Nancy’s Comments (group member since May 23, 2009)

Nancy’s comments from the Q&A with Nancy Lynn Jarvis group.

Hi Betsy,
The second death. Remember, for me this writing thing started as a game, a giant Sudoko if you will. I'd get up early, go into my office and act out what I planned to write for the day. What fun I was having.

I was up one morning busily typing when Charlotte, a friend who was visiting, joined me in my office and asked what I was doing.
"I'm writing a book," I announced gleefully.
Charlotte was aghast! "You can't just write a book because you want to," she blustered. "You have to take numerous classes, have a proper mentor, a critic circle, and suffer for your art. I'm a writer and I should know."
"Good for you," I said. "I'm having fun. If this writing thing stops being fun, what's the point?"

Charlotte was a real writer all right, and from the beginnings of her books that she let me read, I thought a talented one. Unfortunately she never finished any of her books because she thought they were never going to be perfect. She always abandoned them along the way.

I finished my first book, "The Death Contingency" and started on the second one, "Backyard Bones," and although I started having fantasies about publishing them and letting other people read my stories, I didn't pursue doing so.

We got a call from Charlotte a year ago on Memorial Day. She had just been diagnosed with the same thing Ted Kennedy has and she knew she was dying. Charlotte said she was going to write a book about her final experience and this time she was going to finish it. Because this was her last chance to fulfill her dream and finish a book, she said wasn't going to worry about it being perfect.

Charlotte died three months later, unable to write after the first couple of weeks after her diagnosis.

I dedicated my first book to her because her death reminded me of two important things I knew but temporarily forgot: (1) Don't put anything off if it matters to you, you don't know when you'll run out of time. (2)Nothing in life is ever perfect. If you think you have to achieve perfection before taking action, you'll miss your so many adventures.

Whenever I do a book signing, I tell the people there about Charlotte. It's my way of bringing her along as I have the amazing experiences an author has. Charlotte's death, the second death, made me a writer, not just a game player or a puzzle solver.

I would love it! We have to disclose deaths on the premises within the last three years and HIV gets wild,but nothing about ghosts. If we did I would have had an interesting decision to make about a house I once owned.

It was a house that always wound up being home to single women and children (two widows and my ex left me). When I was selling it, the property inspector informed me there was a short in some wiring in the attic and said it was amazing the house hadn't caught fire. He said there was a guardian spirit who watched over women and children protecting us, and that he thought he caught a glimpse of a man with dark hair and a mustache out of the corner of his eye.I thought he was joking and didn't think anything more of it except for getting the wiring repaired.

Access to the attic was through the closet in my youngest son's bedroom. When we were getting ready to move out, my then seven year old said he wanted to say goodbye to George, the man who lived in the closet. When I asked him what he meant, he said he and his friends sometimes went into the attic through his closet and had seen a man there who never said anything but smiled at them. I asked him what the man looked like...yep.

Not that I believe any of that, but I was glad two women bought my house.

Every Realtor who has been in the business for any length of time has a wealth of stories they could tell. All the real estate related stories in my books are things that either happened to me or to friends of mine. I'll never run out of stories, but your husband's exorcism is one of the best I've heard.

I'm not sure how this author chat thing is supposed to work so I better start it.

The answer is that it took two real deaths for it to happen. The first was my mother-in-law who lived in Hilton Head South Carolina. My husband and I spent time with her before her death in November of 2007 and had to drive cross-country to get back home to Santa Cruz, California. I am not a happy passenger (all maps should fold to delete Nevada for starters) so I started reading Tony Hillerman to pass the time.

I loved his mysteries and read them all; twenty three, I believe. Somehow this crazy notion got planted in my head that it would be really fun to see if I could write a mystery, which was an odd thing to wonder about given that I had never in my life considered writing anything other than house descriptions and ads.

I decided to do what Hillerman did...write about where you live and what you know. So Santa Cruz became the book setting and real estate became the "culture" for readers to see.

What about the second death? Well, it took quite a while to get to it...let's see if anyone wants to know more.