Vanilla With a Twist by Peggy Jaeger

Give a warm welcome to Peggy Jaeger, author of Vanilla With A Twist. Part of The Wild Rose Press’s new fun summer series One Scoop or Two! Love ice cream don’t you?

Hey Peggy, I see you’ve brought guests with you?

Yeah, they had a bit of time to kill so here they are. Deacon Withers, hero  and Tandy Blakemore, heroine and ice cream shop owner, from Vanilla With A Twist

That’s wonderful! 

Pull up a chair, grab a drink of your choice from the cooler, a Chocolate Chip or Peanut Butter cookie from the plate, and let’s find out a little about Peggy and her Vanilla With A Twist. First Deacon, come on over here and lets talk.

Tells us about the real you— I’m so boring it’s not even funny. Basically, I work. And I work. And I travel for work, and then work some more. Not a lot of free time for anything else like relationships or fun. I started my own engineering firm ten years ago and it’s grown so rapidly that all I do now is travel to meet with clients. I miss the days when I could make things hands-on, figure problems in a design out, or even just tinker.

Tell us three things we’d find if we looked under your bed? Dust, one slipper because I can’t find the other one, a dog earred copy of A Clockwork Orange that I start reading every year and never finish.

……What makes you laugh out loud? Slapstick comedy and really good, thoughtful puns. The kind you need to think about for a second and then go, yeah.

……What makes you angry? Physical, mental, and emotional violence of any kind, to any one.

      What event in your past has left the most indelible impression on you? I can remember it like it was yesterday, which – I’ve always heard – is a sure sign you’re getting old. Haha. I was seven and my mother’s vacuum cleaner went on the fritz. She called my father at work and told him he had his work cut out for him when he got home. Well, that night, I sat on the bench in his workroom in the basement of our house and watched as he took the entire thing apart. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out what was wrong, so he gave up, scooped me up to get ready for bed and told my mother he’d deal with it on his next day off. I always woke up before my parents did, so the next morning I snuck down into the basement to play with the fascinating parts my father had disassembled. By the time my folks woke up and came looking for me I had the motor back together and the vacuum was once again working. From that day forward anything that broke in our house was immediately given to me to fix.

  What do you most value? Honesty and hard work.

…..What do you sleep in at night? A bed. And that’s all I’m saying.

  What is the type of woman you want to spend the rest of your life with? I hadn’t considered this question fully before now, but I’d like to think the one I’m in love with. Feisty, strong willed, smart and with a backbone of steel. All that fiery red hair and freckles don’t hurt either.

      What do you consider most important in life? Having a purpose and feeling as if you’re making, or have made, a difference in the lives of others. Everything else that comes along falls from this.

      What is your biggest secret? You really don’t think I’m going to share that, do you?

It’s always worth a try! You’d be surprised at what people will reveal. LOL 

Step on over her Tandy,  It’s your turn in the barrel, so as to speak.

Who are you really? Just a small town girl who faced poor decisions straight on and lived to fight another day. That sounds way better than a farm girl who got pregnant at sixteen and never had a chance to leave her small time life.

Tell us three things we’d find if we looked under your bed?  A box of my son’s old report cards, some dust resembling tumbleweeds and a plastic container of the past six years’ worth of receipts.

……What makes you laugh out loud? Slapstick comedy like the Marx brothers and old back and white RomComs.

……What makes you angry? Conceit, arrogance, and people who think they are better than you are simply because they had more advantages in life. And bill collectors, although I think those make me more anxious than angry.

……What do you sleep in at night? Old t-shirts and sweat pants.

   Who were the biggest role models in your life? My only role model was my grandmother Blakemore. She was born and bred a farm girl, married a dairyman, and then helped my granddad build up a successful dairy farm business all the while keeping hearth and home alive. She never suffered fools, called a spade a spade and was loyal to a fault with her family. From her I got my excellent math skills and I learned at her knee how to make the best tasting ice cream in the world, using our family cow’s milk and cream.

What kind of man do you want to spend the rest of your life with?   Until recently I thought I’d never have a lifelong man to call my own. So I’d have to say the one who sauntered into my shop one sunny July day and stole my heart when he fixed all my broken machines for free. He’s smart, kind, well mannered ( much more than me) really listens to a person and doesn’t think five steps ahead of what he wants to say, but hears you out. Plus, he’s got all that tall, rangy good looking stuff going on, so there’s that.

