About Jan Von Schleh

Jan Von Schleh was trying bio-feedback one day in Manama, Bahrain, hoping to cool down from the 137-degree heat-index raging outside her desert window. Her feverish thoughts took her to Monte Cristo, an abandoned ghost town in the mountains outside of Seattle, where she and her four brothers used to chase each other around the dark, tangled forest, scaring themselves silly. She was imagining rain-drenched ferns and mossy logs and the deep shade of a majestic evergreen tree, when suddenly she got up and ran to her laptop - and her debut novel, But Not Forever, was born. 

There has recently been another wave of toasty weather, resulting in a second book now burning up the keyboard. This one, with some of the same characters, takes up the story a year after her first novel ends.

Jan and her husband and their little Sheltie dog have lived all over the world in fascinating places including Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Turkmenistan, and the Kingdom of Bahrain. They currently reside in the very modern nation of South Korea, where, for the very first time in their foreign service career, there are direct flights home to Seattle. When she’s not writing, she likes to explore ancient buildings wherever she can find them and wonder about the stories they would tell—if only they could talk. She is sure that whatever those stories are, they most probably have to do with love.

Jan's a proud member of the Bahrain Writer's Circle and the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association.