Guest Post with Sarah Kernochan, author of Jane Was Here & Giveaway

Good day everyone! I’m pleased to welcome Sarah Kernochan, author of Jane Was Here to Peeking Between the Pages today. I am just about finished the book and I have to say that I’m really enjoying it. I love the mystery and the aspects of reincarnation – all in all it’s a very intriguing book and I’m anxious to see how it’s all going to wrap up. In the meantime Sarah is here to share a guest post with us. Enjoy…

Before the age of 27 I gave little thought to reincarnation. What a silly idea. Some people will believe anything. Heaven and the afterlife were just palliative mythology.

And then I met my first ghost.

It’s far too long a story to relate in a blog. Suffice it to say, the ghost was a family member, and he followed me around for years to come. We had a fractious but loving relationship. But the experience left me in no doubt that life persisted after death, that there was “another side.” I asked myself, so what else is true?

Decades later, the scope of my beliefs has grown to include reincarnation. (I was shocked to read the statistic that 4 in 10 Americans of all faiths believe in past lives!) As a fiction writer, it’s fun to guess what good thing or what bad thing you did in a former life to earn the good or bad circumstances of our present life. And that is how the idea for my novel Jane Was Here arose.

In Jane Was Here, a crime was committed in a small New England town in 1853. A young woman disappeared, never to be seen again. Now, in our present day, all those people who were involved in her demise have been reincarnated. All are drawn back to the same town during one summer, when a mysterious young woman appears: Jane, the reincarnated victim. From the moment she enters town, the wheels of karmic justice begin rolling. By the end of the story, debts will be paid in full.

But it doesn’t matter if you believe in reincarnation or not in order to enjoy Jane Was Here. The fun is in putting the pieces together, as Jane must, until we find out which present-day character was her killer in 1853. And there are plenty of chills along the way.

For myself, I feel as if I’ve been reborn from a past life as a screenwriter. Over the 30 years that I’ve plied my trade in the film business, I’ve written many horror scripts, though only one got made. I wrote What Lies Beneath for Stephen Spielberg, who then passed the screenplay to his friend Bob Zemeckis. I wasn’t available anymore, so another writer did a very good job of adapting the script for the new director. But I’m enjoying my new incarnation as a novelist because I never have to endure being rewritten by someone else! I also don’t have to worry about having to scale down a scene because it’s too expensive. The sky’s the limit.

Or is it? Jane Was Here suggests that there is a power beyond the sky that we can only imagine. So I’ve chosen to imagine it, in a novel that I hope readers will enjoy.

__________

Thank you so much for this terrific guest post Sarah! More than halfway through the novel I can certainly relate to your thoughts in this post. I’m one of those people who does believe in past lives so I’m finding your novel fascinating!

__________

About Jane Was Here

JANE WAS HERE is a suspense story which brings reincarnation, karma, and the paranormal into the mix. What if someone was born with a fragmentary memory of a life before, and refuses to adjust to their new identity? What if she is driven instead to find the rest of those memories so that she can know what happened to her 150 years ago when she mysteriously disappeared?

A young woman arrives in the small rundown community of Graynier, Massachusetts. She calls herself Jane, though she was christened by another name. She can point out the house where she grew up, and yet she has never been to Graynier in her life. Thus begins Jane’s mission, to retrieve the puzzle pieces of a former life, groping her way through the past and the present simultaneously.

The inhabitants of Graynier are unwittingly drawn into the mystery, as it becomes clear: someone must pay in the present for what happened in the past. For somewhere in this town is her killer, who also has come back incarnated as a different person.

Will Jane meet the same fate as she did in the other time? Or will divine justice be served?

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About the Author

Sarah Kernochan (born December 30, 1947) is a documentarian, film director, screenwriter and producer from the United States.

After graduating from Rosemary Hall in Connecticut, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College to take a job writing for The Village Voice. After quitting that job, she became interested in film and quickly gained national prominence in the United States as co-director and co-producer of the 1972 film Marjoe (about evangelist Marjoe Gortner), which won an Academy Award for Documentary Feature.

During the next two years, she released two albums on RCA Records as a singer-songwriter, House of Pain and Beat Around the Bush

In 1977 Kernochan’s novel Dry Hustle was published. It was reprinted as an ebook in 2010.

Kernochan’s first screen credit as a screenwriter came with the 1986 film 9 1/2 Weeks.

By the time she was brought in to work on the 1993 film Sommersby with Jodie Foster she had become known for creating strong female characters. She commented in an interview with Salon.com, “I think people know that there’s no point in calling me in if you want the other kind of women characters: a featureless “help me” character, or the saint, the whore – you know, any of the skin-deep stereotypes. I don’t think all women are powerful, intelligent, any of those things. I just require that female characters be very real, that they have all the dimensions that the male characters do.”

Since then, she has been primarily a screenwriter. She –

· wrote Dancers

· wrote Impromptu (1991), the debut film directed by her husband James Lapine

with a script she characterized as “maybe the best thing that I will ever do”

· co-wrote the screenplay for Sommersby (1993)

· wrote and directed The Hairy Bird

· co-wrote the story for What Lies Beneath (2000)

· directed Thoth (2002)

Her second documentary, Thoth, also won an Academy Award in 2002,

this time for Best Documentary Short Subject.

Kernochan is married to director James Lapine. The couple’s daughter is food writer Phoebe Lapine.

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GIVEAWAY DETAILS

I have one paper copy of Jane Was Here by Sarah Kernochan available to US residents and one digital copy of the book available outside of the US. Please let me know if you are outside of the US so I can put you on a separate list. To enter…

• For 1 entry leave me a comment with an email address to contact you should you win (no email, no entry).
• For 2 entries, follow my blog. If you already do, thank you, and please let me know in your comment so I can pass the extra entry on to you as well.
• For 3 entries, blog or tweet this giveaway and spread the word.

As above, one hard copy to US residents and one digital copy outside of the US is available for giveaway. I will be drawing for the winners on Saturday, September 17/11. Good luck everyone!

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