About
About Bea (and Benji)
Bea Jayne is an Australian author of warm, funny, closed-door women's fiction and romantic comedy, including the five-book Same Time Friday series set in Sydney.
Bea Jayne is an Australian author who writes in the gaps: between a busy working life, school runs and the nightly negotiation over whose turn it is to fill the dishwasher.
Bea has spent her career in the corporate world, from the boardroom to the endless meetings about meetings. Writing is how she keeps her balance: a place where the plot twists are her own and every character eventually does what they're told (well, mostly).
She shares her home with her family, including teenage twins (exactly as lively as it sounds), and Benji, a wonderful cavaspoodle. Not a poodle. Not a cavoodle. A cavaspoodle, and he'd like that on the record. Benji is her loyal writing companion, the harshest critic of anything that isn't a walk, and a firm believer that the best seat in the house is whichever one Bea is about to sit in.
Bea's ideal day involves a beach, a towel and a book she can't put down. Her actual day involves considerably less sand. She reads widely and without apology: swoony romance one week, a spy thriller the next, then back to the classics to cleanse the palate. As far as she's concerned, a good story is a good story, whatever shelf it lives on.
Words have always been her thing. She studied English literature through a Bachelor of Arts and then a Master of Arts, which taught her a great deal about the great novelists and absolutely nothing about getting two teenagers out the door on time.
When she isn't writing, working, ferrying or being herded towards the lead by Benji, she's dreaming up her next beach holiday, and the far-too-large stack of books she'll pack for it.
Benji's corner
Why I wrote Same Time Friday
I wanted to write about friends who have known one another for years and still don't quite know one another. I think that's most of us. We share a table, and a joke that has been running for a decade, and we go home with five different versions of the same evening. One of us heard a kindness. One heard a criticism. One wasn't listening at all, because she was working out how to say something, and then didn't say it.
That's the heart of these books. Each of the five women is sure she's the only one at the table with something she can't say. None of them is short of people to tell. So they tell a phone instead, at one in the morning, because a phone won't say “Oh, Bec,” or look at you differently next Friday.
And I wanted to ask how a decent person ends up somewhere she never meant to go. A long time ago I did some management studies, and one lecturer walked us through an ethical problem one small, sensible step at a time. Nobody in the room objected to any single step. At the end he showed us where we were standing, and not one of us would have chosen to go there. I've never forgotten it, and it runs quietly through all five books.
If these books make you think of a friend, call her. Ask her what she had for dinner.
Bea
Find Bea elsewhere
Amazon Author Central, Goodreads and BookBub profiles are on their way and will be linked here.
Friday Drinks with Bea Jayne
Pull up a chair. Same time Friday?
New releases, early copies, bonus scenes, and the occasional Benji update. No spam, and you can leave any time.
Friday Drinks, Bea's newsletter, opens soon. Check back in a few days.
