From There to Here

Evie Valentine is the protagonist in my Evie Valentine legal thrillers. Evie decided to be a lawyer when she was six years old.

I took a more circuitous route. I arrived at law only after test-driving anthropology and architecture. I drove my husband crazy as I tried and discarded these career options.  

Anthropology was fascinating but I didn’t want to spend months and months away from home doing field work.

Architecture was cool but there were no rules, at least none that I could discern. One week the profs loved my designs, the next week they hated them. The low point was when a prof compared a house I had designed to a 7-11 store.

Law had always interested me but given my track record I decided to explore it further before making the commitment. I convinced a litigation lawyer to hire me as his legal secretary. All sorts of interesting cases rolled in the door. For an entire month it seemed like every new client was named after an animal, Mr Lamb was followed by Mrs Deere, and so on.

I wrote the LSATs and was accepted into law school. By then I was 31 and a bit concerned about my ticking biological clock so I had two kids before I graduated.

I articled and practiced litigation at a large law firm before moving in-house with an energy company. My work took me from the board rooms of Calgary to the streets of Beijing. It was a great career and now I’m ready to go back to writing.

I wrote my first short story decades ago. It was about a sleepy afternoon on the beach at Parksville. The publisher returned it to me. Apparently there’s only so much you can say about the waves lapping at your feet before it becomes boring.   

So, lesson learned, no more mood pieces. Instead I’m creating stories that draw upon my legal experience. I hope they will entertain you as much as they entertain me.

Let’s keep in touch,

Susan Jane