Master Word Puzzle Compiler Janice Witham has compiled and published over 10,000 word puzzles in the span of over 20 years of her professional word puzzle compiling career in Canada and Australia.
Janice began her career in media as a copywriter for radio stations in western Canada. Her love of writing led her to begin writing articles for magazines, including a series of travel pieces while traveling across Australia on a year-long working holiday (where, incidentally, she met her husband), Janice continued to write on a freelance basis and also began compiling Wordfind puzzles.
When a Canadian magazine she was writing for was keen to publish them, Janice began supplying one puzzle per week. “I found the challenge of compiling word puzzles much more interesting than solving them, even though the first few took hours to do!” Today she has compiled over 1500 Wordfind puzzles.
When Janice moved to Australia she successfully re-established her freelance writing and puzzle compiling career in Melbourne, forming a long-term relationship with Auspac Media. “Joining forces with the enthusiastic team at Auspac meant I could concentrate on compiling top quality word puzzles and generate new puzzle ideas, and Auspac handled the marketing aspect.”
Back in 2005, when she first saw a Sudoku puzzle Janice says, “This puzzle intrigued me; a number puzzle that required logic rather than mathematical skill. It was a new challenge and it was encouraging that my Sudoku puzzles were picked up right away by the Observer (in the United Kingdom).” Janice devised her own original method for compiling Sudoku and, for over ten years, she has produced thousands of JANRIC Classic Sudoku, each one with a unique solution.
Over the past two decades, JANRIC Enterprises word puzzles have appeared in Qantas Airways inflight magazine, several regional newspapers in Australia, as well as Woman’s Day magazine, Australian Womens Weekly magazine, the Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper and international publications spanning the globe from Dubai to London to the U.S.A. to South Africa. Some Australian publications have continuously published JANRIC Enterprises puzzles for 20 years.
In her freelance writing career, Janice has written and published over 100 articles for a variety of publications including Australian Geographic, Business Review Weekly and The Australian newspaper.