Jaden Terrell's
Jared McKean Mysteries
About the Author
Murderous Musings Blog
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Jaden Terrell's Jared McKean Mysteries About the Author Murderous Musings Blog |
                
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The official bio: Jaden Terrell is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and Sisters in Crime. The former special education teacher is a Magnolia Award recipient for service to the Southeastern Chapter of Mystery Writers of America and is also the Executive Director of the Killer Nashville Thriller, Mystery, and Crime Literature Conference, founded by author and independent filmmaker Clay Stafford and held each August in or near Nashville, Tennessee. While researching the Jared McKean series, Terrell attended the Citizen Police Academy, FBI Citizen Academy, and the TBI Citizen Academy, took the medical examiner to lunch, and became a certified Equine Sports Massage Therapist (the perfect pastime for a nervous rider with a passion for horses). Terrell lives in Nashville, Tennessee and is available to speak at libraries and book clubs in person or by phone, as well as for workshops and seminars. For more information, contact [email protected].
The Informal Bio: I was born premature and jaundiced in a military hospital in North Carolina, where doctors pumped all the blood out of my tiny body and pumped someone else’s in. When I was a little older and immersed in fairy tales, I told myself it was changeling blood, filled with magic and starlight. That was where the stories came from. By the time I was eight, I knew two things about myself: I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a teacher. At twelve, I knew special education was my calling. I thought I could write and teach at the same time, and I know some people do, but for me, it was impossible. Teaching took my whole heart. I still wrote in my head, still carried the dream, still watched the movies in my mind, but everything else went to my kids. In the summers, I worked at Easter Seal Camp, sometimes as a counselor, sometimes as Arts & Crafts director. After eleven years, I’d pretty much burned myself out. It wasn’t the kids. It was everything else. The old writing dream started to nudge, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave my students, some of whom I’d taught for four or five years. Then, in 1995, our system was restructured in such a way that, for the first time, I wasn’t going to have any of the same students the following year. Knowing how slim the odds that this would ever happen again, I put in my resignation. I taught one more year as a junior high/high school resource teacher, and then took a few years off to become a writer. I wrote the first half of an epic fantasy trilogy, wrote a private detective novel, acquired an agent and a lot of “good” rejections, and finally got so broke I took another day job, this time in educational assessment. Along the way, I got a red belt in Tae Kwan Do and a license in equine sports massage.
I kept
writing, taking workshops, studying the craft. By then, I’d fallen in
love with my detective, Jared McKean, and put my fantasy on the back
burner. Jared was a former homicide detective, and I knew nothing about
police work, forensic science, or investigative procedures. I just knew
this was a man I wanted to write about. So I went to the Citizen Police
Academy, then the Citizen FBI Academy and the Citizen TBI Academy. I
went on a few ride-alongs. I took the medical examiner to lunch. I even
got to participate in an FBI tactical training exercise; a group of us
played out a variety of scenarios in an abandoned shopping mall. In one,
the “bad guy” came in shooting, we role-players scattered and hid, and
the tactical team neutralized the danger and got us all to safety. What
a rush.
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