About Jen


This is the same thing you may have read on my Amazon page or my Goodreads page. I've chosen to keep the message consistent. If you just randomly stumbled across the blog, well...

Hello and welcome. I hope you find something of interest or chuckle worthy, encouraging or uplifting. And I hope you'll come back.

So a little about me...

My husband and I have been married for thirty+ years and have three adult children.

We've lived in Texas for over twenty years and we lived in Nebraska for several years before that while my husband was in the U.S. Air Force and stationed at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha. I was born and raised in Southern California and was a real live Valley Girl. That is to say, I actually lived in the San Fernando Valley, although I wasn't the quintessential Valley Girl as depicted in movies or on TV.

So if you and I were sitting down to coffee, cocoa, tea, or cocktails, what would I tell you about myself?

My earliest reading memories are of A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh and Miriam Young's Miss Suzy, along with the great Dr. Seuss books. Books like The Cricket in Times Square by George Seldon, The Little House on the Prairie series, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind were staples of my growing up years. In high school, I discovered romance, reading both Danielle Steele and Silhouette's teen romance line at the same time. I also love biographies, history, and large coffee table picture books. If any of those get combined, so much the better.

I remember doing a little bit of writing as a child, including a comic book character I called Crazy Cat. Junior high and high school netted only school assignments and diary entries.

Then life and work and children and work happened. I continued to read, but writing wasn't even on my radar until somewhere around the 2000s. We were pretty broke and I was a fast reader and I went through the interesting books in the local library fairly quickly. My husband suggested I get on the Internet and read fan fiction. The family was watching Star Trek: Voyager at the time, so that's what I searched for. And then somehow the TV show JAG was on my radar and I was hooked, both on the show and on fan fiction and JAG websites and fandom in general. But as I read and read and read all this JAG fic that was being poured into the 'Net, some good, some not as much, I decided to give it a try.

One day, a fellow fan girl (from yet a different show) said she was going to a Romance Writers of America meeting and asked if I wanted to go. And that was it. I joined the local chapter and then the national organization and I started to learn about writing romance novels. That was back in 2003. All these years later, I've missed maybe a handful of meetings and have served in almost all board positions. I've met so many wonderful writers and made some wonderful friends.

Am I an official published author, though? Finally, yes, with over a dozen self-published male/male romances to my credit. You can find the list of those here.

If you want to follow my life's journey, I blog Mondays almost without fail. I don't blog about writing (as in a blog for writers about writing) or politics or religion, I blog about life. Mine particularly, what's going on in it, my struggles and victories and goings on.

My other creative endeavor is managing an Etsy shop. I'm a long-time fan girl of various things and so the name and the content of my shop reflects that: FanStitches, but to be honest, it's mainly hockey.

As a side note, I don't tweet, I'm not on LinkedIn, or Tumblr, or much of anything else, except Facebook and that's only for family or close friends. I am now on Pinterest though and have an Instagram account.

My author pages:
My Amazon page: amazon.com/author/jenfitzgerald
My Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7516984.Jen_FitzGerald

Anthologies I've participated in...
Love, Texas Style, 2008
Deep in the Hearts of Texas, 2013
Lone Star Love, 2018

2 comments:

Regina Richards said...

Wonderful write up, Jen. Enjoyed it. :)

Anonymous said...

I like that your sense of humor shines through in the write-up. Well done!

Nancy