Lisa Jones sold used cars in California after college, which became the basis of her novella Southland Auto Acres (originally entitled Up, published in 2002.)
This is how her life has gone: a job leads to a story, which opens a path to another job, another story. She hasn’t had a career so much as a series of seemingly random callings.
She worked as a healthcare copywriter for Kaiser Permanente in Pasadena, and for National Jewish Health in Denver.
She spent three years in the development department at a movie production company involved with The Secret of Roan Inish, among other films. During the “dotcom boom” in the late 1990s, she was a staff writer at Realtor.com.
Jones launched a website about Nichiren Buddhism and received angry threats from Nichiren Buddhists. Under the pen name Beryl Barclay, she wrote Daily Scoldings: A Bracing Tonic of Criticism, Rebuke, and Punitive Inspiration for Better Living, prompted by her experiences with Buddhism.
After a family tragedy, Jones hiked around the south of France with a mysterious group of women. With them, she made the short film Trail of the Troubadours. Their travels inspired Jones to complete her novel, Renegade Nuns: Sisterhood is Powerful. Also, she became a Reiki Master.
In response to her sister’s death, Jones took so many training courses in forensic media analysis that she earned professional certification as a forensic video technician. She wrote Blunt Force Yoga, a plea for renewed consideration of her sister’s case. She once lurked outside a homicide-detective convention in Vegas handing out copies of the book to attendees.
As a private investigator licensed in Colorado, Jones focused on political campaigns and candidates. She completed coding bootcamp at the University of Denver in 2019 with the dream of developing a Denver-specific investigative database.
In her youth, Jones earned a B.A. in history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and completed the technical writing certificate program at Cal State Long Beach. She graduated from Littleton High School in Littleton, Colorado.
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