Life Is All About The Journey with C.J. Peterson

Hello and welcome to Shedding the Bitch Radio, where you can discuss, debate, and get advice on how to discover and shed the bitches of fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and negative mindsets so you can realize your dreams and life purpose and create and accelerate the riches you want in life. Join us here live every Tuesday at noon Eastern and dialogue with us at 818-572-2910. You can also chat with us at blogtalkradio.com/sheddingthebitch or share your stories on our website at sheddingthebitch.com. Whatever The bitch is that's holding you back from living your life to the fullest, it's not worth giving up the riches in life that you deserve. So call in now and let Bernadette Boas know what's holding you back.

818-572-2910. Good day, good day, good day everyone, and welcome to Shedding the Bitch Radio. We have a fascinating conversation today all about the fact that it's all about your journey. It's all about your journey. So we want to ensure that you are kind of with us and you stay with us because what our guest has to share is quite fascinating, but more so quite impactful and transformational to your career, business, and life. All right, but before we get there, I want to, as always, thank our new and ongoing tribe of listeners and viewers. You have been doing a fabulous job going out onto any one of the streaming services, but mainly BlogTalkRadio, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn. You're also finding us on our Shit and the Bitch TV YouTube channel. So I would love for you to continue subscribing, liking, following, rating, leaving comments and feedback in regards to, uh, the topics that you want to hear about, as well as any recommendations on speakers that you would love to hear from. So be sure to continue doing that on any one of those streaming services, plus Shedding the Bitch, uh, TV on YouTube and Shedding the Bitch on Facebook or Twitter. All right, uh, and of course our ongoing tribe, you're fabulous because you're the ones helping us get the new eyes and ears on the program. Of course, I can't go without saying and making sure that we recognize our ongoing sponsor, North Georgia Tax Solutions. Debbie Snelling and her team, uh, provide full-service financial and tax services to small to corporate-sized clients and individuals across the country. Not just North Georgia, but across the country. And she is fabulous, so be sure to check her out at ngtaxsolutions.com. Tell her I said hi, and you will be in great hands with her and her team. All right, so let's get into this conversation. It's all about your journey. So our guest graduated with master's degree of life sciences from the University of Hard Knocks. CJ Peterson is no stranger to the trauma and adversity life has to offer. She uses her unique combination of ADD and OCD to keep her worlds of being an author, blogger, podcaster farmer, and publisher all balanced. The tagline for her books is, while the stories are fiction, the journey is real. It's all about the journey of life and heart with her. When life gives you lemons— well, you could probably fill in the blanks, can't you? All right, what we want you to be listening for is how to find balance in life.. And I know many of you are like, is there such a thing? Well, CJ is definitely going to help you with that. She's also going to share with you how to adjust your perspective on life situations. Be a survivor. She wants you to be a survivor, not a victim. And then what life is like as an authorpreneur, an authorpreneur. So let me give you an introduction, then we're going to bring her in. CJ Peterson is a 7-time award-winning author published since 2012. She knows how to relate well to folks of all ages. Her heart shines through as an author, blogger, podcaster, publisher, speaker, cosplayer— I'm gonna have to find out about that— and the farm life. She and her sister run Texas Sisters Press LLC, while she and her husband run Serenity Acres Oh, that's fascinating. Some of the places she has spoken include Indie Author Day on what it's like to navigate the indie author world and the East Texas Writers Association on social media and branding, as well as tips and tricks on surviving the author life. Sharing her testimony of being a domestic violence survivor to a youth group in East Texas was an honor. With her bright personality, she uses humor to give balance to the heaviness or dryness of some topics, making them easier to digest, yet keep the gravity of those situations intact. Now, what I want you to be thinking about, and for those of you new to the program, including CJ, I like to ground you in a rich question. And it's a question that you might have joined in and said, ah, you know, this topic isn't really, you know, relevant to me. Well, yes, it is. And so based on what it is we want to be talking about, your rich question for today is to think about what are those areas of your life that are a bit off-kilter, off-center, and you need to find that balance, or you want to find that balance. Consider that, think about it, and CJ is, um, bound to answer all of your questions. So I want to bring onto the program CJ, it's nice to see you.

Hi, thank you for having me.

Oh, you're absolutely welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. All right, so there's a lot to unpack, and I'm going to actually start from the end to the front. The end of your intro where you ended it with your farm life and the Serenity Acres Farm. I must, must know about this.

Well, my husband and I own Serenity Acres Apiary and Farm, um, and an apiary is where we raise bees for honey, wax, propolis, all that fun stuff. And right now we only have 11, so basically we're taking our 5-acre farm from ground zero to fully functioning, self-sustaining. And what I do is I have a blog called the Journey to Fruitfulness blog— journey, catch that— um, and in that I share our joys and our successes as well as our mistakes and our epic fall on our flat base failures. And I take them and kind of apply life lessons and spiritual life applications to them. And within that, we have, like I said, we have the bees, we have about 20 to 30 fruit trees, we have the solar's already in place, we'll be working on a well pretty soon. Um, we have, like I said, it's just the 5 acres, but we're going to maximize it to the utmost potential. Yeah, well, when— and kind of like I said, make it self-sustaining. When the snow and ice storm hit Texas and kind of knocked all of us upside the head. We were fine. We had the solar for sometimes during the day and at night we have what's called a Buck stove. Well, during the day for cooking.

