So I’ve bitched and moaned a lot over the years about how going to book events is exhausting, costly, and draining physically, mentally, and financially.
Sorry about all the whining, kids. Truly.
But…
I’ve promised myself I will keep doing them, only on a different scale both financially and physically. To that point, on June 20th, 2026 from 11 am until 5 pm ( and yes, that’s a long day!) I will be at LITHERMAN’S LIMITED BREWERY in Concord, NH, at TALES AND ALES BREWERY BOOK NOOK TAKEOVER sponsored by Your Book Besties Book Nook.
I am reminded of the scene in Sweet Home Alabama where Reese Witherspoon sees her childhood friend, who has a new baby, and says, “Look at you. You have a baby…in a bar!)) LOL!
I actually think having a book event in a brewery is a unique way of getting my books – and those of the other authors participating – in front of new readers.
So, if you are in the Concord, NH area on June 20, stop at Litherman’s. Have a bite to eat…a beer…and buy some books.
That’s going to be my motto for the day… a bite, a beer, and a book!
I’m excited to let you know that on Sunday, June 28th, Barnes & Noble is hosting a book signing for my current book, “My Love to you all.” A daughter’s journey through grief.
The event is from 12-4 pm, and I will have copies available for purchase from B&N to sign. Or ifyou already have the book ( BLES YOU!) bring it and I wll sign it for you.
This book was a three-year labor of love, grief, tears, and ultimately, a path to healing for me, navigating through my mother’s death and everything that came thereafter with my stepfather.
“Grief comes in waves, tsunamis, and droplets.”
When her mother died unexpectedly, Peggy Jaeger used her writing blog to help her navigate through her grief. Detailing her mother’s tortured life – and their oftentimes contentious relationship – allowed her to understand the decisions and events that comprised her mother’s 87 years and made her the woman she’d grown to be. With brutal and at times painful honesty, Peggy details her mother’s life; one that knew suffering, heartache, supreme loss, mental illness and paranoia.
This is the story of how two women – mother and daughter – learned the power behind the gift of forgiveness and helped Peggy come out on the other side of her grief a stronger, wiser, and more understanding person.
If you’re around on the 28th, I hope you’ll come see me.
Three NERFA 2026 Finalists in Contemporary Romance 🌹 Congratulations to our extraordinary finalists from @firstcoastromancewriters: ✨ The Magical Tea Shop — Aimee O’Brian *(no TikTok handle found)* ✨ Just the Way You Are — @nikarhoneauthor ✨ Perfect Match — @peggyjaegerauthor Winners announced next month. Find all three books at the links in bio. #NERFA2026#ContemporaryRomance#RomanceBooks#BookTok#RomanceReads#FCRW
With June upon us, I thought I’d take a beat and tell you where I’ll be appearing summer 2026. It’s not as extensive a list as it’s been past summers because…I’m old and tired and money is tight.
All true.
But…
I will be a few places you can come see me and other authors to talk books, buy books, learn about books.
The date for the August Bigelow Library event is 8/15
So, if you’re in the vicinity of any of these places, drop down and say hi.
Recently, I put one of my books up on Kindle for free for a week. I also added it to KU, both as a means to garner new readers who would – hopefully – purchase others of my books if they liked this one.
I posted about the free sale daily on TikTok, Instagram, and my fb buisness page.
And I tracked the downloads for free and the KU page reads.
These are the results: 89 KU page reads
37 free downloads.
This is actually pretty pathetic for a free book.
This tells me a couple of things, potentially.
nobody wanted the short story book even for free
people don’t like short story books
people don’t like the genre ( horror) in short story books
Let’s analyze those points:
Nobody wanted the short story book, even for free. WHY? is it points 2 and 3? Is it that they don’t like my writing? Is it that they didn’t want to be bothered even getting a free book because either the subject or the author ( me) wasn’t palatable?
So many questions with no answers.
It’s becoming even more exhausting trying to garner new readers every day in this economy. Billionaires don’t read. Not the stuff I write, anyway. My books are read by women, mostly, usually above the age of 30 with kids, grandkids, jobs, and responsibilities. In this economy, they are already stretched as far as they can go, so buying books has become a luxury they can ill afford.
I hear this and feel it so profoundly.
My husband asks me routinely why I still do this. Why do I make myself sick with trying to come up with new ways to market my books, find new writers, and discover new ways to get people interested enough to read my work?
The answer is really very simple: it brings me joy.
Despite it being a time suck and at times anxiety producing, not doing it would be worse because then I wouldn’t have any joy.