  What kind of man would you never choose? Self absorbed, mean tempered and boring. I don’t care if he was is rich as all get out and I’d never have to work another day in my life. I’m not wasting my time with anyone with those qualities.

What is most important to you in life? Financial stability and making sure my son gets the educational advantages I didn’t, like college.

   What is your biggest fear? Bankruptcy.

Peggy, Tell us a little about writing Vanilla With A Twist.  Was it fun or difficult?  Do your characters always act as you expect? Are you a plotter, or fly (write) by the seat of your pants?

When the Wild Rose Press put out the call for a new summer series dealing with ice cream in all forms, I just knew I had to submit something. A small town romance with an older couple had been dancing around in my head for a while and once this storyline was made public, I knew what I wanted to write. It took a single day to plot it all out and another to find my character lookalikes on Pinterest. ( you can see that page here: https://www.pinterest.com/peggyjaeger/vanilla-with-a-twist/

Within 3 weeks the first draft was done, another week to polish, and then I submitted and received a contract in less than a month.

Peggy, tell us about Vanilla With A Twist.

Tandy Blakemore spends her days running her New England ice cream parlor, single-parenting her teenage son, and trying to keep her head above financial water. No easy feat when the shop’s machinery is aging and her son is thinking about college. Tandy hasn’t had a day off in a decade and wonders if she’ll ever be able to live a worry-free life.

Engineer Deacon Withers is on an enforced vacation in the tiny seaside town of Beacher’s Cove. Overworked, stressed, and lonely, he walks into Tandy’s shop for a midday ice cream cone and gets embroiled in helping her fix a broken piece of equipment.

Can the budding friendship that follows lead to something everlasting?

Buy Links:

Amazon  Nook   Applebooks

A sneak peek between the page of Vanilla With A Twist:

For a few moments, she regarded him with a look his mother would have called insightful. The corners of her eyes narrowed, she dipped her chin a hair, and she pulled her mouth into another appealing pout he was tempted to kiss.

“I bet,” she said after a long, drawn-out sigh, “you were the kind of kid who took apart clocks and fans and vacuum cleaners to see how they worked.”

“It was more washing machines and lawn mowers and anything with a motor, but yeah. I was.”

She shook her head, her own lips forming a lopsided grin. “Your poor mother.”

“She survived.”

Tandy rolled her eyes and shot her hands to her hips. “So it’s working again?” She thrust her chin at the ice cream machine.

“For now.”

“Okay, well, I can live with for now. And you think you know the real reason it’s been acting up?”

“I definitely do. But like I said, the water to the machine needs to be shut off to fix it.”

“Okay. Well, we close at nine.”

“I’ll come back a little before then. Get things ready. Is that okay with you?”

“I guess it’ll have to be.” She bit down on the inside of her cheek as her brows pulled together. “And you’re sure you want to do this?”

“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t offer, Tandy.”

Why her reluctance to have him help was such a turn-on was something he considered while he waited for his ice cream.

About the Author:

Peggy Jaeger is a contemporary romance writer who writes Romantic Comedies about strong women, the families who support them, and the men who can’t live without them. If she can make you cry on one page and bring you out of tears rolling with laughter the next, she’s done her job as a writer!

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, she brings all topics of daily 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’s created the families she wanted as that lonely child.

When she’s not writing Peggy is usually painting, crafting, scrapbooking or decoupaging old steamer trunks she finds at rummage stores and garage sales.

A lifelong and avid romance reader and writer, Peggy is a member of RWA and her local New Hampshire RWA Chapter.

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??!”

Social Media links:

Website: http://peggyjaeger.com/

Blog: http://peggyjaeger.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Peggy-Jaeger-Author/825914814095072?ref=bookmarks

Twitter: https://twitter.com/peggy_jaeger

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/13478796.Peggy_Jaeger

BookBub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/peggy-jaeger

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDR8RRIlssIyS0FYZWeGqsg/videos?view_as=subscriber

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peggyjaeger_author/

Pintrest: https://www.pinterest.com/peggyjaeger/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peggy-jaeger-296ab878/

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00T8E5LN0

Authors database: https://authorsdb.com/community/15814-peggy-jaeger

Triberr: https://triberr.com/tribe/strong-women–loving-men

It was wonderful having you with us today.  Please feel free to stop by anytime. Good Luck with Vanilla With A Twist!

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