Veronica Medina - The Journey of a Medieval Fantasy Writer

In this conversation, Veronica Medina shares her extensive journey as a medieval fantasy writer, discussing her experiences with self-publishing, the challenges of balancing writing with caregiving, and the importance of personal writing. She emphasizes the need for health and relationships to take precedence over writing, while also providing valuable advice for aspiring writers.

Quote:

“Take care of yourselves while you're doing it."

Takeaways: 

• Veronica's journey into writing began after being laid off.
• Personal writing has been a significant part of her process.
• Maintaining balance in life is crucial for writers.

Resources:

Website https://www.evmtreasures.com/

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/E.-V.-Medina/author/B008MQSTCA?

Realmwalkers: https://www.amazon.com/Realmwalkers-World-Tiaera-Book-3-ebook/dp/B007DLLKIK/

No Ordinary Wrangler: https://www.amazon.com/No-Ordinary-Wrangler-V-Medina-ebook/dp/B09HL9GDY4/

Chapters

• 0:00 WWW Intro
• 0:28 Veronica's Writing Journey Begins
• 6:18 The Evolution of Personal Writing
• 11:16 Balancing Life and Writing
• 16:22 The Role of Community in Writing
• 22:00 Navigating Health and Writing
• 26:54 The Importance of Prioritizing Life
• 32:14 The Balancing Act of Writing and Life
• 35:34 Navigating Relationships and Writing Aspirations
• 37:31 Health, Faith, and Writing: Finding Priorities
• 39:27 Escapism Through Writing: A Therapeutic Outlet
• 41:07 Advice for Aspiring Writers: Moderation and Balance
• 44:43 The Benefits of Caregiving and Personal Fulfillment
• 47:32 WWW Outro

Transcript

Jane Jones (00:28)

Morning, everyone, and welcome to We Women Writers. This morning, we have with us Veronica Medina, and she's a medieval fantasy writer, blogger, graphic designer, and illustrator. She's also an internet content writer in the past, and she was known under the pseudonym, Leafy Greens. Veronica has written five books. She self-publishes them, and the first of which is Realm Walkers, and the most recent is No Ordinary Wrangler. Welcome, Veronica, to We Women Writers.

Veronica Medina (01:03)

Thank you so much for inviting me.

Jane Jones (01:05)

Thank you. We appreciate your generosity and your time coming on. I know you're really busy, and I know the story that's gonna come out is part of your journey, but please tell us about your writing journey.

Veronica Medina (01:20)

I wanted to be a writer for years, at this point decades. I went to Florida and tried to go to school there, went to college, took a couple of writing classes, but that did not pan out until I was moved back to the Southwest and I got married and...my husband and I were doing well, and I was still doing some writing personally, but I've always wanted to do a book. And I got laid off after a while. We were going through a recession, and I got laid off. And instead of panicking, my husband encouraged me to write that book since I was going to have some time to myself to finally do it.

He made sure that all the bills were paid despite my worries. And he even got me a laptop and encouraged me. And I started working in earnest my very first book. But even then, I was a bit worried about it because I didn't know what I was doing. Self-publishing was still very new back in the 80s. And so, I collaborated with a friend. His name was Jack Shepherd. We collaborated in this book. And so, part of it is his, part of it is mine. I did most of the graphics. Did the covers, everything. And all the illustrations inside the map, we created a world called Tierra, which in Spanish, the words, it's not spelt this way, but it means earth. So, it was a parallel earth, named Tierra. I could we collaborated and created the entire world there. We made continents, towns, cities, everything, everything was completely created. And we based our story on this mystical old age, middle-age world, and that's where we got started, and it got published in 2011. So, my first book came out in 2011.

Jane Jones (03:49)

So, you started this in the 80s, and it got published in 2011.

Veronica Medina (03:56)

Oh, hang on a second. Let me make sure I'm not lying here. Yeah, 2011 was published. Yeah, it took a while. It took a while.

Jane Jones (04:10)

Okay, so there's so much that I know we need to cover. Let's circle back to that, because I've got some things I would like to ask you about, but continue, and we'll circle back.