So… the struggle is real and exhausting, but the joy offsets all the misery for me.
I’d really like to seel some books and get new readers, though.
And, as a gift to you, I’ve made one of my books FREE on Kindle until May 23rd.
A few years I put together a collection of short stories I’d written over 20 years and titled the collection DEATH BETWEEN THE PAGES. A few of the stories won writing awards from small publishers and all of them were at one time or another, published works, whether in literary magazines or horror fiction publications.
From today, May 19th, until May 23, you can get a KINDLE copy as a free download.
The reason I’m making the book free is,
I’m nice that way ( LOL)
If you’ve never read my suspense books, Retribution and Vendetta, this will be an easy way to introduce you to the crazy way my mind works when it comes to death, dying, revenge plots, and serial killers.
It’s a short story collection so you can devote, literally, an hour to it, and finish it. No 700-page tomes for me.
So…Happy Birthday to me and here’s a gift for you.
Here’s the backstory. I read my reviews. Always have, always will. But I started to notice something on Amazon and Goodreads about two years ago. Every time I have a new book release, there’s always one 1-star rating. No review – just the 1-star.
Every single book. Every single time.
So I can only guess, surmise, muse, (KNOW!) this is either:
1. a fellow author who didn’t like a book review I did on one of their books and this is retaliation ( I really don’t want it to be this one)
2. someone who really just hates me as a writer ( okay, I get it. My books aren’t for everybody, but if you read one and give it a 1-star, why would you read another by the same author? I don’t. If I DNF a book, I never read that author again.
3. someone who really just hates me as a person living on this planet. ( this is probably the right answer.)
I can’t fathom why else someone would consistently – EVERY SINGLE TIME – give me a one star. NO review, so I really don’t even know why the reader hated it so much. This leads me to surmise they simply hate me.
Any suggestions on how I can find out who this person is or why they would hate me so much?
I’ve been a full-time published writer for 11 years. 75 books, a few anthologies, a few novellas.
I’ve had 4 publishers that I actively sought out because I had no literary agent.
Let me repeat that: I’ve had 4 publishers, over 75 published works, and no agent.
It’s not like I haven’t tried to get an agent. I have tried. Or, rather, I had tried.
After too many form rejections, one person should shudder through, I was able to pitch to an agent at the RWA 2017 conference. You had to send 3 chapters of your WIP prior to the meeting so she would know the work you were pitching.
My appointed time came, and we met, shook hands, and then I introduced myself and reminded her which was my work because she was seeing people every 15 minutes for 2 hours. The very first thing out of her mouth was, “Oh, yes. I didn’t like your voice.”
I’m sorry…what?
She didn’t like my writing voice, so the appropriate assumption was that she didn’t like the work I’d sent either; that assumption was proven correct when her next sentence was, “I didn’t like the pages you sent.”
Okay. So…what now? I’ve got a 15-minute pitch session with this woman who absolutely shut me down before I ever said a word. Do I stay and talk about the weather? Politics? How ’bout those Yankees?
Yeah…not happening. Can you spell awkward?
What would you have done?
I’ll tell you what I did. Blinked a few times and took a few breaths so I wouldn’t go postal on her, then stood back up, plastered a fake as a three-dollar bill on my face, put out my hand and said, “Have a nice day.”
And then I turned and left. She never stopped me. Never said, wait, tell me about something else you’ve got. What else are you working on?
Nothing/Nada/zilch/zip.
Nice, right? ( insert sarcasm)
Ever since then, I haven’t pursued getting a literary agent. Why would I? I mean, a masochist I am not.
But…
About a year ago, I started writing a book that I truly feel is my best writing to date. Layered characters, a great backstory, a present-day situation anyone can relate to. And I thought, do I really want to self-publish this one? Wouldn’t it be nicer if I could get it trad pubbed?
Yeah, I answered. It would.
So…last week I reactivated my Query Tracker account and started searching for agents.
I know…am I crazy? Like I said…masochistic? Or just plain stupid to even try?
The one saving grace for me in using this tool (QT) is that I don’t have to sit through a face-to-face rejection. It will come in the form of an email. So much easier to stomach. At least for me. I don’t have to pretend my heart isn’t breaking or put on a good show face when I’m told, in person, “I didn’t like your story.” A faceless, speechless encounter is about all I can stomach at this point in my life.
You would think after all the writing awards I’ve won ( and you know they’re a lot! -No brag, just truth.) and the number of books I’ve had indie and trad published, someone, SOMEONE, and by someone I mean a literary agent, would want to take a chance on me and my story.
