Meet CJ

I'm CJ Sleeth. I've been telling stories my whole life — I just didn't always call it a job.

I grew up in a house that wasn't always easy, but if there was one steady thing in the middle of it, it was my grandma's porch. She was the storyteller in our family, the one who could hold a room from a porch chair, and I spent a lot of my childhood trying to make her proud. I didn't set out to follow in her footsteps — it just turned out I couldn't help it either. Stories found me the way they found her, and once they did, I never really stopped.

Before any of that took shape into a career, I spent twenty years in the Air Force as a Master Sergeant, which took me a lot farther from that porch than I ever expected — Japan, England, Germany, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and a handful of other places most people only see on a map. I picked up three degrees and a couple of certifications along the way- the practical kind, the kind that teach you discipline more than anything else. What I didn't expect was how much of a storyteller I still was underneath all of it — every place I lived, every person I met, became something I wanted to tell someone about later.

When I retired in 2017, I finally let myself do the thing I'd been putting off my whole life. I published my first book at forty, and I haven't stopped writing since. Wherever I am, there's a dog at my feet, and a keyboard nearby — some things about a porch follow you no matter how far you've traveled.

These days I write in three different genres, under three different names, because different stories need different rooms to live in. But they all come from the same place: a front porch, a light that's always on, and someone who believes a good story is worth staying up for.

Clara Jay writes the sweet ones.
Clarity Jaine writes the ones with a touch of mystery.
CC Sleeth writes the ones you probably shouldn't read alone at night.

Pull up a chair. I've got a lot of stories left to tell.