OK.

So which is like an insert to a fireplace. OK. A lip to it that allowed us to cook on it and everything. So when we didn't have power for about 90% of the week and about no water for about 95% of the week, you know, we were still fine. We didn't have to go anywhere.

Awesome.

So that's our long-term goal, is to make sure that everything is out there. I'm talking, well, we're talking a huge massive greenhouse that should be up in the next few years. We're going to eventually have what I'm going to call the beehive, which is our little store. I have like a 3 bays long, 2 stories wide, 1 bay on the bottom floor, about half plexiglass where they can watch us. Process the honey.

Interesting. That'd be very interesting.

Exactly. And our honey is raw. We literally send it through a double sieve and bottle it. It's about as— our slogan is, the way nature intended. Yeah, about as raw as you can get it. Sometimes little bits of the comb in it.

Yeah.

So the center is going to have like balms, jellies, jams, fruits, vegetables from the gardens. And then upstairs I want to have like a little library for all my author friends to send their books. Nobody can leave with the books, but their cards are going to be inside. So people want to learn more about the book, they can take a picture of the card and go find the author.

Awesome. Wow.

That—

and you're blending your authorship with your farm life. I mean, that— what a beautiful synergy. And, uh, I'll call it blending as, as opposed to balance.

But well, you mentioned synergy in my blog, The Journey to Fruitfulness. Anything with serenity synergy has to do with the bees.

Nice.

How everything comes together.

Nice. Awesome. Now, um, okay, I want to— where's Serenity Acres Farm exactly? Like, in what town? I know it's in Texas.

Lufkin, Texas, which is in East Texas. It's about 2 hours north of Houston, about an hour, an hour and a half south of, um, like Tyler.

Okay. And is there a website devoted to that, or on my web—

site. There are two pages. There's a blog which is the Journey of Fruitfulness blog, and then there's also Serenity Acres has its own page which shows, you know, what we are of. There's some pictures on it, uh, for doing the bees and stuff. But you can find it all on cjpetersonwrites.com. C-J-P-E-T-E-R-S-O-N-W-R-I-T-E-S.com.

Yep, look down there, folks. Oh, that's awesome. That's fascinating.

Okay.

So that was something to unpack. And I love it, love it, love it. And I— well, I do want to make a comment. You said only 5 acres. I don't know about you, but there's many people, majority probably of us, that are like, I'd love to live on 5 acres.

Well, most people think of farm, they think of like 10 to 20. Yeah, but we're kind of doing more with less.

Yeah. No, that's awesome. That's awesome. Um, okay, and then tell, tell me about Texas Sisters Press that you do with your sister.

Texas Sisters Press LLC, my sister and I founded it in 2019. Both of us are authors. I started publishing in 2012, she did in 2015. Um, she's a 3-time award winner, I'm a 7-time award winner, and we originally published through BookLocker.com, which absolutely love, love, love Angela Hoy and her husband. So a lot of times if they don't quite fit what we're looking for, we'll send them over there, right? Um, but what we decided, my sister, when she did her book, she's like, because when you go to publish a book, of course the, the primary things are cover, editing, and distribution. Those are the 3 core things when it comes to cover design. Um, you really got it. People do judge books by their covers.

Yes, they do. Yes, they do.

Especially as an indie, because there's a lot of amateur covers out there and it makes the author look bad.

Right.

Editing, people are trying to save money and their BFF or their mother's BFF was an English teacher or English professor. It's like, no, you need to go to a professional editor for copying and content editing. When it comes to publishing, formatting was always the bane of my existence. I hated that and knocking everything down to like a 75-word thing, which that one's kind of avoidable, but the formatting, you know, they could do for us. It was great. My sister figured out the formatting, and then she and I both do covers, and I do media and marketing and branding, which we will be touching on later. Yep. But what we thought of was, I thought, you know, we could do this. Let's do it ourselves. So what we did initially was we republished all of our books to Texas Sisters Press because we're the sisters of Texas Sisters. It's not Two Sisters, it's Texas Sisters. People keep going Two Sisters. I'm like, no, Texas Sisters.

Yeah, yeah.

Our authors are not just in— out of Texas though. We have them from all over, right? Right, right. But what we did was we then opened it to other authors, I think August of last year, and we have Martinez, who published a really cute children's book, The Sock That Went on Deployment, regarding Navy. He was the very first one. We have— we're up to 6 different authors now.

Awesome.

Coming out soon. Our line that we tell people, um, we like to keep it family friendly. We're quality books for the family. That's our tagline. And we like to keep it family friendly. Our mother of 87 just passed away in January.

I'm sorry.

Thank you. Our line was— she was a 6th grade teacher for 20-some years. Our line was, if she could read it and not blush, we were good. That's our line.

