Today we’d like to introduce you to Jaden (Beth) Terrell.
Hi Jaden (Beth), thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
From the time I was eight, I knew I wanted to be a writer and a teacher. At twelve, I knew I would be a writer and a special education teacher. Foolishly, I believed I could do both at the same time. But when you’re teaching children, especially children with special needs, you can’t do it halfway; you have to give them all you have. So for the twelve years I taught, writing was something I did mostly in my mind, with occasional scraps–a paragraph, a page, maybe a chapter–actually committed to paper. I toyed with the idea of leaving the classroom to pursue my writing dream, but as a special ed teacher in a self-contained classroom, I always had some of the same children from the previous year. Some of them were with me for five years! I couldn’t bring myself to leave them, but I continued to read good books, study the writing craft, and write when I had the energy.
It wasn’t until the school system was restructured in such a way that I wasn’t going to have any of the same students that I took my retirement early and threw myself into learning to be a professional writer.
I wish I could say I blasted out a masterpiece, immediately sold it to a Big Five publisher, and rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists, but alas, that was not to be. I spent two years writing the first of a fantasy trilogy, got a sheaf of rejections, and came across the St. Martin’s Press/Private Eye Writers of America First Private Eye Novel just as that (small) retirement cushion was running out. First prize was a publishing contract and enough money to subsidize my writing career until I made the big-time. I had always enjoyed reading crime novels, so the idea of writing one intrigued me. The only problem was, I learned about it six weeks before the deadline.
“I’m going to do it,” I told my husband. “And if it’s no good, I can tell myself, ‘What did you expect? I wrote it in six weeks!”
I got it in under the wire, postmarked the day of the deadline. Of course, I didn’t win. But I did get a lovely personal letter from the judge, who told me she loved the characters and the writing and thought the book had solid potential. I spent the next several years working for an educational assessment company, while revising that book, writing the second book in the series, and attending advanced writing workshops in the evenings and on weekends. After a few false starts, including a failed foray into self-publishing, I met my current agent, Jill Marr, at the Killer Nashville International Writers Conference, (which I helped organize and which has played a huge role in my life and career as a writer). Jill sold the series to The Permanent Press, a small traditional press in Sag Harbor, NY. That first book, retitled RACING THE DEVIL and published in 2012 under the pen name Jaden Terrell, was shortlisted for a Shamus award. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.
I started teaching live and online workshops on writing fiction. Teaching felt like coming home, and in 2015, I left the educational assessment company to pursue writing and teaching writing full-time.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has definitely not been a smooth road! I think if there was a mistake that could be made, I probably made it. I think I talked about some of them in the last section. 🙂 But while those mistakes and setbacks didn’t always lead where I hoped they would, they always–eventually–led to other good things. When I left teaching, I’d hoped to be a full-time professional writer, but the years I spent working in educational assessment made me a better teacher and led me to think about writing in a deeper way.
There were also some setbacks that couldn’t have been foreseen. For example, my first agent went from over-the-moon excitement about the book to being completely incommunicado. Many months later, I found out he had died. Somehow, no one had thought to tell his clients. He was a very kind man, and I’ve always been sorry I didn’t get the chance to really work with him.
I’ve had a lot of “almosts.” I almost won a Shamus. I almost got that Big Five contract. It gets discouraging sometimes, and I have to remind myself that “almost” is a gap that can be crossed if I just keep learning and honing my craft.
I’m actually having a setback right now. I’m caregiving for my mother, who has a progressive dementia. It takes a lot of time and bandwidth, and I struggle to fit in my own writing, client work, and the courses I want to create and upgrade. I am grateful to be able to give her this time, but there is a small voice in my head that says my own time is ticking away. That I’m not young anymore, and there are so many books I want to write! So many craft-of-fiction courses I still want to create! I do try to make some progress on my newest novel every day, even if it’s just a paragraph or two. Eventually, those paragraphs will be a finished book.
You just have to decide what is most important at any given time and then give yourself some grace.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m a fiction writer, writing coach, and course creator/writing instructor.
My published works are all crime fiction. There are four books in my Jared McKean private detective novels, which are set in the Nashville area. My favorite review was written by Sheila Deeth for Café Libre. She called RACING THE DEVIL “The perfect combination of noir and human hope.”
My second favorite is from the San Francisico Book Review: “…Pleasingly spiky prose which positively bristles with the darker side of wit. This is strongly recommended.”
I call Jared a hardboiled hero with a softboiled heart. The lone-wolf, maverick detective is a long-standing trope, and Jared has some of those tendencies, but they’re balanced by personal relationships, including parenting a son with Down syndrome and helping his best friend and housemate navigate an HIV diagnosis. The ex-wife he’s still in love with calls him a hero looking for something to die for. She’s not entirely right, but she’s not entirely wrong, either. He doesn’t have a death wish, but he does have an unconscious belief that heroes die protecting others.
I’m in the process of getting the rights to the series back (after the death of my publisher), so the books are currently out of print.
I’m also working on a series of cozy cat mysteries to independently publish under the pen name Bethany Chandler. Much as I love the Jared books, the Marley the Great Cozy Cat Mysteries are a fun change of pace.
On the teaching side, I do live and online workshops and courses about the craft of writing fiction. I also do a workshop on book marketing for writers who hate marketing. Selling doesn’t come naturally to me, so I’ve studied a lot about what works for other authors, and I’m pretty good at helping writers come up with marketing plans they can enjoy enough to actually follow.
One thing students like about my courses is that I often deconstruct scenes from successful novels so they can see how they’re structured, what makes the word choice effective, how the authors use subtext, and so on. I also use some before-and-after scenes from my own work. Often, writers compare their own early drafts with the revised and polished books they see on the shelves. It’s encouraging to know that those books don’t usually start out that way–they were first drafts once too. And it can also help to see how to make that ordinary writing sharper and deeper.
What does success mean to you?
In life? Success is leaving the world a little better than you found it.
In writing? There are so many levels of success. I think you have to appreciate and celebrate each one. An email from a single reader who loved your book, an insightful five-star review, a spot on a podcast that goes well, book sales a little higher this month than last.
But once, at a Mystery Writers of America board meeting, Sara Paretsky asked me what I hoped to accomplish with my writing, if I had to pick just one thing. I said I wanted to write something so good, so powerful, that people would remember it for the rest of their lives and be changed by it. Something that would be to other readers what LORD OF THE RINGS and A SEPARATE PEACE had been to me.
That would be the pinnacle for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://jaden@jadenterrell.com
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/groups/spiritofink
