When we wrote our first novel, our editor at Penguin felt that we should have a feminine pen name. We tossed around approximately a dozen names or so, and then we thought of Jim’s late grandmother, a strong-minded, book-loving woman who would have been the perfect heroine for any story. So we decided to use her name… hence, May McGoldrick was born (or re-born). The interesting thing was that the publisher felt so strongly about it that they even tried to hide our identity in the author’s bio, saying that the author “lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with her two cats. She is presently working on her next novel.” It was pretty funny, actually.

When we wrote our first contemporary suspense thriller, Trust Me Once, we decided that it was so different from our historicals that we should come up with a pseudonym that wouldn't mislead readers who had been enjoying our May McGoldrick books. We decided on Jan Coffey because ‘Coffey’ is Nikoo’s maiden name… .and ‘Jan’ is an acronym for ‘Jim and Nikoo’! The Jan Coffey books are even more popular than the historicals, so Jan Coffey is how most readers know us now.

Love and Mayhem is a historical comedy, a spoof on the romantic comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, specifically Arsenic and Old Lace, so it was a little different from our earlier historicals. So… once again we went in search of a new name. This time we thought we’d go with Nikoo Cody. The name Cody was the real May McGoldrick's maiden name, but Penguin didn't want to use the name Nikoo, so Nicole Cody was born.

We met in 1979. Nikoo was six, and Jim was thirty-something. (Just kidding… Jim was in his early twenties.) One morning, after a wild storm had ravaged the New England shoreline, Nikoo was out walking along the seawall in Stonington, Connecticut, and came upon a young man (early twenties… honest!) who was trying to salvage a battered small boat that had washed up on the rocks. Jim needed help dragging the boat up over the seawall and across the salt marsh. Anyway, by the time the two had secured the boat on higher ground, a spark had ignited between them...or rather, between us. So it was instant electricity… and Jim’s been chasing Nikoo ever since!

This is the story we like to tell about how we met. It isn’t true, but we like to tell it anyway. And as far as the truth about our ages, we’re really only four years apart.

We’ve been married since 1980… as soon as Nikoo turned seven.

Yes, we’ve always been writers and readers! Nikoo used to write stories for her grade school friends. After high school, being very good at math and sciences, she was encouraged to go to engineering school. After all, that was where the JOBS were. So she did and tucked away her love of writing (in a safe spot) in favor of her immediate responsibilities. Later on, writing took a back seat to paying a mortgage and raising a family. She never lost her love of storytelling, though… Jim wrote poetry and ‘007’ skits for the other kids in the neighborhood. He later became an English major and at least tried to stay in touch with his desire to write. In fact, after finishing college he wrote a screenplay that almost sold to Robert Redford’s production company. But real life again interfered with dreams as he pursued a career in a submarine shipyard before going back to school and getting his Ph.D. some ten years later.

After our younger son successfully came through heart surgery as an infant, we found ourselves reassessing our lives and our goals. We have always been storytellers and readers, and we decided to try writing a short story together. That story, a prizewinner in a national writing contest, was the first step. The next step, naturally, was a full-length historical novel!

We can no longer even imagine writing separately! In our nonfiction book, Marriage of Minds: Collaborative Fiction Writing, we talk about the difficulties and the delights of working together, but we can tell you that the joys outweigh the hardships by a mile… at least for us. As far as summarizing things, though, everything comes down to our ability to separate the work from the person. Just because we don’t like a passage or a paragraph or a chapter that our partner wrote, that doesn’t mean we don’t like THEM! Another thing that is special about us is that we had a solid foundation in our marriage before we started collaborating on our fiction.

Two heads being better than one should be the theme song for every collaborative team. You are never alone. You always have someone to talk up or down your ideas with. But of course, having two heads doesn’t necessarily mean that you have twice the brain… or you could write twice as fast. Feeding times are difficult… bathroom times are hell.

The biggest pleasure that we’ve found in the actual act of writing is the feeling of complementing each other. While we don’t really have specialty areas, Nikoo could be characterized as the screenwriter type (she loves writing dialogue), and Jim is more the poet type (he loves imagery and language, descriptive passages… he also loves sleeping in late, long walks on the beach, old movies… anything to keep from working.)

History in general offers the writer so many opportunities to create stories. We know (or learn) the names and the events, but the human dimension is not generally recorded. This means that there are huge gaps left in the records, just dying for storytellers to flesh out. The Highland Treasure Trilogy, for example, began with the idea of stories involving the three Fates: one spins the thread of life, the second measures out the length of that thread, and the third cuts that thread. Our three sisters have those general qualities to their respective personalities. From that point, we began to form the idea that these three women belong to a family that has a secret… a secret that they have been guarding since the days of the Crusades. That secret is thought to be the “greatest treasure in Christendom,” and that makes them the target of some very powerful and very lethal people… including Henry VIII of England! And we wrote those novels long before The DaVinci Code, by the way. The Promise (September 2001, Signet), deals with issues of the abolition movement in England during the 1770’s. The Rebel (July 2002, Signet), is about the rebellion of the Irish chafing under British domination. The Dream Trilogy picked up the issues and characters that were introduced in The Promise and created a mystery around a woman’s murder and three brother’s role in it. Our first novel, The Thistle and the Rose, covered the chaos after Flodden.