Okay, so it's fiction?

No, it could be anything. Okay, fiction, nonfiction, children's, as long as it's considered a clean read, right?

Right.

Basically, my, my books are where the bar is as far as like and everything.

Getting the corporate bitch. Yeah, that's okay. That's perfectly okay. Um, that's fascinating. Well, good for you. So entrepreneurs, I know many of you want to be authors and many of you are working to be an author, so I hope you are listening because she gave you tips from COVID to editing to social media marketing to publishing. And distribution. So you really wanted to be paying attention to that. But at the same time, if not, then look and go to CJPetersonWrites.com.

Right now, Texas Sisters is TexasSistersPress.com. But okay, here's the thing, you can also find it on my website. They do have a page there. But right now we are putting a call out for a holiday anthology. So any authors, writers, aspiring authors, because once you're a writer, you're a writer, you're not an aspiring writer, right? But authors, you know, not authors yet but want to be, the requirements submission guidelines are 3,500 to 7,500 words, family-friendly, holiday-themed, and has to be fully edited to me at cjpetersonwrites@yahoo.com by August 15th. We do a huge book launch which allows everybody to cross-pollinate when it comes to and cross-promote with the different audiences. A lot of fun. We had him singing Christmas carols last year, completely out of tune, but we had a blast. Cute.

Okay, so give me the, um, website for Texas Sisters.

It's texassisterspress.com. There's a lot of S's in there. T-E-X-A-S-S-I-S-T-E-R-S-P-R-E-S-S dot com. Yes, perfect.

All right, check it out, people, and, and go there especially if you want to submit to, to their— would you consider it a contest?

Sure, we don't pay for it, but we don't charge for it either, right? Unless, you know, last year we tried to get a combination of well-established authors to— last year we even had one who hadn't published before. So always looking for things. If you have a book you'd like us to consider, you can always submit that. There's a form on the first page of Texas Sisters Press. We're always looking for authors.

Okay, so take a look and get all the information there, um, if you're, you know, an aspiring or a seasoned author. All right, all right, awesome. So let's dig into this. So what is it like— and I loved when you, in your intro, it was authorpreneur— um, so what is it like and what does it mean for people when you say authorpreneur?

Well, a lot of people think, and I really cringe when I hear this, when I retire, I want to write a book. And it's like, no, this is a full-time job. And it's not just writing books because you can only put out so many books per year of good quality. And that's the hitch there, was of good quality, right? Put out little 99-cent ones, you can put out lots of stuff out there, but good quality, you need— you can only put out so many per year. And so you have to look for other avenues. The main idea behind being an author is content, content, content, always being out there. This is an ADD society. You've got to stay in front of them, which is why I initially branched out to blogger, because that allowed me to continue to come out there and put stuff out. And then last year I went ahead and ventured into podcasting. So I have my own podcast, which is called The Journey, hint, Israel. And so I talk to people about their passions, and I met tons of fascinating people. And then this year I also joined another podcast, which is the Con Hour. We talk everything Comic-Con, um, so that's going on as well. That one is live. My other one is pre-recorded.

Nice.

And the other thing that I do is, like I said, we, we get on different anthologies. So the idea is get your name out there, right? Worst thing somebody told me was at an indie author day I did early in my career, because this is going on 10 years now. Early in my career was I did an indie author day, and the guys came up to me, goes, I really loved you. He goes, I didn't know who you were today until today, but I went ahead and bought all your books. So inside of me, I should be rejoicing, but I'm cringing at the fact that he hadn't heard of me. Right, right, right. My goal from this point forward is make sure it's very difficult not to find me on the internet, and I think I pretty well succeeded.

That's— well, you, you kind of said before we even jumped onto the program, you're kind of known as the social media, you know, queen amongst your, uh, community.

So, and it is important, and marketing is sincerely important. People think, I just wrote the book, I'm gonna put it out there. Well, it doesn't work that way. No, you know, if they don't know who you are, they're not going to pick up your book, right? I have 13 novels, a children's book, and I'm in 2 different anthologies, and all that's within 10 years, right? And you've got to get yourself out there and continue to put yourself out there, and not just your books. They want to know who the author is. They want to connect with the author. They want to know who's on the other end of that writing utensil or pen, computer, whatever it is they're reading it on.

But what is that? What does that mean to our listeners? What, what does that look like when it comes to— say they haven't started writing a book, maybe they have. Well, let's even back up. They haven't considered it, and maybe now you're convincing them to do it. And then they— so they have to start working into it. They think they have a story, and therefore— and they certainly have a life, right? So what does it practically look like as far as what would you suggest they start doing and where in order to start kind of peppering out their name and what they stand for?

Okay. Well, the best way I can explain this is to kind of go through what I do with our Texas Sisters Authors. I'm the marketing branding. When people go through us, they actually go through a marketing branding course.

Okay.

