Peggy Jaeger's Blog - Posts Tagged "life-challenges"

Many of the writers I know personally are big into play lists. They have their favorite music streaming while they write; they even come up with individual play lists for each book they pen.

Not me. Not so much. I NEED peace and quiet when I write. The one noise I love to listen to while I’m at the laptop is the sound of the rain as it comes down outside my attic loft writing room. Rain in the ultimate white noise for me. If I’ve got music on in the background, I tend to sing along and never get anything written. I envy those writers who can compose written lines while listening to background noise. Their brains work so much better at compartmentalizing than mine does.

Having said all that, I love music – of any kind. Classical to rock; rap to hip-hop; Elvis to Eminem. When I’m not writing, I listen to my playlists on my i-Pad. My favorite song of all time is Secret Agent Man by Johnny Rivers. I just got distracted and listened to it 3 times while I uploaded it to this post. See? This is why I can’t listen to music while I write.

So, that’s my favorite song. But to answer the question in the title of this blog, the song that defines me is Survivor by Destiny’s Child. Although, the Gloria Gaynor I will Survive is a pretty close second. The fact I have survived many horrible things in my life and have come out in the light instead of turning to the dark side, is a testament to my faith, my determination, and that I believe like Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Now, the things I’ve survived in my life may not be as horrible or as life changing as many others have lived through. But they’ve been pretty brutal to me. I survived a fall out an apartment window when I was 18 months that all the doctors said should have killed me. It left with a face full of scars and a terrifying fear of heights. I lived through a childhood rife with functional poverty, ( for those not acquainted with this term, it simply means we lived a hair above the poverty line but could never qualify for any “assistance”), a horrible adolescence filled with bullying, an eating disorder that still plagues me sometimes to the day, profound emotional abuse from someone I loved and trusted, family psych issues. I almost lost my daughter – twice!- and I’ve fought melanoma. Again, others have gone through and come through much, much worse than all this. But this is what defines me.

So, Survivor is my musical anthem…what’s yours?

Today’s blog is a little different because I’m not talking about writing ( for once!)

These are the top 10 things I believe with all my heart:

1. Good will always triumph over evil. ALWAYS

2.People are basically good; circumstances change them.

3. If you eat fish for dinner and don’t empty the garbage right away your house will smell like stale, old…you got it!

4. Girlfriends are like fine bottles of Port(my favorite!)…they only get better with age.

5. If a woman says “fine,” when asked if something is wrong…run.

6. If you have a choice to work for overtime pay or spend the day with your kid…ditch the OT. You can’t buy a memory with overtime pay.

7. Children are like flowers…they need food, attention, nurturing and most of all daily doses of love and affection to grow to be beautiful.

8. Superman wins over Batman EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. DO not argue with me about this...you will lose.

9. Bottle blondes have as much fun as natural blondes.

10. Laughter can cure just about anything; love certainly can.



Any thoughts? Let’s discuss…

I recently attended the New Jersey Romance Conference and took a master class with Margie Lawson. Who, you ask? Well, if you don’t now who she is, you really are missing out. Margie Lawson is a woman who wears many metaphorical hats. She’s a psychotherapist, an editor, and a very smart, savvy woman, just to mention three. The master class I took was all about Empowering Character Emotion and it was the best 3 hours and the wisest money I ever spent on a day course.

Seriously.

In fact, I learned so much in that short 3 hours, I knew there had to be more to learn, and boy was there! When I clicked on her site I found she has on line instruction classes and packets and I purchased two right at the conference. I’ve been editing away ever since in my current contracted novel. You can see the efforts in the picture I’ve included. Now, Margie’s stuff is proprietary so I’m not going to tell you what she suggests doing, but I highly recommend you go to her site and click around.

