{"id":3439,"date":"2026-05-01T06:07:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T13:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=3439"},"modified":"2026-04-28T09:31:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T16:31:31","slug":"fact-checkers-unite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2026\/05\/01\/fact-checkers-unite\/","title":{"rendered":"Fact Checkers Unite"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Friday afternoon after the blog posted, I was reading through the comments when one of them jumped out at me and stopped me in my tracks. It was from a lady saying wait just a minute. Wasn\u2019t that teacher of yours at BHS named Anne instead of Eva? The commenter may have gotten Mrs. Medigovich\u2019s last name wrong, but as soon as I saw her message, I knew my SEBR (Sharp-Eyed Blog Reader) was right. In other words, in the midst of my Eva-Yvonne-Ida-Eva tangle in Smoke and Mirrors<\/em>, my middle-of-the-night brainstorm had gotten her first name dead wrong.<\/p>\n

As a writer it\u2019s often difficult to tell the difference between what I think I know and what I don\u2019t. If I\u2019d gone into the office and checked my high school yearbook, the Cuprite, the answer would have been right there in black and white. But that morning, if someone had hooked me up to a polygraph machine and asked me if I had lied about her name being Eva rather than Anne, I would have told them no and passed the test with flying colors!<\/p>\n

As soon as I learned I was wrong, however, I knew that in this week\u2019s blog I\u2019d need to set the record straight. So as I was getting my steps that day (Yes. FYI I\u2019m still getting my steps\u2014currently at 44,922,059 steps which add up to 21,340 miles!) I was turning the problem over and over in my head. If the Eva who inspired the character\u2019s name wasn\u2019t Mrs. Medigovich, who the hell was she? The only Eva I could come up with was the woman who was the manager in the Equitable\u2019s agency office in Phoenix during the three years I worked there. I knew her name was Eva. We weren\u2019t especially close, so all these years later, that was all I could remember about her\u2014her first name. I couldn\u2019t for the life of me come up with a last one, and I couldn\u2019t think of anyone from back in those early-eighties who could provide me with any answers.<\/p>\n

On that note, having finished my steps for the day as well the copy-editing job on Smoke and Mirrors<\/em>, I turned my attention to page proofs for The Taken Ones<\/em>. You\u2019ll be happy to know that this one went a whole lot easier. I was making great progress when, what do you know, there was another Eva. This time she\u2019s a minor character\u2014a bad guy\u2019s mother, and no I didn\u2019t change it. But I did end up wondering, Who the hell is this Eva person who\u2019s walking around in my head?<\/p>\n

That was still the case right up until I opened my email on Sunday morning. There I discovered I had yet another SEBR! This one hailed from Louisana, and she told me the blog had sent her down an Internet rabbit hole. In the process she, too, had discovered the Anne\/Eva discrepancy in my English teacher\u2019s name. She also learned Eva Medigovich in Bisbee really was married. Her husband, Lee, was born in Yugoslavia in 1897 and fought in World War I. He wasn\u2019t a gambler\u2014he was a dealer, although his obituary didn\u2019t mention what kind. He must have been a good twenty years older than his wife, and when I encountered her as a teacher in the early sixties, it\u2019s likely she was already a widow. Amazingly enough, Equitable Eva, who also last name also happened to be Medigovich, was born in Buckeye, Arizona, and grew up there on a family farm.<\/p>\n

So now that the record is straight, we all know that, although I have a good memory, it isn\u2019t infallible. If more instances of this happens in the future, please accept my apologies in advance.<\/p>\n

As for The Taken Ones<\/em>? The page proofs are now in the mail, as it were. Did I learn anything while doing the editing process. For one thing, my penchant for watching True Crime paid off big-time. There are several different kinds of canines working is law enforcement K-9s these days. I had mislabeled one of them\u2014those that search out electronic devices. I had the initials right\u2014 ESD, but the wrong words. They\u2019re actually called Electronic Service Dogs. In terms of the plot for The Taken One<\/em>, having and ESD available came in very handy.<\/p>\n

With all that out of the way, it\u2019s time to go back to working on a still-unnamed Joanna Brady #22, but I promise you this\u2014NO MORE EVAS! I think I finally have that one out of my system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Friday afternoon after the blog posted, I was reading through the comments when one of them jumped out at me and stopped me in my tracks. It was from a lady saying wait just a minute. Wasn\u2019t that teacher of yours at BHS named Anne instead of Eva? The commenter may have gotten Mrs. […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Tt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439","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=3439"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3441,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439\/revisions\/3441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}