And they go through it as their book is in the publishing phase. And one lady decided to wait until she had everything all ready to go. And then she goes, well, now I'm going to go ahead and sign the contract and we can go ahead and take off. I said, honey, you should have started about 3 months ago. So here's the deal. What you need to do is people need to know who you are. So you already have a base by the time you launch. Practicality-wise, I have a birthday month celebration. I celebrated my birthday in the beginning of the month for an entire week. Everything we did in celebration for each day, people followed along. People know about the farm. They know about our dog and our cat. We have a Maine Coon Manx mix cat named Samson. He's huge. We have a service dog for my husband named Delilah. They know who they are. They've seen pictures of them. They've seen pictures of the bees. They've seen pictures of Chief and Sarge, the stuffed animals that go with the children's book series. And they go on different adventures with us wherever we go. And we travel, we like to take pictures. And so they're everywhere. So I kind of combine everything together. Yeah, make like a journey, an adventure, exploring. All of that is all wound together. And so that With my tagline, why the stories are fiction, the journey is real. Everything for me is about the journey, right? Everybody knows that I do everything from the heart because they've seen me consistently do stuff through the years.

Okay, so they should be placing, you know, tidbits of— like, they can even develop an arc. They can develop like a list of various stories, tidbits of stories and pieces of their life— that they can then be turning into posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. They could be writing a blog.

If you like to travel, if you like to garden, if you like to draw, paint, whatever it is that you like to do, I guarantee there's somebody else out there. I had one author come on my— my one rule for authors of my podcast is they cannot use writing as their passion, which stretches them elsewhere because it lets people get to know an author on a different level. When they can connect with an author on a different level, whether they're a book sad or not, then that creates a more loyal fan base because they're like, hey, we got this in common, this is really cool, right?

Yeah.

So the idea is to let them get to know you. Everybody knows I call my husband Super Hubby. He's former Navy, 24 and a half years. He has a rod in his arm, a rod in his leg, two cages in his back, his neck. He's like Superman. He's still walking around. And so I call him Super Hubby. Everybody knows, and they, they see him like, oh hey, that's Super Hubby. Half of them don't know his first name is Trevor, but they know. So it's like there's an online persona that he has out there. He knows me now by my face because my picture is pretty much everywhere, and it's consistently throughout across the board of the different social medias. Like I said, once it's kind of like getting an email list going and a website going once you consistently do that, you have a loyal fan base. So when your books come out, your actual books come out, they're more than likely to pick them up and read them.

Sure, sure, absolutely. I love that, I love that. And that's for everyone listening and watching, those are simple steps that you can take, you know. Those are simple, simple things you could do right now. And then you, you know, if you're in— if you're at the start of a book or in the middle of the book, But at the same time, get a hold of CJ so she can help you with all the dos and don'ts and navigate you through what appears to be simple. But, you know, it's your journey.

Easier said than done.

It's your journey. It's your— well, and I love you keep saying journey because when I went to write my book, the one story I tell is to really make it kind of real for people as to the journey. Is I said stop writing at one point, and my editor— because I did have an editor from day one—

good job—

and my editor reached out, and this was 11 years ago, and she said, okay, so what's going on? I'm like, what do you mean what's going on? She's like, you're not writing. I said, yes I am. She's like, no you're not, I haven't received pages in like 3 weeks. She's like, meet me at Chick-fil-A, we need to talk. Long story short, she's like, so what's, what's up? What's— why aren't you writing? And I was like, well, I'm stuck because there's a— now we're at the meat of the story, at my journey, and I really am getting insecure about telling it. And she's like, you— that was your goal, that was your objective, was to tell your hard truth. So tell your hard truth. So the point being, someone like CJ is going to help you kind of navigate that, that journey.

Um, so yeah, when it comes to writing, um, something I haven't quite put out there yet, when it comes to writing, a lot of times people come to me and they're like, well, I have my memoir I want to write. I said, that's great, have you considered also potentially converting it to fiction? I'm like, why'd I do that? And I said, because being a writer, it gives you control over the story. So when you have someone like me who has a rough background in domestic violence, I have now control, which I didn't have back then, of the story to potentially change how I end it.

Yeah, absolutely. I, I adapted my book into a screenplay, a film screenplay, and the ending is very different. Like, I, you know, I, I love that. But I could also turn it into another novel. Um, love that. I love that. All right, cjpetersonwrites.com, everybody.

Answer your balance question before we go too much. Okay. Okay, um, people are like, how do you balance author, blogger, podcaster, publisher, and farm life? One thing I do is— super hubby Trevor and I have a very strong relationship. We're one of those couples, it's— we get in trouble when we're apart. But including him in everything, he, he reads through the books before I send them to the editor with me. I sit there and I read them out loud and he reads along with them on like magnified 240. So he knows every single story I have out there. He's also, when it has to do with anything military or medical, he's my go-to person. I mean, how many people can ask their husband, where can you get shot and not die?

A built-in consultant.

Pretty much. When we do the book shows, he is right there. Half the time my sister and I are usually floating around doing what we do and he, he'll be at the table making sure that everything is going on, whether we're doing panels or whether, you know, we're checking with different people.

Nice.