Veronica Medina (04:20)

Okay, so anyway, it took, you know, a few years, I didn't get laid off until about 88. And so, it got finally published. And then after that, I decided to make a smaller book called The Priestess and the Raven Knight. And it is a novella, and I said goodbye to Jack Sheppard. We went our separate ways because he got too busy with his church work, and he got married and got busy being a husband, learning to be a husband. So, I decided to put my experience to work, and I came up with this little tiny novella, also based on the world of Tierra. And it's also illustrated. I also did the artwork on the book cover and everything, the blurb, everything. I do everything on my books, which is why I like to self-publish. I did get approached by a publisher for Realmwalkers. I did get approached by them, but it was, it put me off to using the publisher because they started talking about making changes to my story, making changes to my characters, making changes to my cover, making changes everywhere. And I told them this is what it's all about to be published. I don't want any part of it. I want control of my product. I think it's a beautiful book cover, just as it is. And I like my illustrations. You can't take them. And it just really put me off to going with the traditional route of publishing. And I said, These I created, these are my babies, you know, I'll either succeed with them or I will fail with them, but they are mine. And so I decided self-publishing was for me.

Jane Jones (06:18)

Yeah, yeah. Okay, you said earlier that your writing was personal writing. Could you help us explore that, the idea of personal writing and what it was for you, what it meant to you, and your experience of it?

Veronica Medina (06:34)

Like, I am not exactly sure what you're asking for? Like, where do I get my ideas?

Jane Jones (06:39)

No, no, well, no, you said you did personal writing, and when you got married, didn't publish, you didn't do active writing. You were just doing personal writing. What do you mean by personal writing?

Veronica Medina (06:53)

Okay. Yeah. Oh, you should see the notebooks I have before I started writing Realm Workers. I have like, I had like about 30 notebooks, three-ring binders, and they are all filled with stories that I came up with while I was gaming. I am an RPG gamer.

I have been gaming for about four decades now. I play in a game called EverQuest 2, or at least I used to, now I don't. But I've been playing that game for years, ever since it got started. And the ideas just came to me while I was in there with this character. And then I made other characters, and stories started popping into my head. And some of them were so good to me that I had to write them down. I would either log them or I would write them down, type them up, and put them in a binder because I kept saying to myself, one day, just maybe one day, I will finally get around to making a book. People were encouraging me in the game, saying, Ronnie, you really need to write a book.

And I'm like, well, you know, maybe one day, right now is not the time. But that's what I did. I have like, I still have about 10 of those binders left. I've said goodbye to many of them and thrown them away, and got rid of them. Anyway, that's how it all started. I still have a lot of notebooks that I'll probably never do anything with. I flip through them every once in a while just to have a giggle because I captured some very funny dialogue in that game. And I keep saying to myself, I'm going to make a book out of this one. I'm going to make a book out of this one. It's not going to happen, not with my eyes the way they are right now. Just doing something like this is hard on my eyes. This is only one, two, three, four, five, 10 pages. And the writing is huge so that I can see it well enough, even with glasses. 10 pages and it's hard. 

Jane Jones (09:26)

Getting the ideas, you still have the ideas, getting them onto the pages now, and then working with them, because of your eyesight is a little more difficult.

Veronica Medina (09:35)

Very much so. It requires…writing stories or writing a book requires a lot of focus. You have to focus and block out all distractions. can't do that. I can't focus. My eyes get tired after an hour's worth. And by the time you get into what I call the zone and you're rattling away on your word processor, your computer,

Jane Jones (09:58)

This is all.

Veronica Medina (10:05)

By the time you get to that, your eyes are giving out on you, and everything looks blurry. you know throw up your hands and say, well, that's that. I'm done. I'm done for a while.

Jane Jones (10:18)

I had a gentleman a long time ago, I helped him write his memoirs. He was telling me one day, he was quite aged and he was, you know, finding it difficult. And I said to him, when he was telling me about something that is getting to be a pattern with him that was particularly frustrating. And I said to him, I said, well, Grandpa John, what do you do? He looked at me like I had lost my mind. And he said, Well, I just keep on going. So what you said reminded me of him. He was just a really lovely gentleman. You've got this difficulty, but you just kind of keep on going. You rest, but you can't do it. You see you can come back at it again, which is a...I want to say a lesson, it's not really it's for me. It's an experience because you, I harken back to something else to remind me, and hopefully to remind the listeners that is at times when we've felt like that. Maybe it's not the same as with our eyes or with somebody aging and vitality dropping. but cause keep on going, just keep doing it, and you keep doing that, were you a gamer before you went to Florida?

Veronica Medina (11:48)

Yes.

