Action & Adventure Science Fiction Children's BIOGRAPHY
Jan Lister Caldwell has published several works, including science-fiction adventure novels for the middle reader, children’s verse, and a collection of short stories for younger children. She has worked as a free-lance journalist, regularly writing feature articles for The Daily Gleaner, a province-wide paper based in Fredericton, NB. Her work included cover stories and photos for its three weekly magazines.
Before publishing her work, she worked with several schools in New Brunswick, Ontario, and Maine, and with local libraries. Her stories have been tested extensively. She published the series, testing the market and contacting reviewers. When the series was first published with advance copies for testing, the Canadian Book Review Annual gave the series a ‘Highly Recommended’ for each of the four reviewed - Time-Travel Runaway, Cousin Clash, The Young Lion and the Castle Curse, and Captain Blackheart’s Gold. Several other reviewers have had similar praise. The series was accepted by several Canadian educational distributors and a Canada-wide bookstore distributor. Unfortunately before she could get underway the printer doing the books suddenly went out of business leaving her to cancel the orders.
She was becoming ill during this time, having been diagnosed with Lupus, among other problems, and had to put all but the actual writing and illustrating on hold until she recovered. She did have enough of a print-run of the fourth book, Captain Blackheart’s Gold, to offer it for review by the Dept. of Education of New Brunswick and it was on their resources list in NB for over 10 years.
A few years later, the first two in the series were reworked and published through Trafford Publishing but were cancelled in 2013 in preparation for the relaunch that included a new series title and extensive rewrites.
Her book, The Science Fair Disaster, released in 2004, is listed with the Dept. of Education in Nova Scotia. Though SFD was done in a limited print run and marketed with limited funds, it was sold to schools across Canada. She published the 2nd edition with KDP in March 9, 2022, available in print and Kindle.
Her health improved since the series was first launched and she has been doing rewrites of the remaining novels in the series. The rewritten Book One, Time-Travel Runaway was published in July 2014. Book Two, published previously under "Cousin Clash", was renamed, "Only Child" and was published July 31st, 2020. The author also did the cover artwork. The Young Lion and the Castle Curse is the third adventure and Captain Blackheart's Gold will be the fourth offering in the adventure series. As of January 2021, 2nd editions with some rewrites and cover changes were published through KDP/Amazon under the recently activated imprint, Menagerie Publishing.
In May 2015 she was honored to have been named Executive Director and Summer Camp Coordinator of Dragonfly Centre for Autism, Inc. in St. Andrews, NB, Canada, an Autism Resource Center that provides programing including Summer Camp for autistic children and young adults as well for those with other intellectual disabilities. She retired in July 2021.
She continues to work on her writing and art, and enjoying living with her husband, her high school sweetheart, in rural southwest New Brunswick. |
