Special Day

Seeker of the Extraordinary

Today is my Special Day.

It’s the first one without the people who gave me a reason to have this day. I’m not sure how special it’s really going to be.

When I was a kid, it was like having another birthday. I honestly don’t remember if we had cake and presents, but it was a well-honored day in my house because it was the day I became my parents daughter. It was the day they became parents for the first time and I was saved from a life in a country that didn’t value women. I don’t know what kind of life I would’ve had if I’d have stayed but as an orphan, I can’t imagine it would’ve been worthwhile.

So I owe them everything.

Tomorrow will be the first day I don’t have one of them to thank. My dad died in 2014 and my mom, in March.

They adopted me when I was two, picking me out from pictures and choosing me from all the others.

I’ve struggled for more than a decade to understand who and why my birth parents would abandon me. I was a toddler and unable to care for myself but somehow I survived. There are far more questions than answers, and the people who have the answers left me on the side of the road.

Me at age two in a Korean Orphanage.

As I grew up, I never thought much about that early struggle to survive. Strangely, I didn’t consider it at all.

My new mom and I in my new home. Day One.

Then I had children and it changed me.

It made me realize that as a mother, there are things I would never do. Abandoning my children was one of them.

Because of that, I began to write.

I’d always been a writer, but when my youngest was two, I was facing personal trauma that was too much to bear. As I looked at him in the crib, I realized that he was the same age I was when I wandered the streets hungry and alone. Something inside of me changed forever so I turned to the one thing that had always given me solace and I wrote a book.

As Eva’s story poured out of me, so did the pain. My story became Eva’s story, and I realized that there had always been a part of me missing. I’d always felt it but never knew what it was.

Her abandonment story wasn’t quite my own, her story riddled with poor choices and addiction while mine remains a mystery.

Her broken leg was my broken arm and her shattered heart was a reflection of my own, calling out for a mother who no longer wanted her. Left in fear as darkness.

Writing brought healing and so did the laughter of my boys and their tiny voices and endless hugs. With them, I had purpose and I understood why I had survived when nobody cared if I would.

So on my first Special Day without the parents who raised me, I’ll think of them with nothing but gratefulness in my heart. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have this life, or my children, or the freedom to love and create.

I am so thankful for all of this and this makes every day special, for me.

These two make every day special 💙💙

The Good One-New Release

So … I did a thing.

I released my seventh book and my first one of 2018! Shortly after The Missing Piece Anthology was released, I published The Good One.

There wasn’t a lot of fanfare or even a great big plan, because that’s just how I roll sometimes. I was on a mission to get this book published by April 10th and I made it by the skin of my teeth.

I have a confession to make… This was a tough one to write for a number of reasons.

As a working mother who is also an author, it can be difficult to juggle the writing life with my everyday life. Writing is something I do because I need to, for my soul. I do it for me alone and I’ve been fortunate to find a few beautiful people who love to read the words I put on the page.

Like many Mom-needs, the need to write often gets put on the back burner because homework, packing lunches, doctor appointments, and that other thing I love called my full-time gig, takes precedent. Believe me, I’m not complaining. All of those things mean that I have people who love me and a place that I get to go to that pays me for a job that I love to do. (I’m a pretty lucky girl

Still, finding time to write can be a struggle. With this book came a deadline because it was part of a series that joins me with other writers, and other books, in a place called the Happy Endings Resort. Being included in this has been such a privilege and a challenge because I don’t often write to a deadline. The challenge was awesome and stressful, but I loved it and would do it again in a second.

In an effort to streamline my productivity, I wrote much of the first draft using dictation. Ugh! While I was able to get more words on the page, the page was probably wondering what in the hell I was doing most of the time. Words were garbled, sentences were butchered, and my main character’s name was wrong (Livvie) about seventy-five percent of the time. In addition, the story went in about fifteen different directions because I was speaking it instead of seeing it. I can barely remember what I had for breakfast, let alone what color my main character’s eyes (brown) were half the time because I can’t remember anything.

Often I felt as though dictation was an experiment gone wrong so I was waiting for my laptop to explode because of how horrible the story was. Thank goodness, after moving chapters around, deleting so many words (soooo many words), and then reworking the story multiple times, it finally came together.

Finally.

Or at least hopefully. The only person who’s read it so far has been my editor and she said not to worry because it was good. I didn’t even have time to give it to my trusted beta readers. So, I worry because all writers worry when others are reading our stories. We are crippled with self-doubt every time a new book come out, a new story is created, and new characters are borne. It’s in our nature and whether I have seven books or fifty, I’ll always worry.

This is me, writing the synopsis. Omg!

Here’s the synopsis and if you’d like to join my review team, I’d love to have you! Just sign up here!

The Good One

Olivia and her sister Molly grew up in a trailer park in a small resort town called Happy Endings, but their life together was far from happy.

When the unthinkable happens, Olivia must learn how to live without the person she loves the most and she is forced to keep secrets that she buries deep within.

Thirteen years later, an accidental collision gives Olivia the chance to finally experience love with Danny, who promises to always protect her. As Olivia and Danny build a life together she is suddenly forced to face a past she has struggled to forget.

Can Olivia find the strength within to save herself or will she lose everything, in Part One of The Good One?

Goodreads link-Check out The Good One: Part One by Jennifer Sivec

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39794604

Jen’s Loves

As an author, I’m so fortunate to get to met so many unbelievably amazing people: artists, designers, editors, readers, and of course, other authors! I want to share some of these people with you because it truly feels selfish to keep them to myself!!

The first person I want to  introduce you to is Author C.D. Bradley. I had the pleasure of being her table-mate that the wonderful Rebels & Readers Author Event hosted by Amy McGlone and Tonya Nagle. I LOVED this event and meeting C.D. She was fun, kind, and during in between meeting fantastic readers, we had fun getting to know one another. She is the author of the Stark Trilogy, which features Author BT Urruela on the covers.

I asked C.D. six questions and I absolutely loved her answers. I’m sure you will too.

Q.  Dog or cat person?
A. All animal person. I live on a farm with 2 dogs ( one Australian Shepherd named Jack and an Old English Sheep Dog named Lollie. We have a rescue cat named Little John, 42 chickens, and 2 ducks. A very large bear named Samson a host of turkeys and deer and one very annoying bobcat.

Q. What are three interesting/unique/fun truths about you?
A. Eeep um well I am a terrible farmer but I am learning. Every day is an adventure here and I just laugh at my self and go on. We have recently learned that I am unable to kill anything. This does not go well if you raise livestock. We had to “cull” roosters the other day and I literally cried.
I am very ADD and usually have three or four projects going at once.. Currently I work, homeschool, write books, bake wedding cakes and love my animals ( farm creatures)

Q. What is the single most guiding principle in your, life and how does that impact your role in the publishing world?
A. Guiding principle has always been pursue your dreams as if limits to your abilities do not exist…. just go for it with out trepidation. Don’t hold back in anyway. If you think of a long jumper or a pole vaulter if they hold back in any way they will fail before they even leave the ground. Put your whole self in to what you want to achieve.

Q. What is one big thing about yourself that you would change and what have you done about it?
A. Biggest thing that I would change is that I need to be more organized. I am working now to declutter and get rid of excess so that life with five kiddos is more manageable.

Q. What do you do in the publishing world?
A. I am a writer. So far I have written two books in the Stark Trilogy and I am working on the third and final which will release New Years Eve at midnight. This series is about a military doctor who is fresh out of school and a special forces sergeant. Their journey will entrance you, and then take you places you never imagined. I have really enjoyed writing this series. This final book is bitter sweet because I have spent so much time with Stark and Kira, writing that final The End may kill me.

Q. What is one thing you want people to know about you?
A.  Something to know about me …Hmmm I really enjoy meeting all the fans at each author event.  Though I am shy so its hard for me to engage people I don’t know, I love hearing about you and your lives and what you are excited about or frustrated by.

 

 

You can click on C.D.’s picture to follow her on Facebook! You’re not going to want to miss out on this wonderful author. Click on her book images to catch her books on Amazon!

Love Letter to My Readers

Dear Love,

I’ve been writing all of my life but before I met you, that part of me was incomplete. I’ve always written for myself but never imagined there might be someone out there who would care to read my words. I never thought that anything I wrote could matter to anyone else but me. I realize now that there was a piece of me that was truly missing  before I found you. 

I wrote without direction or purpose, my thoughts chaotic and meaningless. But when I met you, there was a reason for the words that I wrote and the stories I put together. For the first time, someone else cried when I cried and felt what I did, and suddenly all of the noise in my head made sense, and there was quiet and peace.

You helped me make sense of what was once a thousand dreams running  through my head all at once. You gave me a better understanding of my place in the world and how to survive  in it. 

I can’t tell you what it means to me when you read the stories that have been bled from my heart. And when you tell me how much they mean to you, I replay every word because the joy it gives me is immeasurable and so good for my soul. 

I want you to know that I am so thankful for you. You have helped to heal me and make me whole and I will forever be grateful for your love and support. I hope we will always know one another because your honesty and friendship is something I will always treasure. 

Love.

Jennifer

Thankful for This Life

I purposely didn’t post a blog on Thanksgiving about how thankful I was. Not because I thought I was above doing it. It’s because I wanted to give the concept of thankfulness a little more thought. I wanted to write something that didn’t sound trite and recycled. I wanted to express exactly how thankful I am.

The truth is, I AM extremely thankful for this life that I’ve been given, more than I can share.

So much so, that it sometimes feel more like fear or painful awareness than Thankfulness. I’ve been through some things in my life that I will never write about because they are just too horrible to revisit, and some things that I will never remember, that are probably equally so. For me to share my true thankfulness, I would have to share my entire life, which I won’t do. I believe that some things are meant to remain locked up deep inside, private and painful, to remind you of how fortunate you are to get to live.

The parts I share, through my writing, I only share because I know just how thankful I deserve to be.

My life has been a fabric of different thread, weaving in and out, bright and colorful, sometimes shameful, and often outright ugly. But each thread has meaning. Without one, there couldn’t be another, or another, or another, and then I would be nothing. Colorless, meaningless, without one stitch of gratitude within me. There have been many times that I have wished for that. But I realize that without it, I would cease to be what makes me who I am.

But life is hard. And there are moments when I want to pull my hair out and scream because I wish it was more. And then there are other times that I want to sit comatose, staring out of a window, because I wish it was less. More often, I feel that the true secret may be, just accepting what IS, which is something that I struggle with every single day. As a well-known, and well documented “control freak,” accepting that there are things outside of my control, has been the most brutal lesson of my entire life. It is the lesson that I believe is the key to understanding gratitude in its truest form.

I don’t think that I am there yet.

I still struggle too much with my life, with my path, with the threads that make me who I am. I look far too often at the road I’ve travelled instead of at the road ahead. And I’m still entirely too haunted, angry, and sad on a regular basis to live out this guise of thankfulness fully and truthfully every day.

But I’m trying.

I know where I need to go. I can see it, touch it, taste it. And some days I even achieve it, if not for the briefest of moments. Just sitting back, accepting, and appreciating what my life IS while acknowledging the path that I’ve taken to get there is truly being thankful. It’s not wishing that the thread were a different color, or woven a different way. It’s looking at the tapestry as a whole and understanding that true beauty is in the richness of each individual stitch. It’s loving each thread and not wishing that one had been different, or placed somewhere else.

I look forward to the day that I can look at my life that way, every day. I know in my mind that I have gotten here by decisions that I’ve made, and decisions that were made for me. I know that I am not a victim and that I choose how I view my life. And when it’s all said and done, that how I choose to view my life which will determine how I feel about it in the end.

With each passing day, it gets a little easier. And when I look into the eyes of my sweet, innocent, amazing children, is when I am the closest to feeling gratitude and life makes more sense. In the deepest place in my heart, I feel the glow of thankfulness and happiness every day. But I wanted to be honest so it didn’t sound as though I walk around on cloud nine, every day of my life.

Life is difficult, and we have to seek out the beauty that finds its way through the pain. And when we can do so, we can truly be more thankful.  

   

To Be, or Not to Be…

Part of the reason I write is because I can’t get my brain to slow down and be still. It’s always been that way for me, ever since I was young. This has served me well in a lot of areas of my life. But truth be told… It can be exhausting and frustrating. Reality can never keep up with the pace in my mind which has resulted in a personality of impatience.

My thoughts are in constant motion, jumping from one subject to the next and my dreams are the same. I’m sure they make medication for that, but I’ve always preferred a more creative outlet and have been fortunate to find one.

It seems as though over the years, I’ve tried something else.

Instead of rushing toward the next goal and finding frustration when I don’t get there quickly enough, I’ve been trying to stop and see where I’m stepping a long the way. As a person who has consistently been labelled a “results oriented” person, it has been a Herculean feat to be able to do this. But after many hard lessons, two children, and some much needed perspective, I’m FINALLY able to enjoy not only the results, but the journey and what it takes to get there.

I’m learning how to just, “BE.”

Be… In the moment.
Be… Content.
Be… Satisfied.
Be… Thankful.
Be… Kind and compassionate.
Be… Appreciative.
Be… Patient.
Be… Tolerant.
Be… Attentive.
Be… Understanding.
Be… Happy.

It’s easier, for me, to revert to the opposite of all of these “Be’s”. It’s a fast paced world and we are constantly obligated and busy. We are moving more toward instant gratification in our society than we should ever be. We are glued to our smart phones, instant communication, instant everything.

Myself included.

Don’t get me wrong, I love technology and instant results. I’m addicted to it, just like the next person. But one day, I woke up and suddenly I’m more than halfway through my life expectancy and I can’t pick up my babies anymore because they are too big. And I wonder, where did my life go?

I’ve been on this path of “just being” for a while now. While it goes against my very nature, but I find that when I stop, and take it all in, I feel more accomplished. I am content in a way that I never realized was possible. and I am at peace.

To Be… Or Not to Be. Should it really be a question?

Versatile Blogger Award

I want to thank Kristen Mazzola http://khmazzola.wordpress.com/author/khmazz/ for being so encouraging in my writing by nominating me for the Versatile Blogger award. 

I also want to thank Staci Bailey for doing the same! Both wonderful, supportive, encouraging writers.

I’m nominating the following Blogs for inspiring me as well!:
http://authorstacibailey.wordpress.com/
http://khmazzola.wordpress.com/
http://roomwithbooks.wordpress.com/
http://authortlgray.wordpress.com/
http://cristianmihai.net/
http://authorteasereadings.wordpress.com/
http://18yearsyoung.wordpress.com/
http://elizabethahawksworth.com/

They are beautiful, interesting, funny, entertaining, and thought provoking blogs that I thoroughly enjoy reading. When I began blogging, it started out as more of a writing exercise. I just hit my 30th post (this will be 31) and I find that it has become more than that. It’s become a way to share and to learn and to grow as a writer and as a person.
In accepting the Versatile Blogger Aware, I’m supposed to share 7 things about myself that you may not know. So…here goes.
1. I’m a Pisces
2. I hate Lima Beans-the texture grosses me out and makes me want to GAG 😛
3. I have a potty mouth. I wish I didn’t, but I do. It’s a bad habit.
4. The quality that I have needed to work on the most in my life is Patience. I finally have it, most of the time.
5. I am well aware of every single one of my shortcomings. It sucks to have that much self-awareness.
6. I love to cook and I love learning how to make new things. I can barely bake.
7. If my nails aren’t painted, I bite them. Another bad habit.

Thank you again to Kristen and Staci for nominating me and for reading my blog. I am so humbled that you think that much of it. Writing this blog has been a wonderful experience which I have loved doing.
I will continue to write it as long as I have the privilege to share!! XOXOXO

Momentous

My sweet six year old is a lover and always had been. He’s the one who will kiss and hug me for no reason, tells me he loves me countless times in a day, and blows me kisses for no reason.

The other day he hugged me and kissed me, and laid his sweet cheek on my arm. He opened his angelic mouth and said, “Mom, I Love you so much…I’m going to miss you when your dead.”

I laughed and said,”Hopefully that won’t be for a very long time.”

He said, “At least not until I’m 20.”

To him, 20 is a lifetime away. To him, 20 is an eternity. To me, it’s an eye blink. After all, wasn’t I just 20? Then 25, then 30, and…well, that’s just the point.

Life is short and it gets shorter. There was a time when I didn’t appreciate my life or the small moments. There was a time when I moved too quickly past the smaller moments, racing to get to the big moments. But I don’t do that anymore.

Life is full of twists and turns and detours that can take you to some pretty dark places, even if you’re not willing to go. I don’t miss the small beautiful moments anymore. I watch for them, I wait for them, I search for them. I seek them out every chance I get. I’m thankful because I realize that those moments are few and far between, sandwiched between the everyday minutia of life. If I’m not vigilant, I know that they are easy to miss.

I’ve found that every day is an opportunity to discover something beautiful about my life, about my family, or about myself. And I appreciate the dark twisty moments even more. They’ve taught me to recognize the small things that can make me so happy if I just let them. And every day can hold something momentous.