Jane Jones (11:49)

Okay, and you had these stories and then you go to Florida and that but that didn't work out so well. What does that mean? It didn't work out so well

Veronica Medina (11:58)

The reason why it failed was I had to go through a divorce. And yeah, that pretty much uplifted my entire life. When my husband and I divorced, I had to find a job fast because we were separating. And that took all my, that became my priority. Even though I was going to college, I finished the class, but my priority was, How am I gonna support myself? And everything had to go into finding a new job, which I did, found a great job, but it didn't pay the bills. And I knew that eventually we were gonna have to separate, and I was gonna have to move back to the South West. There’s a lot of up… then I had a lot of medical problems, had to have a hysterectomy. I mean, the life was just a mess.

Jane Jones (12:54)

I liken it like this up and down. You're going through this like, The other way I liken it is you're going through life and you're one of those little wagons with the little red sides on them. You're holding on to the sides, the little red sides, and then they break off like they because they are just sitting. And then you have to grab the wagon, and you're holding on. It was like.

Veronica Medina (13:19)

Yeah, yeah, it was crazy. It was really crazy. I took the books, I transferred them, I brought them over with me, all the 20-some odd notebooks, and just kept them and kept rewriting and rewriting and working on them as much as I could because it was still a dream. It was still a dream that one day I would write a book, and I didn't wanna lose the stories. So, I came back to Laughlin, met my second husband, and told him about my dreams. He saw my notebooks and everything. And we put them aside for right now. At that time, we got married in 1985. And then I worked until about 1988, when I got laid off. And that's when I began my journey putting together a novel with the encouragement of my current husband, Paul E. York.

And he bought me a laptop. He said I could do it. He said we will be fine. Have a little faith. And that he was ready for me to do what I wanted to do all my life. And I would get up and I would put in about eight hours a day or so, sometimes even more. He would go to work and come home, and I'd still be at the laptop. And I would be so engrossed in what I was doing that it became a bit of a joke because, you know, he didn't know when I was ever going to come out of the room. He poked his head in. Are you almost done? Almost done, almost done. I'll be there in just 15 minutes. Okay, 15 minutes. 

Jane Jones (15:04)

Yes. An hour and a half later.

Veronica Medina (15:09)

Are you gonna eat today? And that's what would happen. I would get into the zone on my computer and I could not stop because I was in zone and the story was flowing and my fingers were doing everything they could to keep up and it, you know, and I couldn't stop and if I did, I would be kind of frustrated because I'm like, you know, it's there, it's there and it wants out, you know, and I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I had to be reasonable and remember that I had a husband and a house to take care of. And, you know I had other responsibilities. Couldn't be all about writing, you know. And that's what it is like right now, too. Now I've got a senior couple living with us. And, you know, writing is now reserved for early morning hours when everybody's still in bed.

Jane Jones (16:10)

Okay, so you... You kept your dream, and it took a number of years. So, it kind of went under, not underground, but set aside, but it always came along with you.

Veronica Medina (16:31)

It was more of a hobby. It was like a hobby, you know, something that you pour time, effort, and money into, to create. And that was it. That was what it was. It was a it still is basically a hobby. Yeah, it's not my job. It's not my business. It's not bringing me major income of any kind. But it's, it's good for me for my soul for my mind. It helps me.

Jane Jones (16:58)

Staying active, absolutely. So, during the time when you got married in 85. Did you continue with the personal writing?

Veronica Medina (17:07)

Yes. And that's when I was dabbling with the content, the content articles, I was looking for ways to bring in a little bit of money on the internet. And I heard about people that could write, if you could upload and create a blog, put some ads on a blog, and then get a following, you can make a few dollars here and there. And that's what I was doing while I was starting work until I got laid off, starting work on my first book. And that's when I was doing the content.

Jane Jones (17:41)

Yeah. marketing. No, marketing, content.

Veronica Medina (17:51)

Articles, articles, anything that I was anything I could write about, even stories, little tiny stories. If it drew an interest and it brought in a few, you know, a few pennies, I wrote about it and put my writing to work. You know, sometimes they were travel logs, we will go to hotel, and I would take pictures of the hotel in our travels, and I write about the history of that hotel, and what we saw, and what we did. Whatever. I just wanted to write. I was a writer, and I wanted to write. So, I did.

Jane Jones (18:28)

Gotcha. Now you mentioned the senior couple that now lives in your home, and that's you and your husband, now caregivers for them. Is it your parents or his parents?