When you have support like that and encouragement like that, that helps. And he also is one of the bigger proponents for taking care of the farm itself. When we get the garden and get the greenhouse going, then that's probably a little bit more me there, but he takes care of and sustaining a lot of things. I'm actually allergic to bees, so it's very rare that I will don that bee suit, but when I do, I like am double layered. But usually he's the one that will go out there and inspect stuff, and then he'll bring the racks and I will clear it off for the honey and do all the honey processing. So it's like when you work together as a team, right, brings you closer.

Yeah.

And you also both have a vested interest on the success of all of it.

Absolutely. Well, and I think it's overall what you, um, even mentioned is in regards to a support system, you know, everybody needs a support system, uh, and that's fabulous. That's, that's fat. Even if it is you're like a husband or a sister versus if it's, uh, just another co-peer or co-partner or strategic partner.

Yeah. I mean, I've seen people are like, how can you work with your sister? Because usually siblings don't get along. My sister and I get along great. Yeah. And so it's like when she needs help, like right now she's building a house. So I'm covering a lot of the bases.

Right.

And so when my husband, Super Hubby, goes to have back surgery soon, she's going to cover those bases. And so it's like when you can work together and each person has their strengths and each person has their weaknesses. That are opposite of their strengths, it creates a balance.

Yeah, yeah. I like to look at it as a blend because I'm so all over the place sometimes that—

well, I'm ADHD and OCD, so I'm with you.

Yeah, it never seems balanced, but it certainly seems blended nicely.

Well, in 2020, it's like when I started everything, because the publishing company started December 2019. My podcast started February of 2020. I definitely call 2020 as the year of Jumanji. Each one was a new level of Jumanji, and it just progressively kept getting worse and worse until, you know, 20— or February 2021, when we did the Oregon Trail version here in Texas. That was our finale, and we made it. But it's like, when life goes through and keeps tossing stuff at you, if you have a secure security system or support system, yeah, there's a lot that you can face. I have seen many authors who the family doesn't support them, or they think it's a hobby, and it's like, no, actually it may not be. Some people are one-and-dones.

So what do you tell them? What do you tell them to coach them through that? I mean, it's easy to say, well, it's, you know, it doesn't have to be, but what can you share with them to help them understand the steps they need to take to kind of close out the, the naysayers and, you know, follow their, follow their passion.

There are a lot of authors in the author world who are— had the same kind of theory my sister and I had, that we're all in this together. It's not a competition. There are some in every sort of career that it's a competition, so there are some out there. If you can find the right ones which my sister and I found— like, mine, I found like 3 or 4 really good ones when I first ventured into the author world. And they can take you under their wing and show you the ropes and start to introduce you to different people and networking. That's where your support system will come from, right? A lot of times it's not from your family. Not everybody's as blessed as I am. A lot of times it's not from your family. And so when you can find support and encouragement and doing something that you feel that you need to do, because an author needs to write. I mean, I jokingly say it's to silence the voices in my head. No, I am not schizophrenic. It's just these stories are in there and they have to come out one way or another. And when you can find somebody to help you encourage it, that's the way you do it. And when you do get your first book out and there are a few reviews in there that really stand out to you keep those for those days that you feel very discouraged. You're like, why am I doing this? I don't want to— I'm a 7-time award winner, 13 novels. There are still days where I'm just like, why am I doing this? And then I pull out those reviews, or that's the day I get a message on Facebook or a text from somebody that says, I read this and I was crying. And I'm like, yes, I've hit your core. Yeah, yeah, that's why I write, you know. I've done my goal. And so then I start fired up and I keep going again. So a lot of times it's not going to be from your family. It may be from the outside in the author world.

Right. So be okay if your family or friends don't support what you're doing. Just be like, okay, I understand. Let's, let's choose to agree to disagree here and then go seek out other people out.

And you also have to have a thick skin because, like, for example, my books, people either love them or they hate them. There really is no in between. Yeah, my husband will be the first to say it as well. People, they either love it or they hate it, right? The ones that love it are the ones that you wrote it for. The ones that hate it, see if there's something you can get constructive out of what they're saying. If not, toss it aside and keep going because you're not the one that wrote it for.

Yeah, and even be okay with like when they get out on Amazon and they— and there's, you know, there's great reviews and there's bad reviews, and reach out to them on those bad reviews and say, hey, you know, you know, Any feedback? Anything?

I tend to not, um, I don't because a lot of times they're trolls. So what I tend to do is my readers actually defend me for me. I don't have to do it.

That's cool too. That's very cool.

Like, for example, one of them said, I don't make it a secret that my books are Christian fiction. It even says it right off the bat, right? And one, one person wrote, well, there's too much Bible in it. And I kind of sat there because I was kind of like, he gave me a 2-star for it. And I'm like, seriously, dude, it's Christian fiction. You know, what, what part of that are you not understanding?

Right.

But I sat there for a little bit for a few days, and all of a sudden somebody I don't know jumped on there and said, great, thank you for doing that, now I'm gonna buy the book. So that's the day that I learned I don't have to defend myself, right? Let them, let them do it.

