This goes a long way towards inspiring forgiveness

My wonderful mum sent me a wonderful parcel of cereal and cookies and mac and cheese for darling Jane, and I’ve just noticed that the box she sent it in used to be my nemesis box when I worked at Book Boulevard, because it is box K10, Krentz - Krentz, which means that Jayne Ann Krentz has brought me joy.

This is a circumstance I never expected because when I was working at Book Boulevard, I had the job of unpacking all the boxes of books and putting them into alphabetical order. They were already roughly ordered, but I had to do it properly, and then I had to move the books from the party barn where I was alphabetizing them into the house where they were stored on shelves. And because we were not clever enough to remember all the pseudonyms that the various authors used, the general policy was to shelve the books under the author name that was written on the book.

Before Jayne Ann Krentz, this wasn’t much of a problem. I came across a few books that were out of place, but I just gently went into the house and moved the books a little bit, and shelved them properly. But Jayne Ann Krentz, Jayne Ann Krentz, she was a horse of a different color, because we had so many books by Jayne Ann Krentz. Several entire boxes that were just full of Jayne Ann Krentz books, except that a good half of them were actually written by Stephanie James.

And do you know what that meant? It meant I had to go all the way back to J (and yes, it could have been worse, but there were a lot of books in between James and Krentz) and take all the books and move them forward enough spaces that I could fit in all these stupid Stephanie James books. I even wrote an angry doggeral pome about it as follows:

Jayne Ann Krentz, you prolific something bitch,
Your Krentz-authored books sold with nary a hitch.
Why then do you write under Stephanie James?
God spare me from novelists using false names!

(I can’t remember what the other adjective was, but if I do I’ll keep you posted. It had four syllables, so it scanned. Don’t think I can’t scan things, because I totally can.)

Well, anyway, now Jayne Ann Krentz’s existence has made it possible for me to have Oreos and Life Cereal, and that causeth me to rejoice in my soul.