Most of the agents I queried have a response time of 8-12 weeks, so I’ll be debating with myself until the end of summer if this was a good idea or not. Until then, I’m perfecting the story and if I get nothing but rejections, it’s going live immediately!!
So this is the fourth year I don’t have my Mom on Mother’s Day. This day hits harder than all the other “holidays” for me since her death. It’s the one day (and really, it should be every day!) that we, as a society, collectively celebrate the women who bore us, pushed us out, loved us unconditionally, and helped us grow into the beings we are.
One day.
Honestly, it’s not enough, but like I said, this one hits harder. probably because it’s an individual reminder of the loss for me. I’m pasting the blog I wrote for the first Mother’s Day she was gone – barely 2 months from her death, here. It’s included in the book I wrote about my grief journey, “My Love to you all” A daughter’s journey through grief, and I am amazed that the feelings I was going through that first year are exactly what I’m experiencing today. No real change.
Grief is hard. It lives, breathes, and hits you at the worst and most unexpected times.
I miss my Mom. Tortured though our relationship was, I miss her.
HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY?
I’m not going to lie. This has been the hardest day of my life to date.
In 62 years I’ve lived through a lot.
A lot.
So that’s saying something about the agony of today.
Chronic pain; numerous surgeries; life-changing accidents; rejection; multiple types of skin cancer with subsequent disfiguring surgeries.
It’s a lot.
But it’s all paled in comparison to the unstoppable ache in my soul today.
This is the first Mother’s Day I’ve ever had without my mother.
The sadness surrounding me is like a cloak made of a heavy black depression that weighs more than anyone should bear.
Even during the times our relationship wasn’t perfect, Mother’s Day was always something I never forgot. Cards, small tokens, even just a phone call, were all she ever wanted, just a reminder from me that she was my mother and I loved her.
My mother wasn’t one of those moms who demanded and expected hearts, flowers, and expensive gifts.
She was a simple woman with simple tastes and desires.
One of her favorite gifts, and the one she commented on every year on Mother’s Day, was a ceramic house I made her in third-grade arts and crafts class in school. I’ve looked at this item over the years and have always wondered, why the hell did she love it so much?
I know the answer now. At least, I think I do.
We lived in apartments from the time I was born until I was in the sixth grade. That year, my mother and stepfather bought their first home. It was a tiny one-bedroom bungalow in a beach community on Staten Island. Low rent district, because it was in a flood zone, but a real house nonetheless.
And yes, I said one bedroom. They slept in it, I slept in the living room on an old Castro convertible – remember them?
The entire house couldn’t have been more than 750 square feet. It had a small fenced-in backyard that abutted a wooded area. The houses were separated from each other by three feet ( 1.5 feet on either side), which meant you could hear and see everything going on in the next house. Railroad track houses they were called. One room falling into the next.
I don’t know how much the house cost in 1971 but they had a sizable mortgage for the time. That I do remember because money was really tight during those years. Those were the times when we didn’t eat vegetables because we couldn’t afford them, powdered milk was the only kind they could buy because of the cheap price, and we ate boiled potatoes five times a week and plain macaroni as our main meal on the weekends.
My mother loved that house.
Why? I think because it was the first real one she ever lived in. Her entire life until that moment had been spent in apartments. First as a child, then as an adult.
This was the first home that was truly hers and not owned by someone else.
I’m not gonna lie and say everything was honky dory in that house. It wasn’t.
The water pressure was practically nil, which meant taking a shower and actually getting soap and shampoo off you took five times longer than it should have. And the water was never really…hot.
The stove was an old burner flame one and the pilot light went out routinely 3-4 times a week. I learned how to light an oven at an age no child should. And with matches, not an electric lighter.
The walls were paper-thin, which meant no privacy. In the bathroom…in the bedroom.
You get the idea.
There was one thermostat to control the heat and it was in the living room so that meant in order for heat to register in the bedroom the temp had to be turned up high. I never went to bed without sweating.
And forget air conditioning. They couldn’t afford one. Summers were…difficult.
But my mother loved that house, despite all the issues.
And I think that’s why she loved that ceramic house I made her so much.
At the time I made it, we were still living in apartments where roaches were our roommates, junkies looking for a fix roamed outside the front doors, and crime lived in the lobbies.
That little ceramic house was my mother’s hope for the future; her dream where we would live one day. Safe, sound, and far from crime and urban squalor.
The funny thing is, that very first home in the beach looked an awful lot like the ceramic one.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms, moms-to-be, aunties, sisters, and step-moms. If you’ve still got your mom with you, call her, give her a hug, tell her you love her.