Yep, yep, absolutely. Love that, love it, love it, love it. And but I think it's even more important what your message is, is get a thick skin. Rejection is, you know, is part of life. It's part of everyday business, writing, relationships, you know.

And networking. When we go to book shows, my books are not for everybody. Like I said, they either love them or they hate them. When somebody comes by my table, the first question I ask them is, do you like to read? Because if they don't like to read, I'm not going to waste my time.

Right, right.

The question is, what do you like to read? Before each show, I go to every author's table and I find out what their genre is. They don't like my genre, but they like someone else's genre. I say, you know what? I want to make sure that you as a reader are happy, right? I'm not going to tell you about my books, but I'm going to send you over to that table right there because they have exactly what you like to read.

Yeah. Now that is a tip without making her seem like her giving it as a real tip, everyone. That is a tip of a trusted advisor. She goes and looks for being a solution to a possible objection of her own work, and then she, you know, she ensures that that person doesn't walk away unhappy. I love that. I love that. Yeah, I absolutely love that. All right, so you wear a lot of hats.

Yes, I do. A lot of hats.

And it's got to be exhausting. It's got— so what do you do? What do you do not to blend? We've talked about that, or balance, to talk about that. But what do you do for self-care? What do you do to make sure you, CJ, are grounded and are in a place where— because creativity takes a lot of energy.

It does. People don't understand it. They're like, you're on the computer all day, right? When 2020 kicked in and everybody was locked down, everyone's talking about social media. I'm like, Guys, I love you, but this is where I live and I can't do my work if you guys keep jumping in. And I want to talk to you, but I still have work to do.

Right, right, right. So, but what do you do to kind of make sure you're taking care of yourself?

A few things, actually. Super hubby is really good when he starts to see me stressed. We'll just take a day off. We'll go into town, we'll take a drive, you know, down to Houston or some— something in the area. Okay, the Comic-Cons for me are fun. So we have one in July, one in September, two in October. Those are my free times. And then at least once a year— obviously last year was an exception with COVID— my sister, my husband, and I all go on a cruise because you literally cannot get a phone call on a cruise ship, whether it's 3-day, 5-day, or 7-day. There are a chunk of days where nobody can talk to you and it's great. You get waited on hand and foot. Yeah, look forward to those. Now, as far as practical everyday type stuff, November and December I take off for family, so I'm sure to get everything already in line. So all I may have to do is pop stuff up online, which is like an hour a day maybe, right?

Right.

Um, otherwise the rest of the day is for my family, and I— Christmas is my favorite holiday and I love to celebrate it. A lot of times I will, if I know I'm gearing up for something, I have the ant method where this is my end goal and I know I need to reach these goals, these goals, and these goals to get to this end goal. So like the ant slowly gathers through the summer to help feed for the winter. For example, the, the— I'm doing a YouTube drive where June is my birthday month, so a birthday month celebration, my gift to my people who subscribe is they can have the chance to win a $10 gift card, one of two. Okay, what I did was back in April I knew this was coming, so I created all the graphics. May, I went ahead and created everything that needed to be said. End of May, I uploaded everything to the two different websites, and then I started kicking it out in the beginning of June. So it's just a progressive— I have sci-fi Christian trilogy coming out starting in September. So I got a hold of my editor. She says, you can get me the books in July. Okay, great. That means I got to write 3 books in the next 4 months. Okay, I can do this. So I wrote book 1, 2, and I'm working on 3, and that's technically bases are done. But I know that by that point, July 1st, 2 books need to go to my editor. She's going to do her thing while I get the COVID stuff done, and then everything will come together in August to be launched by September. So I'm going to get all the graphics done through August while I'm waiting for everything else, my sister to format it and get everything ready. When I know that there's a goal here, I'm sure to plan out the specific steps so that I'm not doing it all at once. Because a lot of times people wait till the last minute, they're procrastinators.

Oh my gosh, they do. They, they absolutely. And actually we just had a conversation, a number of us, about back planning. So basically you have that end goal of September and then it's back planning everything that needs to get done, you know, so you don't miss stuff and you're not waiting until the last minute.

I mean, I cringed when I was in college because they hand you a syllabus in the beginning of the semester. They tell you exactly what needs to be due when, and never— people didn't have it done. I'm like, did you not know in August that this was due in November? It's right here.

Yeah.

So it's like, when you know something is due by a certain point, then you can kind of slowly start to do the different steps that you know you need to do.

Yeah, because, because they're complaining that they're stressed out and they're anxious and they're always under pressure. And it's like, yeah, yeah.

And I mean, there are tips and tricks to social media, like Hootsuite and TweetDeck that will tweet for you. You just have to sit down for like a week and load them up and they'll cook them out for you. And you don't have to be online all the time nowadays.

I mean, automation has just made it way too easy for people not to, you know, not to get organized, exactly, get ahead of everything and find that balance as you talk about, find that balance.

And there are different social media platforms that have like millions and billions of different subscribers that are completely for free. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. Those are your key 4.

Yeah.

And if you can keep up with those, then your outreach can be Outstanding.