I can say with all honesty my writing and editing skills have improved significantly since I started following her suggestions. She helps you hone in on places where you can add punch to character emotions and scenes where you can dial up the conflict from easy to complex with just a rephrasing of a few words, or the addition of a power word or two. She helps you see where you may have too much of one thing – like exposition, which makes readers skim the page – and not enough of another – like conflict, and we all know romance writers need conflict between their characters.

If you are determined to get that first book published or if you are a multi-published author already, Margie can literally take your writing skills to the next level and maybe even 3 or 4 more beyond that.

Just saying.

Day 5 of NaNoWriMo and I’m way into my current WIP ( work in progress). Yes, I love a personal challenge. Yes, I adore a writing challenge. And yes yes yes I love to combine them both.

But I do have a life away from the laptop.

Yesterday, I started writing a 3 am ( chronic insomnia, folks) and went strong until 9 when I realized I couldn’t feel my a**. So, I got washed up and went off to the gym for a few hours to pump and cardio myself into a clear head ( and a smaller a**).

Back home I banged out another 1200 words before I stopped for lunch, then another couple hundred more before I called it a day.

A day for writing that is. When I closed my WP program, I did three loads of laundry, ironed it all and put it way, vacuumed the four floors in my house – yes folks – 4 FLOORS – dusted, put various stuff away and a took care of paying the monthly bills.

Then I started dinner.

After dinner I worked on two courses I am taking online, wrote this blog and stashed another one away for a future release. I am reading two books on kinesthetics, so I delved into those for a while.Tomorrow the car has to go in for service, so I will bring my laptop with me and NaNo while I wait ( like the way I made the challenge a verb, there?)

For those lucky people who can sit all day long and create ( and not have their a**es grow and spread) power to you. I am jealous. I am envious. I am filled with angst.

But not really, because…I do have another life.

So, if you are NaNo-ing, are you an all day typer, or do you take breaks? Let’s discuss

I had a little epiphany the other day when I was banging away at my NaNoWriMo word count goal. I was in a particularly lighthearted scene and the descriptions the first person character narrator were giving had me laughing out loud in my attic. Truly, this was some fine comedic, descriptive writing. The epiphany came when I asked myself, “Am I the only one who might think this is funny?”


I admit freely my humor is a little skewered and all over the board at times. I laugh at the slapstick of Benny Hill, the snarkiness of Jerry Seinfeld, the crude bathroom jokes of the Red Neck Comics. I can laugh at my own witticisms as well, but I never know if what I am writing is as funny to the reader as it is to me. After all, we all think our children are the brightest, most intelligent and most beautiful kids in the world ( mine is, actually) so I think it’s the same with our words and humor.

I can’t really get a gauge for the funny to others, so I’m going to put a few lines I’ve written here and hope if you read it, you will let me know if it is funny, falls flat, or makes you have to pee with glee.

Here goes:



#1 “Don’t worry, Frankie,” my Aunt Ursula said. “Joey’s a bull. He’ll make it.”“Yeah,” Aunt Gracie chimed in. “Remember when Uncle Vito had his coronary at the racetrack? Doc’s had to shock him four times, but he pulled through. Joey will, too. Our family’s made of strong stock.”

I kept my mouth shut because Uncle Vito was currently confined to a nursing home, an after effect of his massive coronary. He was pretty much brain fried, drooled constantly and had an annoying habit of playing flash the sausage with any female who entered his room, family members included.



#2 When my brother Gianni pointed out she was carrying Daddy’s baby, Mama went ballistic. It took the aunts, Gia and me to finally calm her down. Still fuming, we managed to get her upstairs, into her cotton nightgown and then with a large shot glass filled with Sambucca, into bed and settled. Aunt Gracie was going to spend the night and watch over her to make sure she didn’t go crazy and drive to Delphina’s condo and do something.

And by do something, I mean gut her like a fish.