Title: “My love to you all.” A daughter’s journey through grief
Author: Peggy Jaeger
Genre: Grief and loss; memoir
Book Blurb:
“Grief comes in waves, tsunamis, and droplets.”
When her mother died unexpectedly, Peggy Jaeger used her writing blog to help her navigate through her grief. Detailing her mother’s tortured life – and their oftentimes contentious relationship – allowed her to understand the decisions and events that comprised her mother’s 87 years and made her the woman she’d grown to be. With brutal and at times painful honesty, Peggy details her mother’s life; one that knew suffering, heartache, supreme loss, mental illness and paranoia.
This is the story of how two women – mother and daughter – learned the power behind the gift of forgiveness and helped Peggy come out on the other side of her grief a stronger, wiser, and more understanding person.
Excerpt:
My mother died, unexpectedly, last night. And I didn’t make it in time to say goodbye.
Measure of grief? Inconsolable.
Measure of guilt? Incalculable.
She’d just turned 87 last week and joked many times in the past few years that she never expected to “live this long.”
I always quipped back, “I didn’t either.” The first time I said it, she got mad. 2very time after that, she laughed.
My mother was a severely complicated, emotional, mentally broken woman.
She was also the strongest person I’ve ever known.
She survived the sudden death of her father when she was nine years old, leaving a crater in her heart that never healed. She barreled through the suicide of her oldest sister when life became too much for the woman, and the death of her own mother 9 years ago, a woman who admitted she neither loved nor liked her middle daughter. Rust a few months ago, she suffered the loss of her youngest sister.
She lived through a world war and three other wars that saw her lose childhood friends, the tail end of a worldwide financial depression, numerous stock market crashes and recoveries.
She survived a mentally debilitating first marriage to my father, and the censure of the Catholic Church when they excommunicated her for leaving him. This was prior to Vatican II, before things got a bit laxer. Mother Church refused her petition of an annulment, and her second marriage was then “tainted” by her strict family, who saw it as her basically living in sin with my stepfather, even though they were legally married.
My mother was the most devout woman I’ve ever known. She lived her life with her faith even though the practice of it was denied to her.
She never graduated from high school because she had to drop out to help support her ailing mother and her younger sister. She never earned her GED, either. And despite the lack of education, she had extremely important jobs in her lifetime.
She worked on Wall Street as a stock transfer clerk in a time when there weren’t many women in the job. And she made 51 cents to every dollar the men in the same position made.
During the financial crisis of the 80s, she was let go (women were fired first and subsequently changed career paths. She cleaned houses for very wealthy people for a while to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. She babysat for several couples who absolutely adored the way she cared for their children. Then, in her fifties, she became a licensed home health aide. She went into the homes of the people she’d cleaned for, now relegated to sick beds, and cared for them until they died.
During her 87 years, she suffered a miscarriage, two emotional breakdowns that left her anxious and paranoid, two broken hips and the subsequent surgeries to repair them, and broke with her husband’s family when they accused her of a crime. They, like my grandmother’s family, felt she was living in sin with their brother and wanted her out of the family.
She was a gregarious person right until the end and I can’t remember the number of times I asked her to stop speaking so I could tell her something important.
Today I wish I’d never tried to silence her.
It’s a complicated relationship between a mother and daughter, especially when the daughter has lived through the highs and despairs of the parent. My mother was not what anyone would call a book-smart woman, but she was the wisest person in my life, and no matter how many arguments we had or tears we shed over them, she always, always had my back.
The relationship between a mother and daughter is like no other. From the moment a daughter is born, there exists a dynamic that is experienced with no other child with that mother. While I’m not the first daughter to ever lose her mother, I am the only daughter to ever lose MY mother. This book explores the tortured relationship mothers and daughters have.
Peggy Jaeger writes contemporary romances and rom coms about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them.
Family and food play huge roles in Peggy’s stories because she believes there is nothing that holds a family structure together like sharing a meal…or two…or ten. Dotted with humor and characters that are as real as they are loving, Peggy brings all aspects of life into her stories: life, death, sibling rivalry, illness, and the desire for everyone to find their own happily ever after. Growing up the only child of divorced parents she longed for sisters, brothers and a family that vowed to stick together no matter what came their way. Through her books, she has created the families she wanted as that lonely child.
As a lifelong diarist, she caught the blogging bug early on, and you can visit her at peggyjaeger.com where she blogs daily about life, writing, and stuff that makes her go “What??!”
Peggy Jaeger, Author 