NYT Best Selling Author Darynda Jones Owns a Pair of My Fingerless Gloves (Woot!)

It’s true! She does own a pair of my fingerless gloves. I’d like to think they kept her hands warm and flying across the keyboard while she devised the ways in which her heroine would get herself into and out of hot water. But alas, she’d already written the first four books in her Charley Davidson series before being bestowed with my gauntlets. Ah, but there is a fifth book underway! <grin>

As a pre-published author, I have to say Darynda has been a source of inspiration to us newbies at Land of Enchantment Romance Authors. Her books have been wildly successful, and yet she’s about as down to earth (cliche-shame on me) kind a person as anyone I’ve met. If you haven’t read her series yet, I highly recommend you do. It’s unlike anything you’ve read before!

Darynda’s Bio: For reasons known only to the Big Guy upstairs, Darynda Jones won the 2009 Golden Heart® for Best Paranormal Romance with her manuscript FIRST GRAVE ON THE RIGHT. But even before that, she couldn’t remember a time she wasn’t putting pen to paper. When she was five, she would pick up a pencil and notepad, scribble utter chaos onto the page and ask her mom to read her masterpiece aloud. Thankfully, her mother would play along.  Later, she wrote plays for the neighborhood kids, made up stories for her brother as he played cars, and fell in love with Captain Kirk. Those raging, seven-year-old hormones only fueled her imagination, prompting her to create fantastical stories for Barbie and Ken to enact with plots that were horridly inappropriate to repeat in polite company.

After years of being repeatedly sent to the principal’s office for daydreaming during class, she managed to make it to high school where she almost finished her first manuscript. Sitting with her BFF in a corner booth at the local Tastee Freeze for hours at a time, she wrote a post-apocalyptic story about a group of teens who bore a remarkable resemblance to the members of Van Halen and were trying to escape the tunnels of a huge government fallout facility decades after World War III had destroyed the surface of the earth. It was a science fiction version of The Warriors and destined to be a classic.

Life was good. Writing was good. Then she graduated and the real world came crashing through. She forced the dream aside in favor of sustenance and shelter, got married to a local rock star, and had at least two kids that she can think of, the oldest of which was born Deaf, probably to spite her. When he was five, she packed up her boys and moved to Albuquerque to put him in a Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing program. The rock star stayed behind with the business, and they took turns going back and forth on the weekends to see each other for seven really long years.

While in Albuquerque, Darynda decided to see the cup half full and go back to college while she still had enough brain cells to make it worth her while. After graduating Summa cum Laude from the University of New Mexico with a degree in Sign Language Interpreting, she moved back to her hometown and got a real job. Several in fact, mostly teaching at a local college and interpreting pretty much everywhere. Based on personal experience, she does not recommend having more than three jobs at any given time.

But bit by bit, the desire to write needled it’s way back to the surface. Unable to squelch it any longer, she started writing seriously again in 2002 with one goal in mind: A publishing contract. Unfortunately, she sucked. Thank goodness practice makes perfect and three complete manuscripts later, she won that Golden Heart, landed an amazing agent and sold to St. Martin’s Press in a three-book deal.

Book one in the Charley Davidson series, FIRST GRAVE ON THE RIGHT, was a hardcover release in February 2011 with book two, SECOND GRAVE ON THE LEFT, coming out in August 2011 and book three, THIRD GRAVE DEAD AHEAD, in February 2012. She hopes you enjoy reading the series as much as she has writing it.

Darynda lives in the Land of Enchantment, also known as New Mexico, with her husband of more than 25 years and two beautiful sons, the Mighty, Mighty Jones Boys.