Jane, describe yourself for our visitors.
“I’ve been writing since I was five years old. What I did before that, I’m not sure. Just loafed around, I guess.”
That is something PG Wodehouse once said, and it describes me. I can’t imagine not writing, so it’s just a curse you’re born with. I am a writer.
How do you find time to connect with God?
A lot of people say that they put God first, but you have to really do it too. You have to have a special time every day to connect with Him. My favorite way is to be quiet in nature. Here in Arizona, I can climb a mountain and see red rocks against turquoise sky and I can see for miles and miles and miles.
Who are your favorite authors? Favorite books?
My favorites are Leo Tolstoy, Shakespeare, St Therese of Lisieux and Jane Austen. They are incredible writers. Lately, I’ve started to appreciate Charles Dickens and Emily Dickinson. My favorite book is War and Peace, a deeply religious book.
Tell us about your journey to publication.
It took me years and years to get published, even though I had an agent for a long time and won several national writing contests – once I was the best of 5200 entries, but still no writing contracts. My husband thinks writing is a tougher business than his own: law. Walk Me to Midnight did not fit into conventional Christian publishing or the secular ones either, so I had a problem finding someone just to read it.
Capstone Fiction, a brand-new publisher, found the book when I posted it on the Writers Edge service.
Tell us about your current book.
The villain in Walk Me to Midnight is a Nobel-nominated doctor who obsessed by his mission to help dying people commit suicide. When a wealthy society woman dies at his hand and leaves her money to his Good Death Foundation, her two best friends go after him, only to jeopardize their own lives. One character is a psychologist with a phone-in radio show; the other is a crime writer. The psychologist falls in love with a cowboy.
The settings are unusual in that the action moves from laid-back Tucson and its cowboy ranches to mystical Sedona to celebrity life in Manhattan to a resort town in Mexico. Everyone I know who’s read Walk Me has finished it within a day or two – it’s really suspenseful.
How did you come up with ideas for this book?
I wrote Walk Me to Midnight because I lost my father, mother and sister to cancer. I sat with them and their hospice nurses during the weeks before they died, and I saw how vulnerable dying people are. Oncologists turn away from them, and society talks about assisted suicide, at a time when they need love and kindness, and the encouragement to be brave and find meaning and reconciliation in their last moments.
Besides spending perhaps three months with hospice nurses, I did a lot of library research on death and assisted suicide.
What‘s next for you?
I am almost finished with the first draft of a new novel, How Tess’s Diary Saved Me When I was Alone and Snowbound. It’s about a woman who’s nine months pregnant who finds a 19th century diary, but my real subject is birth, women, and babies.
Where can visitors find you online?
I’m on www.capstonefiction.com, and I have a website at www.janestclair.net and a space on MySpace at myspace.com/jane_st_clair . Anybody want to be my friend?
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