Veronica Medina (18:38)

My parents. My parents, yeah.

Jane Jones (18:41)

And we all know that that is, you know, that's a full-time job. For two people, that's a full-time job. And so you still find the time, as you said, you'd find the time in the morning, and the writing you're doing, it's still, again, your personal writing.

Veronica Medina (18:48)

Yeah, it is.

Jane Jones (19:05)

Do you share that? Because you're no longer part of the Lake Havasu City Writers' Group at this time, just on temporarily. And so do you ever share that with any of those people that you ever see or not on a critiquing level, but in terms of community?

Veronica Medina (19:26)

Not right now, the writing is strictly for myself and any friend who takes an interest in it. We have a couple of friends that we play bingo with or go out to dinner with, and whatever. And a couple of them have expressed an interest in my story. So, I share the stories with them just to kind of get a feeling of any kind of feedback, basically.

The Lake Havasu City Writers Group, they were fundamental in getting Realmwalkers and these other books published. Very. I should give more credit to them because they were the ones that critiqued my pages. I would come in on our meeting days and present chapters, pages of my chapters, and they would get in there with their pencils and stuff. It's a critique group. We would go in there and critique and mark up and copy correct anything that they've any errors that they found. They were they were my beta readers that we call beta readers now. And I owe a lot to them for helping me with Realmwalkers, my very first book. And then Priestess and the Raven Knight, Fayre Sea. This is the last one I did with them, Fayre Sea, my mermaid book, with them before I had to take a step away. They wanted me to stay and I wanted to participate, but critiquing takes a long time. And what we do is say there's 10 members present and they all have stories. Everybody got a copy of that story. So I had to find time during the two weeks apart to critique and read these stories, which I did not have time for. Plus, work on new material to present, make copies of it, and round and round and round, twice a month, write stories, critique stories. It was very time-consuming. I finally said, I can't do this. can't, you know, life is just too hard right now.

I can barely write, let alone do critiques. So, we'll see you when we can.

Jane Jones (21:54)

That is a really important example of something that you... I want to say you appear to be a good at, you only appear because you are really good at boundaries, really good at being clear within yourself what needs to be done, and focusing on the most important thing at the time. And even though you have other things that you want to do that are close to your heart, you realize that this one needs to be done first. So, an example is you're separating, you get a job, and you stop the, your personal writing. You finished the College, but you stopped. Then, then it became clear that you were going to have to move somewhere else because the income wasn't going to be enough for you. So, you move and you carry that writing with you.

But you'd never let go of things even though there's another thing that's a priority ahead of everything else.

Veronica Medina (22:57)

Yeah, relationships are very important. And I envy those famous writers, those mostly men, that were given that opportunity to lock themselves away in their rooms for hours and hours and hours without a care. And the wife didn't mind because that's what it was. That's how it is. And it's totally OK with her. I treasured that. Sometimes I would resent Lee a little bit for cutting me off and limiting my ability to write when I was in the zone, and I needed to keep writing. He would bring me back to real life. And sometimes there was resentment there, and sometimes he resented my passion for writing. So, one needs to keep in mind what's...ultimately important. Am I going to go to bed with my book or am I going to go to bed with my husband? You know, and you got to set time limits on yourself. Also discovered in my writing journey that it can take a terrible toll on your health. And I paid the price by becoming pre-diabetic, gaining 35 pounds. I was up to 175 pounds from sitting so much, typing away. My eyes, part of the damage in my eyes, I owe it to the long hours in front of the computer. So now I'm paying the price with surgery and the health problems, the weakness of my eyes.

I had to go on a strict diet to get all that weight off and avoid diabetes as much as possible. And again, it's all because of those long hours I sat down and worked on daily basis trying to get my books done for several years.

Jane Jones (25:01)

So, you’re…there was a certain amount of  franticness, some  hyper focus. But now what you're doing is more personal writing. It's more relaxed. It is less frantic, and you still can get in the zone; you have to separate out and have long periods of time where you aren't doing that.

Veronica Medina (25:39)

Exactly. I have to restrict this to a more manageable pace because I don't want to regain my weight. I'm not in a book fix. A lot of commitment, a lot of commitment. And I didn't just write the stories. I also had to do the artwork. I also had to do the formatting. I also had to do the book cover. I also had to do the blurb in the back. I also had to do the marketing. The materials, the brochures, the bookmarkers, I did it all. And that took time and effort. wasn't just writing a story and say, okay, it's done. Let's send it to the publisher. It took hours and hours every day, every week to get this finished item to look as good.

