Don’t make Tucson-based mystery series author J. A. Jance mad unless you want to show up as a villain in one of her best-selling novels.

To be fair, that’s only happened once (that Jance admits to). It was in the early 1990s when she was suffering from writer’s block after publishing the first eight or nine of her J.P. Beaumont mysteries. Looking for inspiration, Jance contacted her alma mater, the University of Arizona, to ask if its creative writing program would be interested in having her as a writer in residence.

“The haughty professor who called back informed me that they ONLY dealt with literary fiction and NEVER with genre fiction,” Jance recalled. But with those words, her writer’s block was cleared and (spoiler alert) the villain of her next novels was born — the evil writing professor in “Hour of the Hunter” and “Kiss of the Bees.”

Since 1985, the prolific author has published 59 novels and several novellas that have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. Jance will discuss her background, inspirations and writing at an event in Sisters on March 30.

“I think the fact I’ve maintained multiple series is what’s kept me interested,” Jance said.

When she started getting bored with her original series built around the character of Seattle homicide detective J.P. Beaumont, Jance began writing the Walker Family thrillers. Next came her Joanna Brady series about the widowed wife of a lawman who becomes a sheriff herself, and then the Ali Reynolds series about a former journalist turned amateur sleuth.

Since 2000, Jance has typically published two books per year. Her recent pattern has been to release one Reynolds mystery and then alternate between the Beaumont and Brady mysteries for her second novel each year.

Jance has often called upon her own life experiences — both good and bad — to help her craft relatable, flawed and fully-realized characters.

“It’s part of the process of thinking a story into existence,” Jance said. “If I can’t believe the characters, my readers can’t believe the characters.”

One character (Beaumont) struggled with alcohol abuse while another (Brady) had to cope with life as a single mother after the death of her husband. Jance experienced both circumstances when she divorced her husband in 1980, and he died three years later due to the chronic alcoholism that had destroyed their marriage.

To support herself and her two children after the divorce, Jance sold life insurance but had always dreamed of being a writer. Those dreams were rekindled shortly after her ex-husband’s death when she rediscovered poetry she had written and hidden away during her marriage.

“It was like seeing my life in instant replay,” Jance recalled.

She self-published the poetry as a chapbook titled “After the Fire” in 1984. It was later republished by Harper Collins after her fiction gained popularity. Despite the accolades and financial success her mysteries later earned, Jance is in many ways proudest of “After the Fire,” which explores the anguish, loneliness and loss she experienced during her first marriage.

“One of the problems of being involved in any kind of addictive relationship is that it’s so isolating,” Jance said. “The people who write to me about how (“After the Fire”) helped them and how they related to it are really special to me.”

Once Jance began writing in earnest, she worked on her book from 4 to 7 a.m. each morning before getting her children up for school and then heading to her insurance sales job. That first manuscript — a thinly fictionalized true crime story about a serial killer who terrorized Tucson in the 1970s — was not published. The process of writing and attempting to sell it, however, taught Jance that fiction was her strength, and led her to write the first novel in her successful Beaumont series, “Until Proven Guilty,” which was released in 1985.

While many authors of series eventually struggle with their characters or story arcs becoming stale, Jance said she has rarely lacked inspiration thanks to the range of characters and settings.

“These characters have been with me for decades now, and they feel like old friends,” Jance said.

However maintaining several long-running series sometimes makes it difficult to keep all the details consistent. For example, when she decided to make her 21st J.P. Beaumont novel a prequel and mentioned him serving in Vietnam, she forgot that in her ninth Beaumont book, the character mentions he never went to Vietnam.

“That little half paragraph fell out of my head, but readers pointed it out,” Jance said. “I also have to remember details about secondary characters as well and line up all the timelines, remember how old people were, how old the grandkids are and so on.”

Another way Jance has kept things interesting for herself and her readers is by fleshing out secondary characters from earlier novels and giving them center stage in some of her recent work. In the last two Ali Reynolds novels, “Duel to the Death” and “Man Overboard,” Reynolds’ colleague, cybersecurity expert Stuart Ramey, is central to the plot.

“Duel to the Death” was released on Tuesday, and Jance’s next book, which is due out this fall, will be the 18th Joanna Brady story.