# 3 My Uncle Sonny knew a guy, who knew a guy, who ran a talent agency, though. Unfortunately, all the out of work actors employed at Skippy Goldstein’s Star Emporium were booked for live appearances. Cupids poised to deliver candy grams; Little Devils set to bring naughty lingerie gifts and boxes of confections to wives, girlfriends and mistresses. Skippy told Uncle Sonny he should have booked way in advance to which, the family story goes, Uncle Sonny lifted Skippy out of his chair by his ugly skinny necktie and told him he’d better come up with a genie—and fast—or his relatives were going to have to dig through the Meadowlands marshes to recover his body.

Uncle Sonny’s an intense guy.

So….Laughing? Cringing? Peeing? What?…….Let’s discuss…..

and I’m still plugging away.



By the halfway mark, many writers fall into a plot hole abyss, wrestle with a character who wants to take over the story, or they come to the realization the story line isn’t really keeping their attention. And just for clarity’s sake, this happens to all writers whether they are doing the NaNo challenge or not. The difference in November is that you only have two weeks left in the challenge to fulfill that 50,000-word minimum and declare a win.

Pressure, much? Stress, maybe?



No worries.

The best thing about the NaNoWriMo challenge is the only person you are competing against is YOU. Now is not the time to start editing or switching POV, or changing the rudimentary goals, motivations and conflicts of your hero and heroine. Now is the time to freestyle and just write it all out. December ( and the rest of the new year )is for editing and refining. Tweaking and changing.

Now, the goal is to write – albeit you want it to be good writing, that goes without saying. But as long as you are pounding forward, getting those fingers on the laptop keys, or writing out long hand, you are winning.

The tagline for my website is Writing is my Oxygen, because I need to write in order to exist, just like I need to breathe in order to live. A day without writing something, anything, to me, is a wasted day. I approach NaNo the same way. As long as I am pushing forward on the story, I am in the positive column. And even if I get to 11:30 pm November 30 and still need 500 more words to get over the finish line, at least I know I got that far.

To me, partaking in the NaNoWriMo challenge IS the win. The 50k words are just the cherries on top.

This past weekend I was in Las Vegas with my husband and our daughter. They were both registered to run 13.1 miles ( 1/2 marathon) of the Las Vegas Marathon. To anyone who has every attempted even a 5k race, you know the most important part of the marathon is the preparation for it.

My husband is a lifelong runner, my daughter relatively new to the sport, so they prepared in different ways. Both finished exceptionally well, especially for the horrendous weather conditions at the start and end of the race, and both were fine the following day – a little tired, a tad stiff, but no major problems. Their dedication to finishing the race upright and in a certain time frame made me very proud as a wife and mother, and it re-instilled in me my own dedication to writing.


Why writing, you ask? What’s one got to do with the other? Well, I’ll tell you.

Training for the race required a daily commitment to running. A training schedule of increasing miles per day, and then a rest day thrown in, helped with the endurance needed for the long haul. Eating well, at certain times, and foods high in protein and nourishment, allowed their bodies to be at peak performance to withstand the grueling conditions and the long time length the run required. This was no sprint. Muscle training with weights strengthened them to endure the pounding their bodies would take with each stride and sprint. All of this took time, dedication, commitment, and mental focus.

Much the same way writing a novel takes.

You don’t sit down at the laptop and write 75,000 words in one day. Even NaNoWriMo allows you 30 days to write 50,000. No, you write a certain number of words every day, all adding to the gist of the storyline. I once heard Nora Roberts describe why she writes every single day ( like I do.) She said, and I’m paraphrasing, writing is like using a muscle. When you don’t exercise it, it atrophies or weakens and it takes much longer to get it back in shape. To write every day keeps the brain fresh and the storyline clear. Setting out to write a novel takes focus and dedication even when you fall into a plot hole or don’t know where you’re going next. You keep moving forward toward the end. Your brain needs to be nourished and healthy just as your body does, to be able to form coherent sentences and remember where you’re going with the plot.

So marathon running and novel writing are more alike than you’d think. And in the end, one will earn you a medal, and both with give you the satisfaction of a job well done.