Absolutely. Now I want to go back to, um, you were talking about that you started just sharing your story and, you know, kind of putting it out there, and you put out a lot of things about, you know, your family and your husband and your pets and your travels and whatnot. Well, you obviously have this amazing backstory of, you know, what you've dealt with, with domestic violence and, and whatnot, more of those traumas in life. How have you found— because I know there's a lot of people out there who are looking for ways to express and to almost like purge traumas that they've been through?

It's twofold.

Okay.

Number one, Katie McKenna and my Gracious Storage series goes through that. So again, some of that stuff in there is real, some of it is fictional, and people who know me know exactly which ones are real. And sometimes one of the reviews goes, well, this isn't real. And I'm thinking, no, honey, actually that one is the real one. This one is not. And so it's like truth is stranger than fiction half the time, but that's where part of my soul went into. Um, the other part is a portion of the proceeds from my novels go to different charities. For example, for the domestic violence one, a portion of the proceeds goes from the Grace Restored series goes to Hope Store, which is domestic violence shelter in Plano, which I went through. So that allows me to pay it back. To everything they use to help, because they help the residents in so many different ways. Proceeds from, um, Divine Legacy series and the Holy Frame trilogy go to Airborne Angel Cadets of Texas, who ship packages overseas to the military. A portion from Strength from Within goes to Jenny's Hope, which is a counseling center for teens.

Nice.

Each one has like— there's, there's a little theme of something within the series that helps me figure out which one, which charity they go to. Allows me to give back to that charity, which makes me in turn feel good. And it helps.

Yeah, yep, I absolutely love it. But going back to that original, so you just kind of use your story and your emotions and your beliefs around it and, and everything that you experience into your fictional stories as a way of expressing and kind of getting it out.

Yep. When you can reach the core of somebody and make them— my goal is to make somebody laugh and cry in the same book. When I do that, then I know that I've reached my goal. Yeah, a lot of times you can't do that unless you know what it feels like. Yeah, there are some times where you need logistics. So for example, in Katie McKenna's story, she turns— she's a police officer. I talked to 3 officers specifically, sat down with them for about an hour or 2 apiece, got their story, figured out what it was like, what they did, etc., etc. And I was able to utilize that for some of the storylines. When you put the element of realism in it, that's when you can touch the core of the reader. No tears from the writer, no tears from the reader. No laughter from the writer, no laughter from the reader. You have to reach an emotional— that's why I said a lot of times people know that I, I write from the heart. I don't write per the latest trend. I write, I write something that I know will sustain, and I write something I know that will change people.

Yeah, beautiful, beautiful. And, oh, and I asked that, you know, being someone that had gone through domestic violence, I asked you that because I was speaking to somebody the other day and she's just kind of trying to figure out how to process, uh, you know, something that happened many years ago, but it's getting in her way right now.

Your, your body will always remember it. The general rule of thumb is however long you went through it, it'll take twice as long to get through it.

Oh yeah, because I too— I— yeah, I too have had some experiences. And so we had a very, you know— and I, I expressed the whole writing, um, and I'll pass her your information.

Some people journal, some people write stories, some people poetry, you know, whatever it is, it's allowing you to have control over the story, right?

And she does art, so perfect. Yeah, it is. And her work is beautiful. But anyway, we're talking about you today.

She does art from the soul, and that, that's, that's what counts. It's the same thing, writing from the soul.

Exactly, exactly. Um, all right, so, you know, are there a few tips, a few, you know, first steps that you could share with our, um, with our audience in regards to just going on their journey?

Journey in life or journey in writing?

A combination of both. Because I think the two of them, you know, there's a balance there.

There is a balance there. Um, you can research the tar out of something, but until you jump in with both feet, you're not going to go anywhere, right? So for example, um, when I wrote my first book, I did a single, a standalone, Strength from Within, and I later realized that I needed to rewrite it. So I pulled it off the shelves and I rewrote it and republished it in 2020. But that first book allowed me to wade into the author world without putting an entire series out there and kind of figure out the, the ups, the downs, the, you know, this works, this doesn't. And it's the same thing with the bees and the farm. We, we could have researched it for years and never done anything. It's like, nope, let's just jump in and do it. I, I, you know, let's just do it. We learn the hard way half the time. Yeah, sometimes a very expensive way, right? Right. We're doing it, and there's there's nothing, nothing that can be stronger. I don't care what academic tells you, nothing is stronger than life experience.

Yeah, it's so true. Okay, so I did remember a question I wanted to ask you, but okay, life experience. I don't want to like jump in over that statement you just made because there isn't, there isn't anything, you know, uh, better than life experience to share. Um, for those that are getting everything that you're talking about and they get really excited and they open up their laptop and they go, go. Well, I'm a journal writer, so I like to write, but they open up their laptop, they go to a blank fresh piece of paper, and then they're just like, okay.