Jane Jones (26:22)

Mm-hmm.  Yes.

Veronica Medina (26:37)

You know, as you can make it. And then the artwork, that took time.

Jane Jones (26:44)

Yes, so what I'm hearing is that there is this dream you had and comes along, and that there you're experiencing a cost, and writers who want to just write, there is this thing out there where these places will say, You want to write a book? You can write a book in 90 days. You can do this. You can do that.

That's not the experience for you. Experience for you is that it's immersive for you. There are lots of books out there that are being written that are good, and they're written in these sort of speed kind of ways, but that's not for you. And I kind of wonder how many people out there are frustrated by this idea that I should be able to write this book in 90 days or in however many days. And I don't want to be really careful. I don't intend any judgment or condemnation about any of these programs because they work for lots of people. But how many people out there are frustrated by these programs? because they are in this context for women, they’re mothers, they're working, or they’re mothers and they're working, or their women and they're taking care of their parents or a sibling, or there's lots of things happening in life where they don't have the time to sit down because the 90 days is just not something they can do because they have these competing priorities in their head. So, your way of working through it has been total immersion, or it's on the side.

Veronica Medina (28:41)

Yeah, this is where traditional publishing may be more beneficial to some writers. I've met writers that all they can do is type up a manuscript. That's all they can do. They don't have any marketing background. They don't have any artistic background, no graphics background. This is all they can do. So, this is where the traditional route would probably be best or if they use a service that's online where they say give us your manuscript and we'll make you a book. I think Amazon does it also but there's a lot of companies out there that just send us a manuscript we'll take care of the rest and you pay us X number of dollars you know it's all it's not done for free you know so everybody's journey is going to be different yeah and I had the training and the education to do the graphics and to do some of the marketing. That was what I did before I became a writer. So, it was natural for me to just get busy with the brochures, get busy with the business cards, and the bookmarkers, and any other paraphernalia that I use to advertise. But that's me. We all have our journey.

I'll have our creative journey. I just want to warn the ladies out there that want to do this. Yes, it can be done. If this is your passion, if this is your dream, do it one way or another until you can fulfill it to your satisfaction. But don't forget what's really, truly important in life, your faith, your relationship with your husband, family, and your health, and not necessarily in that order, because you will pay. There are a lot of classic writers out there. They got drunk. They killed themselves. They committed suicide that had such horrible lives, but they came out with these classic writings like Edgar Allen Poe. You know, they came out with these amazing books and literature that we're all, you know, enjoying, but they did it at great physical sacrifice. They became alcoholics, they became depressed, they killed themselves. And it's really tragic to read about some of these authors. And it can happen. I started gaining weight, I was headed for diabetes. You gotta stay focused on what really matters. And if this has to go by the wayside a little bit, do it. You're not gonna regret it. You're not going to regret taking care of your health or your marriage.

Jane Jones (31:37)

You talk about this great swath of time of being focused. Is it possible or how, yeah, is it possible to be like, there's some things that are being focused for like 90 minutes and then developing yourself into a pattern of, be focused for 90 minutes and then I will go to work or I'll come home and then get the kids there or the kids will come back from school or the kids are at school. And then you take a part of that day, and then have like multiple priorities. And then each one of them pops up, and you take care of it, and then it's okay. And then this one pops up, and it's back, and it's like a, there's like a musical instrument kind of thing. like if it pops up and it makes a tune, but you gotta be able to hit each note when it comes. And if you don't hit the note, the piece won't be what you want it to be.

Veronica Medina (32:41)

Exactly. Yes. It's very doable. I've heard stories like, and I don't know how true this is, but I heard that J.K. Rowling was writing her Harry Potter series while she was still working, you know, and she still managed to find time to, you know, write her Harry Potter books. I'm like, that's incredible, you know, to have a full-time job and still be able to find time to take care of your family and do your writing and come out with a series of books and become famous.

Jane Jones (33:15)

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her books while she was cooking. She had a notebook in a drawer by her kitchen, and she would do something and then she would write while she was waiting for something to, and then she would put it away and and that's how she wrote. And I think it's a really I find it's really important to look at lots of different people and say that was that person's experience of their life. And as you bring up the people that they got so immersed that they just lost touch with reality in terms of the everyday workaday world, and their lives unraveled. And so you, like your first husband, you're doing this writing. Was it with your first husband that he would be unhappy with your writing?