Recently, on my blog, I shared a conversation I had in the nail salon where a fringe acquaintance asked me, “Is writing all you do?” Yes, she did leave the salon upright – my nails were wet and I didn’t want to damage them – but it wasn’t the first time I’ve been asked that question since I retired and started writing full time. It’s made me mad a few times, chuckle some others, and left me befuddled a lot. A. Lot.

Why do people ask a question like that? To me, it’s as insulting as saying to a stay-at-home-Mom, “Oh, you stay home. You don’t work.” Hello? Have you ever seen a stay-at-home-mom? She may not be going outside the home to earn a paycheck, but she works 24/7/365, she’s always on-call for emergencies and the first line of defense with everything child, spouse, and home related.

The reasons I get crazed when someone says things like, “Oh, you write. Must be nice to be home all day just lounging around,” or, “You’ve got it made, never having to work at a real job,” are varied, but uppermost, they’re downright insulting. The implication of being a writer is that you don’t do anything during the day. You sit around eating Milano cookies and watching TLC. Do people actually believe that? Are they that stupid? Where do they think the books that are written come from? The minds of computers? Monkeys with keyboards? Do they think there are little fairies sitting in cupboards trolling them out? Where?

I spend 6-10 hours, 5 days a week writing, and 3-5 hours daily on the weekends. That includes not only writing my novels, but I also manage 2 blogs, pay blog visits to other sites at least 5 times per month, and am in charge of my marketing/promotion for my books. No time for cookies and reality tv, folks.

During the times I am not writing, I run the house which includes cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, laundry, bill-paying, exercising, etc. I don’t have a cleaning lady. I don’t have an assistant. I don’t have an intern. I do it. All of it. When my husband comes home from work we eat a made-from-scratch dinner cooked by…you got it: me.

And when all of those things are said and done, I also read for pleasure (other authors!), I love to cook new dishes and recipes from the 100+ cookbooks I have, and I paint.

No, dear nail salon bimbo, writing isn’t all I do. I have a life; a damn good one, too.

So, there.

….and here’s an example of what I’ve been writing. On 2/8/16 3 WISHES (A Candy Hearts Romance) is released. You can preorder now, here:

perf5.000x8.000.indd

And here’s a little sumthin’ sumthin’ to whet your reading appetite:

It was Dr. Dreamy.

The man had been a hunk-a-doodle when he’d been in my shop. Right now he looked like sex on a candy stick. Tall, lithe, wide-shouldered and narrow-hipped in his scrubs, he was every fantasy I’d ever had about what my man would look like. He stood in the doorway of the waiting room and stared at me.

And I stared right back.

“I assume she’s your mother,” he said, hooking his thumb in the general direction behind him.

I nodded. He grinned, and my toes curled up at the tips. “She’s a force to be reckoned with.”
I winced and replied, “She means well.”
Even to my ears it sounded more like a weak question than a declaration.
His grin spread, and I swear my girlie parts quivered. Quivered.

When he came toward me, eating up the floor with his long stride, a hot bead of awareness burst from somewhere deep, deep down inside me.

When he was within smelling distance—and have I mentioned how amazing he smelled—he stopped, his gaze lasered on my face.

Dear Reader: want more? You know what to do, LOL!

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I’ve started a new series of books ( see my previous post about storyboarding) and this time I’ve invented an entire town in New Hampshire as the setting.

Scary stuff…but also a little exciting.

I wanted a town with a specific name ( no sharing details for you yet, peeps!!) because the name is integral to the stories and it needed to be made-up because I needed to have total control over the street names, store names, etc. Can I just tell you how HARD this was?!! To not only come up with the town’s name, but the street names to go along with the theme and then the stores, businesses, etc, to further it? My head hurt after an hour of planning. There’s a reason I didn’t go into municipal development, folks.

city

But, after a while, the names started flowing and I felt…okay, I’ll admit it: omnipotent. Tycoon-ish. I made a town, I named the streets, shops, roads and government office buildings. It was like playing Monopoly, but for real!

