new house that was really dark in places, we suggested that they solve their lighting issue by installing Solatube skylights. Ever since, said Solatubes have been doing their jobs and brightening the corners where Joe and Kathy live.<\/p>\n

One of the things I\u2019ve learned from watching Joe Kenda on TV is that once an investigation stalls out, the thing detectives have to do is go back to the very beginning of the case and start over. Months ago, I told you that I was starting work on the next Ali book, Smoke and Mirrors<\/em>. It charged out of the gate like gangbusters, but several chapters in the story stalled out. I mean it came to an absolute stop, and no number of sleepless nights spent tossing and turning fixed it. The story simply would not move forward.<\/p>\n

As a result, yesterday, I did what Joe Kenda would do\u2014I went back to the very beginning of the manuscript, the Prologue, and started over. Then a miracle happened. When I got to the last sentence of the prologue, I gave a middle name to a character who hadn\u2019t had one before, and suddenly the way forward became clear.<\/p>\n

Once I\u2019m done writing this blog, that\u2019s what I\u2019m going to do. Go back to Smoke and Mirrors<\/em>. I\u2019ll have to change some of what I\u2019ve already written, and I\u2019ll be able use other bits and pieces of it later on in the story, but this time I\u2019m pretty sure it\u2019ll work because now I have a character who will be in jeopardy as well as someone for readers to root for.<\/p>\n

At the end of each episode of his new series, Joe says, \u201cAnd that\u2019s what it takes to be an American detective.\u201d To that I might add that changing my mind is often what it takes to be an American mystery writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blog is due to post on March 28. That means the next Ali book, Overkill will go on sale next Tuesday, April 1. So happy April Fool\u2019s Day everybody. The sole Seattle area Overkill event will be at Third Place Books at 3 PM on April 6. J.A. Jance at Third Place Books. Seating […]<\/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":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tour-2","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Qx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257","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=3257"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3261,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions\/3261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}