There are two types of writers. I interview authors every other month on my podcast or on my website. It's the featured author page. There's always one single question that's on every single interview. Are you a planner or are you a pantser? Two types of writers: planners and pantsers. The planners plan everything out— character arcs, story arc. I have a friend who has color-coded Post-it notes, which gives me hives when I think about it, because I am a pantser. I literally sit down, pray, and type. And the character list is sometimes long. Now here's another example of this. My friend Aaron Zook and I, both authors, we were teaching a youth group on writing and being an author. He's the planner, I'm the pantser. He sent me— I'm not kidding you, and I gave him grief for this— 21 pages of character arcs.

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Just character arcs. So I went in there that night, I printed out my 3 pages, and I'll get to you in a second what those were. And I put both piles down on the table and I said, do you guys want to know the difference between a planner and a pantser? This is it. This is 21 pages of character arcs for one story. These 3 pages right here are a list of characters for 12 books. That's my notes.

Wow.

And so first of all, you got to figure out—

and there's nothing wrong with that, right? There's nothing wrong with that. They just need to understand.

Yes, that is your process. I need to figure out which one you are, or are you a hybrid? Now, it doesn't matter which one you are, you know, as long as you own it and you work with it. You have to figure out a couple things. First of all, you're planner or pants-er. Second of all, you need to figure out what inspired this story. For me, a lot of times it's songs. Um, interesting. Yeah, for example, God of Angels' Armies created Army's— or Angels Among Us, book 3 of the trilogy. Um, the Rain— Rain Song, I can't remember which song it is, but it created the Christian sci-fi trilogy that's gonna be coming out. And a lot of times I keep that running on a podcast or in an iPod in my head, so I keep it on the playlist, right? Some people, it's a picture. Some people, it's a story. Some people, it's this happened to this person, whatever it is that inspired that, you need to keep that in front of you.

Yeah, yeah.

And because that is the story, like a scene is picked out. Lincoln Park did, uh, Glass Castles or something like that is one of their songs. That was Chain's Broken song, and it had something to do with sirens in it that inspired this certain scene. And I knew I had to get to that particular scene in that story because that's where the power was.

Right.

Angels' Armies. There was a scene in Angels Among Us that I had to get to, and I keep a running playlist of those songs in my head, and that allows me to, first of all, tune out the world, the ADD portion of me.

Yep.

The OCD portion of me allows me to stay focused on that scene, and I need to get there. How I get there, it's up to the characters, because a lot of times I'll start a story and it will not end what I thought it would end. I never know how my books do end until I finish them.

Right, right.

Extremely painful as a pantser to rewrite Strength from Within because my characters actually cross over storylines, and some of those characters that were in Strength from Within were in some of the other stories. So I had to basically stick to that storyline as much as I possibly could, right? So for a plant— a pantser, that's painful.

Yeah, yeah.

And normally it takes me about a month or two to write a book.

For a planner, that'd be awesome because they would rip it apart, put it back together again.

There's one guy who takes planning to a whole nother level. This guy, I'm not kidding, um, David— I can't remember his last name— is he writes scenes out of order and then puts them together. I'm like, yeah, that just sounds painful.

Yeah, that was my screenplay, um, process because I'm a, I'm a, um, planner. And so I had whiteboards up with Post-it and index cards, colorful index cards, and I would just write scenes Uh-huh. You know, story objectives or scene objectives and put them up, and then I'd play with it like a puzzle.

Yeah, yeah, it gets fun. And, and what it comes up with in the end is nothing like you originally thought it was, whether you were a planner or a pantser, right? Because it's a beautiful thing. Yeah, it's the first thing you have to do, someone told me, is get the sand in the box before you can create the castle. So get the sand in the box, write the basic story, right? Then go through and rewrite, redo more details. So then you're building the castle, and then you go through again one more time to re-edit it, to put like the little windows, the little arches, the little stones, the little people, the drawbridge, all that stuff. You gotta get the sand in the box.

Yeah, it's all about the journey, people. It's all about the journey. This has been fabulous. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I so appreciate you being part of the program.

Totally my—

yeah, this has been absolutely fabulous. Uh, so everyone, I want you one last time, CJ Peterson Writes, check her out and, uh, be sure to kind of see everything that's going on, all of those different, uh, adventures.

A little something for everybody.

Just a little something for everybody. And, uh, yes, and then just reach out and see how she can support you in what writing goals that you may have for yourself. Thank you so much, CJ. I so appreciate it.

Thank you for having me on.

Absolutely, absolutely. And everyone else, be sure to— oops, I meant to take that down. Everybody else, be sure to tune in next Tuesday at noon Eastern time for another episode of Shedding the Bitch Radio. And for everybody here, including North Georgia Tax Alliance Solutions. We appreciate your, your time and look forward to your posts, your comments, your likes, your subscriptions, um, out on our Shedding the Bitch TV channel, Shedding the Bitch Facebook and Twitter, and anywhere you get your podcasts. So I'll see you next week. Take care, everybody.

Bye. Thank you for listening to Shedding the Bitch Radio with Bernadette Boas. Join Bernadette every Tuesday at noon Eastern as she helps you shift your bitches to riches. And the dialogue is always going on at sheddingthebitch.com. See you next week.