Jacqueline Paige is stopping by Charlene Blogs as part of her virtual book tour! She has two books that recently released and she agreed to share both of them with us.
Jacqueline is a fellow Class Act Books author and in addition to being a multi-published author (and she has several more set to release next year), she manages a busy restaurant and five, yes five, children.
Welcome, Jacqueline. When did you discover you wanted to be a writer? Do you remember the first story you wrote?
I think I’ve always been a writer; I just didn’t share it with anyone. The first published full length story I wrote was Beltane Magic. What started as a joke to one of my friends turned into a 70,000 word story and the start of a five story series.
What genres do you enjoy writing most?
I always write somewhere in the paranormal genre, whether it’s romance or romantic suspense or fantasy.
Where do you get your ideas for the stories you write?
I wished I had a system for this, but I don’t. Most of my best ideas show up when I’m trying to sleep. My muse picks this time I think because I’m relaxed and can’t ignore her.
What is your normal writing schedule like? Do you prefer pen and paper or computer and keyboard?
Schedule … there’s a word I don’t know. With my crazy life, scheduling in writing is not something that ever happens. Between my job and kids – nothing is written in stone.
I write on the computer mostly – but for a change or if a scene isn’t working out I will go back to the old pen and paper way. Then again if a story is flowing really well I’ve been known to jot ideas down on anything available, from the back of receipts to a flyer stuck on my windshield.
If you could choose one character to join your family for a holiday, who would it be and why?
Oh my, that’s a hard one. Hmm… I’m going to pick from my own characters, because if it’s any character from any book – well I’d need a bigger house because there are just too many. In all of my own, I think it would have to be my pirate ghost from Salvation, I had so much fun figuring him out that I would really like to see him. That and I have questions about his time period I’d like answers to.
Then again, Whiskers from Twice Cursed would be great to see – but we’d have to hide our dog I think…
Your books have several short stories in them. Tell us why you chose to collect them this way?
Dreams actually started out as a Christmas themed novella titled In Our Dream. After it came out, the characters nagged at me to continue, so From A Dream became a Valentine’s day themed novella. I thought it would stop there, but I was wrong. A few other characters from these two stories demanded I write their story – so After the Dream became the third novella. Then I had a short complete series and decided why not put them all together in one book.
Curses was a little different. I had two stories about curses, Behind the Mask and This Ring – so I put them together and made a book.
I often don’t have time to read an entire novel so I pick up anthologies where I can read one or more of the stories as time allows. With that in mind I wanted to give the readers some good stories but not ones that would take them days to read.
Would you tell us about them?
I can do better than that, I have a few short excerpts to share.
Here’s a favorite scene from the first story in Dreams:
In Our Dream: of where Jennah realizes that the man she talks to in her dreams is actually a real man that can somehow get inside her head!
The nerve of that man! Why won’t he just accept things and go away? She paced back and forth, trying to control the frustration that was pumping through her. Every time she saw him, every hurt moment came flooding back to her and she just wanted him gone. She wanted to move on and live her own life and try her damndest to be happy!
“Jennah?”
She spun around, expecting someone to be behind her. There was no one there. Was that Dominic’s voice? Oh no, she was hallucinating now! Should she call her doctor? Maybe the stress had finally caught up to her. Was she going to end up spending her holidays alone in the psych ward?
“Jennah, why are you so upset?”
She squeezed her eyes shut. I am not hearing voices! I am not losing my mind!
She heard his deep chuckle. “No, you’re not losing your mind. This is really happening. I should have told you, but in our dream...it’s not really a dream. We’re connecting.”
Her eyes flew open. What? “What?” She stood perfectly still, waiting to see if she could hear him again.
“I can explain it better later. I just picked up on how upset you were...”
She squinted. “Picked up? How? How are you inside my head when I’m completely awake? How can we talk inside my head?”
She heard him chuckle again. “Inside mine, as well. I don’t have time right now. Are you all right?”
She laughed out loud, not knowing if he would hear it in her head too. “Clearly not! I’m talking to a man from my dream inside my head while I’m wide awake standing in the locker room at work!”
“Jennah...”
And here is one from the second story in Curses.
This Ring: Bryce is trying to figure out why Emma can see him when no one been able to for forty years.
All in all it had been a long tedious road to this point with no turns what so ever—until this morning when she had looked right at him with both disbelief and dismay on her face. It may not have been a positive cosmic vibe but it was a hell of a lot more than he’d had in all the years he had been waiting and wandering.
Before he was filled with that woe feeling that plagued him daily, after all spending an eternity with no one but yourself got to you after a few years, he turned back to study her. This hadn’t been a huge past time of his, most of the time when there were people around he wandered the other way. After all they represented the one thing he wasn’t – there. With her though it was different, she was somehow different than all the others. What was it about her?
There wasn’t anything in particular that stood out about her. She seemed to be an average height and build. He pinned her age somewhere close to thirty that much about women hadn’t changed that he couldn’t guess an age range and be pretty close to right. Her hair was a mousy brown, for lack of a better way to describe it, and she had it all chopped up like scissors had randomly been placed wherever and cut—he liked it, it was original. Of course he didn’t know what the current in thing was, so it may not be all that original. He wasn’t close enough to see her eyes, but thinking about when they were huge and staring in his direction, he was fairly certain they were brown. So she was very much average across the scales—but what was it about her that just kept him sitting here on this rock, not that he felt his body against it, watching her.
There were choices here, at least a few. He could sit here and continue doing what he was doing until night came, bringing morning closer. That would get a few bits past boring if she went back inside again and didn’t return. The second option was to go wander around the lake and pass the time with more speed than he was doing now. Grinning, he shook his head—because making time go faster had worked out so well for him in the last decade, or two.
If you could give one piece of advice to aspiring writers, what would it be?
Keep writing! Regardless of what you’re writing just keep going – at some point you will write that one piece that you have to share.
Thanks for being with me today on Charlene Blogs, Jacqueline!
Thanks for having me here!!
You can get your own copy of Dreams at Amazon.
And you can find Jacqueline here:
