*Giveaway* Follow Your Dreams Part 3

 This is the third and final post on how to achieve your dreams.

A True Story of Faith and Dreams (with GMC)

I promised I would share my personal story of following my dreams for finding love, having a family, and becoming a full time writer.  Let’s start where all good novels begin, setting up the goals, motivation, and conflict (known as GMC in the writing world). 

Goal and Motivation: I am the oldest of nine children. I grew up in a big, loving family. We didn’t always have a lot financially, but we always had love and support through many trials.  My parents will be celebrating their 60^th wedding anniversary next year.  My life goal was simple, be like my parents.  My career goals were not as defined. In High School I decided I wanted a career in the creative arts: writing, music, or theater. All three were my favorite things in the world.  In my late twenties I realized I wanted to be a novelist.

Conflict: Faith and dreams are tested by real life.

60 years of marriage. My first marriage lasted for five years.  After college graduation, I married my high school sweetheart. Neither of us knew ourselves enough to understand or to effectively communicate the commitments needed for marriage. My second marriage lasted twelve years. I hedged my bets by marrying my best friend, a man who had known me for a decade. But sometimes a best friend does not make the best marriage partner. Talk about a crisis of faith, this was it. What was wrong with me? What had I done to deserve not having a happy, long-term marriage?

It wasn’t until age 45 that I found my forever love—the man who would love me, including forgiving my many faults, and who would support my goals as much as he supported his own.  There’s a chance we will make it to a 60^th anniversary—that would would make me 105 years old and him 107.  I think my husband relates the depth of our relationship best. Though we’ve been married for 13 years, when asked he sometimes says 33 years, with a twinkle in his eye and a dimpled cheek. Why the difference? He truly believes if we’d met then we would be celebrating our 33rd anniversary now. That's how sure he is of the commitment.

Big Family, Lots of Children. Given what I shared above without mentioning children, you’ve probably guessed that didn’t happen. The original dream was cut short during my senior year of college due to health issues, and subsequent surgery, that made it impossible to have children. I tried to re-frame it into adoption. But with the difficulties of my early marriages, that didn’t work out either.  Again, changing the details of my dream brings it to reality. I have taken in foster children at different times in my life, and that has blessed me with an extended family. My husband came to our marriage with two teenage boys. Though I had little to do with shaping who they are as individuals, I love them deeply and feel particularly blessed to be a part of their lives. My dream is still unfolding. In the future, I will become a grandmother. Often what appears to be an end to dreams is really a beginning.

A Career as a Novelist. For 30 years I pursued careers that had nothing to do with writing novels. This is not to say that I didn’t love those careers. I did. But dreams are important. Dreams define you and shape you, test you and ask if you are serious enough to keep them alive. For a long time, I let this dream be put on the back burner. As I approached my 50^th birthday, I made a conscious decision to carve out time in my busy life to write novels. After all, if you don’t ever write one you definitely won’t get one published.  In late 2010, I contracted my first novel to be published.  Healing Notes is my fourth published novel. Am I making a decent living with my fiction? Not yet.  But I will. I have faith that I will.  My career as a novelist is just beginning.

Elton Trueblood described faith in a way that speaks to me and my experience. “Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservations.”  I hope you find a faith that propels you forward and helps you achieve your dreams, even if the details must change along the way.  

*** GIVEAWAY ***

I am giving away up to five (5) ebooks to commenters on my guest posts during the GoddessFish Party.  The giveaway is being done via Rafflecopter.  You may increase your chances by also going to my FB, Twitter, and Blog pages.  However, to win one an ebook you MUST comment on my guest blog post.  I WILL check the randomly selected winner against the commenters on at least one of the three posts I make here on November 4th. Good Luck everyone! 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

About Maggie Jaimeson

My educational and career background is in psychology, counseling, computer science, and education. Somehow I found a way to satisfy both my left and right brain and fashioned a career over the past 30+ years that could do that. I am fortunate to now spend the majority of my time journeying into the world of my imagination and writing novels that reflect my passions and my belief that strong women can do anything, that the good guys win in the end, and that love will conquer all. 

Contacts:  * Website * Blog * Facebook * Twitter * GoodReads * 

Buy Links:  Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | iBookstore | Google Books | Jan's Paperpacks

*Giveaway* Follow Your Dreams Part 2

This continues the series on how to achieve your dreams.

Dreams Are Amorphous, So You Get to Choose How to Define Them

As a romance writer, my characters always begin the book with a belief about themselves and their lives that is unchangeable.  In Undertones, the first book in the Sweetwater Canyon series, Michele believes she cannot have a career as a musician because she’s put five years into pursuing it and hasn’t made enough money to live. She also believes, because of a bad love relationship, that it is impossible to have a relationship and be a musician. In the second book of the series, Healing Notes, Rachel believes that because of her promiscuous past that she doesn’t deserve to have the loving family she’s always wanted.

In both these situations, the women of Sweetwater Canyon have given up on their dreams because they have defined them so narrowly that it is impossible to achieve. In the case of Michele, she has done what many of us do in life. She has set up a false dichotomy. The danger with false dichotomies is that they can be very persuasive—particularly when we have had experiences in our life that are frightening or painful and reinforce those beliefs. We can easily be led to believe that two and only two options exist, where in fact there may be many other options.  How often do we hear that to be really good in business, a woman must choose to forego having a family? The woman must choose career over love.  Michele has to learn that you can have both, but you have to compromise, you have to open yourself to other possibilities.

In the case of Rachel, she has also done something that many of us do in life. She has accepted a view of herself that is perpetuated by people who don’t know her or care about her—media, her ex, a defense attorney.  She accepts this view because she doesn’t trust herself to know who she really is or can be. Rachel accepted her ex-husband’s view that she wasn’t “woman enough” for him, and she makes decisions about what that means and her behavior follows. Rachel also accepts the view perpetuated by certain groups (media, some churches, some attorneys) that her promiscuous past led to a rape that is her own fault, and thus she believes she is unworthy of love.  How often do we buy into what others believe about us and act on that, instead of acting on what we know to be our true selves in our heart? Rachel has to learn that she is lovable for who she is today. She also has to accept that a family can come in many different variations. It may not be the house and man, with the baby in her belly that she pictured at age sixteen. But by being open to other possibilities, she can find a dream that is so more satisfying than she ever imagined. 

Both in my books and in real life women are given a choice in how to define their dreams.  I believe the key to finding your dream is threefold: 1) Expand the dream to include multiple choices in how it can be fulfilled; 2) As the boulders of life are placed in your path, don’t retreat to the safety of denial of your dreams. Instead step off the path and learn from the wilderness and then get back on at another juncture; and 3) Believe in yourself and your goal(s). If you don’t believe in yourself no one else will.

In my final post, I’ll share my personal story around my journey to achieve three major dreams: a happy long-term marriage, having a family, and becoming a career novelist.  I hope they serve as one example of how expanding choices and accepting changes along the way can make dreams come true.

*** GIVEAWAY ***

I am giving away up to five (5) ebooks to commenters on my guest posts during the GoddessFish Party.  The giveaway is being done via Rafflecopter below.  You may increase your chances by also going to my FB, Twitter, and Blog pages.  However, to win one an ebook you MUST comment on a guest blog post.  I WILL check the randomly selected winner against the commenters on at least one of the three posts I make here on November 4th. Good Luck everyone! 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

About Maggie Jaimeson

My educational and career background is in psychology, counseling, computer science, and education. Somehow I found a way to satisfy both my left and right brain and fashioned a career over the past 30+ years that could do that. I am fortunate to now spend the majority of my time journeying into the world of my imagination and writing novels that reflect my passions and my belief that strong women can do anything, that the good guys win in the end, and that love will conquer all. 

Contacts:  * Website * Blog * Facebook * Twitter * GoodReads * 

Buy Links:  Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | iBookstore | Google Books | Jan's Paperpacks

*Giveaway* Follow Your Dreams But Be Prepared for Changes in the Details (Part I)

I will be posting an ongoing series of three posts during the party. All three relate to this same topic of how to achieve your dreams.

We All Need Dreams and We Need to Believe They Can Come True

What happens to dreams as we get older?  As a very young child, we have difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy. With each year of maturity and education, we learn what is real and what is not.  We also learn that we have the ability to make dreams come true. 

Teenagers are at that enviable cusp in life where they know enough about the real world to be cautious, but (one hopes) have not yet experienced repeated rejections. That is why teenagers have so much energy for change and many believe they can do anything, become anything they want.

Somewhere in adulthood that energy and that belief changes for many people. We have all kinds of things to blame, and the list is long: responsibilities, health, jobs that bring in money but leave little time for other things, betrayals from friends or family, death.  The saddest thing some adults lose is faith—faith in God, faith in the innate goodness of people, faith in themselves to rise above their circumstances. That is when dreams die.

 What makes the difference between a person who continues to pursue her dreams and a person who gives up? What makes the difference between a person who remains positive despite numerous negative things in her life? What makes the difference between a person who, at the end of her life, greets death by saying: “It was a good life. I have no regrets.” Versus the person who says: “If only I had…” I believe the answer to each of these questions is faith and dreams.

In my second post, I’ll follow up on this by talking about how dreams still live if you accept changes in the details. Psychologists call this reframing. I call it faith—belief—that we each have a choice in how we approach every challenge and how we pursue our dreams to make them a reality.

*** GIVEAWAY ***

I am giving away up to five (5) ebooks to commenters on my guest posts during the GoddessFish Party.  The giveaway is being done via Rafflecopter below.  You may increase your chances by also going to my FB, Twitter, and Blog pages.  However, to win one an ebook you MUST comment on a guest blog post.  I WILL check the randomly selected winner against the commenters on at least one of the three posts I make here on November 4th. Good Luck everyone! 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

About Maggie Jaimeson

My educational and career background is in psychology, counseling, computer science, and education. Somehow I found a way to satisfy both my left and right brain and fashioned a career over the past 30+ years that could do that. I am fortunate to now spend the majority of my time journeying into the world of my imagination and writing novels that reflect my passions and my belief that strong women can do anything, that the good guys win in the end, and that love will conquer all. 

Contacts:  * Website * Blog * Facebook * Twitter * GoodReads * 

Buy Links:  Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | iBookstore | Google Books | Jan's Paperpacks

Upcoming New Release - RIEVER'S HEART, Fantasy Romance

Elves Go A-Viking???

The warrior in her was ready for anything. But she never saw him coming.

GUARDIANS OF LIGHT Book 5, from Renee Wildes & Samhain Publishing

VERDEEN is on the brink of becoming an elite elven warrior ranger until the untimate humiliation - no war mare selects her for the advanced training. King Loren's "consolation prize isn't much better. Journey to Isadorikja, the Isle of Ice, as bodyguard to a mortal human riever. Daq ARYK. Barbarian. Prince of Thieves.

ARYK dreams the impossible: unite six fractious clans into one peaceful nation. Failure means they are all doomed to kill each other off - and his recurring nightmare of his son's death by sword will come true. The new elven ambassador rouses his ire, not because she's a woman but because she's inexperienced. Her possibly needless death weighs on his already overburdened soul. Her beauty is a distraction he can't afford.

In a fragrant moonlit garden, VERDEEN dares yield to an irresistible compulsion to kiss the mortal riever. The heat shakes her to the core and frees a desire that should occur but once in her life. With a mate.

As their quest turns down ever more dangerous paths, though, their bond is the asset that could assure peace...or the liability that could send a dream down in flames.

WARNING:

This tale illustrates what happens when adventurous dreamer meets seen-it-all cynic. Contains hot, no-hold-barred sex, voyeurism and some self-loving. Also some graphic (but never gratuitous) battle violence.