Christopher JH Jones

Chris Jones--seen here in grainy surveillance footage--is a writer, opera singer, and general creator of trouble and surrealism everywhere he goes. He goes by many aliases, including Cj Lehi, Christopher Jones, Mr. C, and Cristof Jones Harrison.

Cj started writing when he was thirteen and supposed to be learning geometry, a nuclear-disaster fantasy novel about how he, alone among Springfield, VA's teeming thousands, built a nuclear-hardened bunker to keep him--and the lovely Dena Christiansen--alive when the Soviets attacked. Dena's poor boyfriend of the time was, sadly, a horrific casualty of the war. Cj was a casualty of not studying, and failed the final, landing in summer school. The novel sucked, too. He burned it.

But he tried again, writing this time about a professional tennis player (Cj played tennis--five or six times--when he was a teen) who romances a British princess (he knows nothing whatever about British royalty and has never even visited England). The novel was begun when Cj was sixteen and finally completed seven years later. It still exists; there are six extant copies, and no, you cannot have one. The manuscript cannot be edited into publishable form. It's that bad.

And then for twenty years, Cj wrote nothing more than essays and the occasional short story. They won contests periodically, and Cj even had columns in two trade magazines and a newspaper, but nothing more was forthcoming on the fiction front, until he had a dream.

Cheesy, right? But he did, and in the dream he saw the ending of a novel, and was compelled to begin writing it. It took six months, and was a massively bloated effort of 160,000 words, but THE REPAIRERS is the first novel Cj wrote that deserves publication. He has since followed that one with ten more, including a prequel to REPAIRERS called IT WOULD TAKE A MIRACLE. Unable to settle on a genre, he has written everything from religious romance to choose-your-own-adventure (ghost-written) to cyberpunk to post-apocalyptic thriller.

The published tally sits at: three nonfiction books, including FROM POOP TO GOLD, the story of the marketing magic of the Harmon Brothers ad agency (think Squatty Potty); two short story compilations, the most recent of which, TWELVE UPON A TIME, is a collection of fifteen fairy tales for adults and children; and six short-story anthologies, best exemplified by his “Deep Within the Corners of My Mind”, published by Incandescent Phoenix in the anthology WINGS OF RENEWAL.

Cj lives in Lehi, UT, with his wife Jeanette, with whom he is almost right this minute celebrating his 25th anniversary. They have eight children, a murderous cat, and a burning desire to see the world.