All the other stories I’ve written have taken place in actual settings; cities like New York; states like Connecticut. This time I wanted a New England feel, so, of course, I chose my home state of New Hampshire, the prettiest state in the east, and built the town somewhere between Concord and Peterborough. A large enough geographic divide that I could play around with it, but far enough distance between the two where I wouldn’t be stepping on another town’s toes. Does that make sense?

Anyway, this is kind of cool. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes out and together and what the reader response will be.

So, writing peeps… ever make up your own setting? How hard was it? Or, how easy? Let’s discuss…..



New release 3 WISHES (A Candy Hearts Romance)perf5.000x8.000.indd

Valentine’s Day is chocolatier Chloe San Valentino’s favorite day of the year. Not only is it the busiest day in her candy shop, Caramelle de Chloe, but it’s also her birthday. Chloe’s got a birthday wish list for the perfect man she pulls out every year: he’d fall in love with her in a heartbeat, he’d be someone who cares about people, and he’d have one blue eye and one green eye, just like her. So far, Chloe’s fantasy man hasn’t materialized, despite the matchmaking efforts of her big, close-knit Italian family. But this year for her 30th birthday, she just might get her three wishes.

Get it here: Amazon // The Wild Rose Press // Nook// Kobo //

Tweet Me// Read Me// Visit Me// Picture Me //Pin Me//Friend Me//Google+Me//
To see the actual images, view the blog on my website at http://peggyjaeger.com

Some people I know who shall forever and always remain nameless, still consider my writing a hobby.

Yeah…I know. I’m surprised they’re still breathing, too.

Anyway. Writing, as you know, is like oxygen to me. I need to write in order to live, much the way I need oxygen in order to survive. It’s not a hobby, but a necessary facet of my life. A hobby, on the other hand, is nice, but I don’t need to have one to live.

awriter

This got me to thinking, though, that having a hobby is a…good thing, to quote Martha Stewart. Hobbies distract us from the mundane aspects of our work lives; they bring us a little fun in a day that can be fun-less and soul-sucking. Hobbies can clear our minds of the detritus and negative energy our work can bring, and focus us instead on something positive and enriching.

hobbies

Now, my writing gives me all those positive things I just mentioned. But it’s still not a hobby. Nor, is it in reality, work. Not for me. Writing is as necessary to me as water is to the balance of nature and all living things. Writing centers me; keeps my mind sharp, my memory intact. Writing makes me smile and laugh. Of course, when I’m writing something sad it can also make me weep and wail. Well, maybe not wail…but you get the premise. A hobby doesn’t do that. A hobby doesn’t make you sweat and toil, worry and wallow when you aren’t getting the thought you want just right, or the dialogue as tight as you can and still convey the essence of the words. A hobby doesn’t make you bleed emotions and rip your heart into shreds. A hobby doesn’t make you feel immortal or powerful or omnipotent.

So, don’t call my writing a hobby, because it’s not. It’s a…vocation; a calling; a mission. But it’s not a hobby.



New release 3 WISHES (A Candy Hearts Romance)perf5.000x8.000.indd

Valentine’s Day is chocolatier Chloe San Valentino’s favorite day of the year. Not only is it the busiest day in her candy shop, Caramelle de Chloe, but it’s also her birthday. Chloe’s got a birthday wish list for the perfect man she pulls out every year: he’d fall in love with her in a heartbeat, he’d be someone who cares about people, and he’d have one blue eye and one green eye, just like her. So far, Chloe’s fantasy man hasn’t materialized, despite the matchmaking efforts of her big, close-knit Italian family. But this year for her 30th birthday, she just might get her three wishes.

Get it here: Amazon // The Wild Rose Press // Nook// Kobo //

Tweet Me// Read Me// Visit Me// Picture Me //Pin Me//Friend Me//Google+Me//


to see the actual graphics visit me at http://peggyjaeger.com