Gary F. Jones Interview Published on: 01, Mar 2023

Childhood, for me, was a long time ago.

Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with our extended family would top the list.

Childhood habits? Ouch. There are a few I’m afraid, but none I’d like to publicize.

My youngest child is 39. The library is already available among the many books on my shelves, and they’ve shown no interest in them.

In non-fiction, I’m fond of history and biology. My favorite non-fiction books include Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and How The Mind Works. Robert Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology Of Humans At Our Best And Worst is one of my favorites. Stephen J. Gould was an author I routinely looked for. The book of his that I’d definitely include is Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, The Proud Tower, and The March of Folly are among my favorites, although I found it difficult to read her chapters on the Vietnam war. I didn’t serve in the military, but the arguments about the war at the time were wrenching. Every thinking person should read The Lucifer Effect; Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo, to see how easy it is to become cruel.

In fiction, I don’t think you can do better than Sarah’s Key by Tatiana De Rosnay. My other fiction favorites lean toward histories or mysteries, all with humor. At the head of the list is the old Flashman series (Flashman, Royal Flash, Flashman’s Lady, Flash for Freedom! and others) by George McDonald Fraser, followed closely by anything written by Carl Hiaasen.

My first book (Doc’s Codicil) began with a compilation of 30 years’ worth of humorous Christmas letters about my family. Thirty pages doesn’t make a book, so I added stories about my family and large animal veterinary practice. It was a book looking for a genre. I turned it into something of a mystery by starting with the reading of my protagonist’s will. He insisted that his heirs take Doofus squirrel fishing, and no one knew what on Earth that referred to. The book won a national award for humor.

Well-handled, both can read smoothly, although it takes me a while to get used to first person. I prefer writing in 3rd person.

It can help, and I use it. There are other programs I’ve used to keep use of certain words (i.e. then, just, really, starting, beginning) to a minimum.

For me, the first draft is like the first step in a trip of a thousand miles. It’s a start, and it sets me on the road. That’s a nice way of saying it gets my butt in gear. For some of my books, you wouldn’t think the final version was related to the first draft.

The first draft wasn’t good. On what must have been my tenth version, an agent insisted I drop the first chapter entirely and rewrite the next two chapters. The novel seemed to gel after that.

Once a zoo thankfully decided not to consider more X-rays and surgery for a lame grizzly bear I was helping with. I’d come close to being grizzly burgers while getting the first X-rays, and I was greatly relieved not to take it further. We settled for putting him on a sort of super aspirin.

I’ve never worked with an endangered species unless a 6-month-old kitten counts. It was a Bengal Tiger but had nothing seriously wrong with it. I suspect that each animal of reproductive age would have more value than would be true of non-endangered species.

My mother’s family owned a brewery in a small town between 1854 and 1920. It then became a canning factory, but that went broke after my grandfather died in 1935. There was a cavern under the brewery, necessary for brewing lager beer prior to refrigeration, and tunnels under the town to all the bars allowed delivery of beer by pony cart during snowstorms. The brewery wasn’t demolished until 2014. It was the biggest building in town as I grew up. The tunnels beneath the town are thought to still be open. That was just begging for a mystery about a family fortune hidden in one of the tunnels and a killer watching the protagonist as he searched for it.

Those by Carl Hiaasen are my favorites, though I don’t think you’d call them cozy mysteries. I read one or two books a week, and I often don’t remember the titles and names of authors (I’m ADD, and worse, I had a large hematoma on the left side of my brain last spring. That really messed with my memory.)

Some wits claim I haven’t done that yet. I suspect this will vary with the author and their experience. I heard an author complain that she rewrote her first book 42 times, and only one sentence made it from the first draft to the finished work. But her agents managed to sell her book to a major publishing house, so it was worth it.

I don’t think I’ve rewritten a whole book that often, but I’ve rewritten some portions of my books well over 20 times, and I’m sure I’ve rewritten all my books at least ten times before submission and several times after that at the request of my publisher’s editors.

I learned to cook, from Chinese stir-fries to French entrees and Austrian desserts. Obviously, I enjoy eating even more than cooking. My wine collection is something over 150 bottles of reds and quite a few white wines. It gives me something to drink with my cooking.

I’m also a docent at a local zoo one day a week. I enjoy talking to people and explaining unusual aspects of the animals they are observing. With skeletons as props, I give a two-minute spiel on why we can walk and run upright, but other primates have a hard time with that. The neck (cervical) vertebrae of an old giraffe are also available. All mammals have only seven vertebrae in their neck, so if you have a six-foot neck, those bones are impressive.

I’m revising the second book in what I hope will be the Throckmorton series, and I’m preparing a 40-page summary of Ed Yong’s An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us for use by other docents. Each animal senses their world uniquely, and we often struggle to understand their behavior unless we understand how they sense their world, their umwelt.

It has been an easy and pleasant way to frequently put interesting descriptions and photos of my books in front of the reading public.