Jan Allinder Anestis

Author Bio

Jan grew up in western Pennsylvania and has spent many happy years living in Kentucky, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Florida.

Writing has always been Jan's passion, in newspapers and literary journals during high school and college, and for various volunteer organizations while her children were young. Jan's first official publication was a sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, Op-Ed column on the editorial page of The Weston Forum, Weston, CT. Her column took hold with the community, and was featured weekly from 1995 through 1998.

In 2004 Jan authored "Laughter Therapy" for Bountiful Health, a magazine briefly available in health food stores in Tennessee.

Jan completed her first novel, BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL in 2011. It takes a mostly humorous look at the everyday decisions that can shape lives and affect the people we love; of best friends forever; marital betrayal; and heavenly intervention.

In the spring of 2012 Jan invited four creative friends to join her in an unusual writing project. Jan provided a skeleton plot and a few basic character details. Each of her co-authors dug into their creative centers, gave birth to unique characters, and the first of three epistolary novels, written in real time over a three month period, evolved.

MIND OVER MIRROR, volume one in the series Life, Love, and Bifocals, is a sweet love story. Jan's character, Liv, vanished after graduating from fictitious Morrison College in Lexington, KY in the spring of 1967. (Easier to accomplish before internet searches.) Only Mary Alice knew her whereabouts and her secret. But in 2013, college buddies, Guen, Rich, and Scotty, track Liv down, secrets are exposed, and a once extinguished passion reignites.

LOVE'S ILLUSIONS, volume two in the series, introduces the bitter to the sweet as fame, fortune, and a wickedly beautiful red-head add new hurdles to the game of love. And while they still believe that the mind is more accurate than the mirror, living with the "Winged Chariot" within shouting distance adds a different dimension to love's disputes.

QUAKES AND WILLOWS, the final volume in the Life, Love, and Bifocals series, brings major conflict to the five. As they cruise toward their seventies, Guen, Liv, Mary Alice, Rich, and Scotty once again prove that images in the mirror are poor predictors of what life has to offer - passion, a romantic triangle, guilt, struggles with addiction, jealousy, visits from the FBI, and, oh yes, more passion fills their lives. No time for shuffleboard or rocking chairs!

Jan is currently working on a sequel to BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL, although an older friend has suggested that Jan write a slightly different novel, a version of Shades of Grey for eighty-year-olds! To quote that friend: "We're old; not dead." That suggestion might need to settle into Jan's brain for a while, but who knows....