Veronica Medina (34:06)

No, because he never really, he never was really deprived like my current husband was. I went to, I was still going to writer's class when my husband announced, this is gonna take too long. I was kind of hoping that you would have gotten your book out by now and you'd be famous, rich and famous, and independent. I can see now that this is gonna take a while. I want a divorce.

Jane Jones (34:13)

Gotcha.

Veronica Medina (34:40)

You said I could go to school and become a writer. And he's like, yeah, well, you know, it's not working out for me. Okay.

Jane Jones (34:51)

So, there's a balance there, and he'd met his threshold, he was done. And there's a certain amount of thankfulness you have with the clarity that comes. It's not pleasant and it's incredibly upsetting and upheaval of your life, but having clarity is really good, it's really helpful. Otherwise the upset continues and you get very...

Veronica Medina (35:22)

It was meant to be because I had to meet my second husband one day and be blessed by him and be loved by him.

Jane Jones (35:34)

He's not, not the focus, but he said they, you, they, you're getting to the point where you are continuing to write, even though you're not publishing. And it isn't that that door is closed, but that right now there is this priority of your parents, and both you and your husband are on page with that, you're on track with that, and you will see how things go.

Veronica Medina (36:10)

Yeah, yeah, that's why I still have my stories. I still have that need, that hunger, that passion. You do what you can, even if you can't make another book. I've got people coming to me at book signings all the time saying, When are you going to come up with something new? And I have to explain, you know, my eyes, it's become very difficult for my eyes. I can't focus and scrutinize my writing like I used to, and this might be it for me. But I'm still writing stories, and who knows what may become of those? You never know. I might be able to compile them into another book, or maybe even be in a place where I can hire somebody to help me process all of this and turn it into a book. You never know.

Jane Jones (37:01)

Mm-hmm.

Veronica Medina (37:02)

But you keep your doors open and you don't stop doing what you love within meanings within the range of what's a priority. And like I said, health, relationships, i.e. marriage, and, and what was the third one? Yeah. Your health is, I mean, what's the point if you can't, you know, if you don't take care of yourself and you make yourself sick, you know, are you going to create them?

Jane Jones (37:31)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Veronica Medina (37:34)

Your faith, three things. Your faith, your health, and your marriage. Or relationships, whatever relationships that

Jane Jones (37:41)

Yeah, I think the striking a balance is important that you have found and now deal with the health ramifications.

Veronica Medina (37:48)

Mmm-hmm, I want to keep that weight off as much as possible and avoid diabetes at all. My husband's diabetic. I see what it does to him. Our dog's diabetic. I didn't even know dogs could get diabetes. They're diabetic. And so, we're all struggling over here to try to stay healthy. And I hate to say this, too much of a good thing is going to have consequences, including writing. I encourage women all the time to write wherever they can, however they can, for as long as they can, but just take care of themselves while they're doing it because there's more to life than writing. Is, I mean, some people would disagree, but to me, you know, faith, health, and marriage are right up there, and everything needs to be balanced accordingly.

Jane Jones (38:54)

Gotcha. How would you say that writing has benefited you?

Veronica Medina (39:01)

Escapism, just like the role-playing game. It gives me a chance to, I can't take a vacation and I can't go away for a weekend, but I have this rich imagination full of characters and places that I like to go to. Some people read for that escapism. Some people play games for that escapism. I play games and I write because I love bringing my characters to life and going on interesting places and doing things that go beyond my kitchen, go beyond my den, go beyond my bedroom. Mentally, it's therapeutic, because I can take a break from real life.

Jane Jones (39:41)

Mm-hmm. Gotcha. Do you ever go for walks? Do you ever walk and think creatively when you're walking?

Veronica Medina (39:59)

Mm-hmm. Yes, I do. I still have to walk the dog. I still have to try to get in 6,000 steps a day to maintain my weight. Yes, go swimming, take bubble baths, all of that. My mind is working on what I did today in the game world, and what can I do with that character, and, you know, what kind of story can I make this time? And when I...I am sufficiently motivated, then I put it down. As soon as I see that there's a story there, it's time to put it down.