In using topical issues of the time, the writer gets to humanize our struggles… and we also get to give personalities to historical figures like Henry VIII, James IV, the politician Lord North, the great actor Garrick, the actress Jennie Greene, and a host of others.

We’d like to. But at this point we have to find a publisher that is willing to publish them. The general comment we are getting these days is that the historicals aren’t selling. But we believe these editors are not talking to readers as the response in the past fourteen years on May McGoldrick books has been amazing. In fact, we just made available all those books under the Amazon Kindle format. At this point, we wait and hope for an editor showing interest. So please keep your fingers crossed.

The foray into the suspense genre was the product of looking for ways to tell more stories to more readers.

The first Jan Coffey book, Trust Me Once, originated with an image Nikoo dreamed up of a guy driving along a desert road and finding a wooden casket in the road. In it was a woman, alive and wearing clothes from the nineteenth century. From that image, we developed about five different storylines, from time travel to mystery to romantic suspense. Eventually it evolved into a story where a guy runs into a woman who is wandering about in a storm in Rhode Island, only to find out that she was supposedly murdered two weeks earlier.

Since then, our Jan Coffey novels have picked up different themes. Our second book, Twice Burned, dealt with death penalty and was the recipient of some national mystery awards. Triple Threat was about the art theft and political corruptness. In Fourth Victim, we dealt with cults. Starting with Five in a Row we moved into technical field and where Nikoo’s background was. This book was about a virus hitching a ride on your car. Then came Silent Waters—our biggest book as far as readership yet—about a submarine hijacking and political corruption. Curiously enough, at the end of this novel, we elected the first black president. The Project was about medical experimentation on children. The Deadliest Strain was a political techno-thriller that dealt with, among other things, the effects of governments’ actions on people who are the innocent victims of war. In this case, the Kurds.

In 2009 we have two releases from Mira. The Puppet Master is the story of four seemingly disparate lives that are beginning to unravel, and there is one person who wants to help. What they don’t know is that he holds the strings of their fate… and that nothing comes for free. The second book, Blind Eye, is about identical twins, separated eight years ago, who start to communicate again just as the countdown begins to a Chernobyl-scale disaster that one of them can stop.

We love writing these suspense thrillers. Our Jan Coffey readers are women and men, and their letters always say that they couldn’t put our books down. It doesn’t get any better than that. The challenges… ? Actually, writing as Jan Coffey has given us a new understanding of the value of pre-planning our work. Because the web woven by the lives of these characters is intricate, and because the writer has to release info at intervals to the reader, we really need to plan ahead carefully. If we do that, we can still let our creative energies loose as we write, without losing any important details or the pacing that we try to achieve.

The idea for Tess came from letters that we were getting from readers of our adult historicals. The fans of our books felt that these characters really came alive for them, and they wanted to know what happened to them! So we took some characters that had appeared in our first three historical books… and moved forward one generation. The son of those characters is the hero in Tess and the Highlander.

We really enjoyed creating both of the protagonists in that story. Each had a quirky sense of humor… and a real thirst for life. We like that in people… young or old! The hero was named after our older son, Cyrus, so he holds a special place in our heart.

This is the most often asked question we receive in our mail. The same as in our historicals, we have to find publisher interest first. So… maybe.

Our choice of historical romance was simple… Jim had the historical information from his dissertation work, and Nikoo had the stories. And we’re both fervent believers in satisfying endings!

Our desire to write suspense thrillers developed from our need to tell different kinds of stories and trying to use Nikoo’s engineering degree.

Our decision to write nonfiction grew out of our desire to help other writers who might be looking for an alternative way to successfully tell their stories.

As far as Young Adults, we loved the thought of reaching a whole new generation with our stories.

Characters and inspiration. Nikoo has a VERY fertile imagination for vivid images that are then bounced off Jim, who adds something (“what if… ?”)… and then the two of us just continue to talk and experiment and think about characters that would struggle and achieve with a given set of problems… and on and on it goes. Once Nikoo starts writing the draft of the first chapter, we have a firmer place to start ironing out the direction of the story and the personalities that we’re dealing with.

We have won numerous awards—the New Jersey Romance Writers Golden Leaf award, the Florida Romance Writers Laurel Leaf Award, the Virginia Romance Writers Holt Medallion, and others.

Nothing has changed since winning the Nobel Prize. We still have to stand in line for the booth in the corner, and we still get our eggs ‘over medium’… instead of ‘over easy,’ the way we ask for them.

We don’t really have any spare time. We hardly ever watch TV, and our vacations now are generally work-related. We love doing yoga.

We are living our Grand Passion. Living and working with the one you love is the best life has to offer. We found our soul mates… and our hearts sing every day! (Actually, it’s Nikoo’s heart singing… and Jim’s stomach growling.)