Jane Jones (40:38)

Gotcha. And it's at a more leisurely pace. Yeah. 

Veronica Medina (40:47)

Even if it's just writing it down on a few notes on a paper pad in the kitchen or in the bathtub, write down the few notes and then stick it on my desk so that the next morning when I've got some quiet time, I can start fleshing out the story.

Jane Jones (41:05)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Veronica Medina (41:07)

So, it's all doable. It's all doable. You can't be too busy to write. It's all doable. You can find time to write if that's what you really want to do.

Jane Jones (41:17)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you, well, I was gonna ask you what your advice to writers out there would be based on your experiences. What would?

Veronica Medina (41:29)

Again, but health, faith, marriage, relationships, important relationships, keep everything in moderation, but keep your health, faith, and relationships above everything else. It's got to have its place in that hierarchy because if you don't, you're going to sacrifice something that's far more important. You're going to find this out when it's too late, perhaps I caught it before I got diabetes. When I saw that I was going up to almost 180 pounds. And I realized it was all those long hours at the computer. All those long hours. I only had me to blame. That's what I need to warn the ladies out there that want to do this kind of thing. They can just write as little logs, little tiny things. They can do, if they can't even do

Jane Jones (42:12)

Mm-hmm.

Veronica Medina (42:24)

Do something like a short story, you can always just try journaling. Journaling is wonderful for that. I'm working on the month of September. is my planner. This is how, as you were talking about, we keep things organized so that you can find the time to write. And even if it's just little blurbs, daily blurbs, to-do lists, this is how you make the time to do this if you can. So I advocate journaling as one way of doing it, keeping a calendar and writing whatever you can, your thoughts, your wishes, your dreams, your daily events, so that you can just get it out there. Another way of writing when you can't really spend a lot of time.

Jane Jones (43:08)

Mm-hmm.

Veronica Medina (43:30)

I have like, I started this in 2020 when we had the pandemic and everything. I wanted to document the pandemic. And I've kept it up ever since because now it helps me keep everything. Like you said, everything is scheduled. Everything has a time for it. Everything is planned out for it. Dinner's out, time with husband, take care of parents and then do my God time, my writing time in the wee hours of the morning. And if I have to get up at four o'clock to do it, then I have to get up at four o'clock to do it. But I'm at their disposal. When they're awake, it's time to get breakfast going. It's time to get back to real life.

Jane Jones (44:18)

Yeah, yeah, because they're very important people and needs that they have. And I wonder how many, just as an aside, I wonder how much in supporting others in their needs as an aging parent, there's very real needs. And I think, I believe that for a person to provide and support and help for that person's needs has an equal benefit internally to the person who's doing the service, who's doing the caregiving. And it could be hugely taxing. I do believe there's a huge benefit to being of service that way. To a person in need, whatever that need is. When a person, it falls to them to do that, it's, there's a benefit to it. So, or do you find that when you have this caregiving that you're doing for your parents, and is it kind of an escaping from that? Or this is just, again, just going into your own world because that's a really place that you'd like to be.

Veronica Medina (45:37)

It depends on the on the caregiver. Some people have very limited lives. They don't have passions. They don't have hobbies. They don't have outside interests. And they would probably benefit the most out of being caregivers, because it gives them something valuable to do. Caregiving is important. It is respectable and for such people that don't have a lot of things to occupy their time and have a lot of time in their hands, it's a perfect way of feeling needed, feeling important and needed and loved and fulfilled. But it's not for everybody. If they do have interests, outside interests, clubs, organizations. It's a balancing act.

Jane Jones (46:34)

Yes, yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Okay, so thank you, Veronica, for your time and giving us your time and for your husband too, his patience, and because I do this is a joint project that you guys, in your life together, you work.

Veronica Medina (46:50)

I was very lucky. Yeah, very lucky to have met him.

Jane Jones (46:54)

Yeah, well, and I venture to suggest or to put forward that I think he feels equally as lucky to have met you.

Veronica Medina (47:04)

Thank you, for what you're doing for us. I really appreciate this opportunity to discuss my little journey in writing. It's interesting, and I hope it's interesting to your followers.

Jane Jones (47:17)

I believe it will be. Yeah, thanks. And I hope you have a really wonderful day and a good day with your mom and dad.

Veronica Medina (47:25)

God bless you. Take care of yourself, Jane

Jane Jones (47:28)

I will, you too. God bless. Bye bye.