How to Turn Your Weirdest Experiences Into Published Books | Jessica Freeburg

Jessica Freeburg turned childhood experiences seeing ghosts into a thriving author platform with nearly 20 years of writing experience and 14 published books exploring paranormal legends, ghost stories, and dark history. As co-host of Darkness Radio and a certified mindfulness coach, Jessica shares how she built her business by writing what she knows, embracing the creepy and unexplained stories most people avoid. In this episode, she reveals her strategy for producing 3–4 narrative nonfiction books per year with co-writer Natalie Fowler by transforming real newspaper reports of paranormal encounters into compelling short stories using Google Docs and color-coded spreadsheets. Jessica also discusses how she built an audience before her first book deal by starting a ghost hunting group of creative professionals, the haunted family heirloom that caused unexplainable activity in her home, and how her creative retreats blend mindfulness, art, writing, and ghost hunts to help people tap into their most human trait: creativity. If you've ever felt your weirdest experiences or deepest passions couldn't become a business, this episode proves that building a platform around what makes you different can lead to a fulfilling and profitable career.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

You know, really what I would share with people is just find the things you're passionate about and find a way to do something fun with them. And like I tell my kids all the time, just make this journey of life. It's so short, no matter how long we get to live it. If we get to be a hundred years old, it's still gonna go by in a blink of an eye. Um just have fun. Let the goal be to have fun, and I feel like everything else just falls into place from there.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Hey there, business enthusiasts. Welcome to the Chills Podcast, brought to you by All Weather Roof. Because just like a sturdy roof, our conversations are built to last. I'm your host, Brent Loberg, and we're about to dive into the world of business, family, and the moments that give us those exhilarating chills. Ever wonder what keeps successful people inspired? Well, get ready to find out as we chat with some fantastic all weather customers, partners, vendors, and friends. We'll explore their triumphs, challenges, and maybe even some unexpected secrets. After all, business is not just about numbers, it's about the people behind them. So grab your metaphorical popcorn and join us on this journey. Get ready to be inspired. Maybe even get a few chills of your own. This is the Chills Podcast. Let the goosebumps begin.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

So tell us about your business or introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_03 1:11

Okay, well, my name is Jessica Freeberg. I am an author, and I've been writing for I guess probably like close to 20 years. Um had an agent for about 15 of those years. And um, I do have a day job too, though. So I kind of juggle two different careers. So like when you guys reached out and connected with me, I was like, do they want to talk about writing or do they want to talk about digital marketing? I wasn't sure which hat I was gonna wear here today.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

So I guess whatever one you prefer. I mean, I I kind of like the the writing one because it's a little bit different. I saw it, it was looked at your website, and you have a lot of books and some paranormal stuff.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

Yeah, that's fun side.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

Yeah, let's do the fun one.

SPEAKER_03 1:50

Let's do the fun one, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

And Will does our digital marketing anyways, so he's kind of our expert here for me, anyways.

SPEAKER_03 1:57

We can share tips, please.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:59

Yeah, so I've been doing that for a while. I also do a podcast, I co-host a podcast called Darkness Radio, which makes it sound really creepy. And um, it kind of is. We do a lot on the paranormal side, but I tend to do the the um weekly episode that's called Dumb Crimes and Stupid Criminals, which is on Tuesdays. And um Tim Tim Dennis is the main host of the show, and he just basically tells me the horrible things that people have done in the world, mostly in Florida. So Florida man is a real thing. And I just react, which is usually I'm disgusted or laughing hysterically. So it's just kind of a fun, fun thing, lighthearted.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

So tell tell me a little bit more about your books. I thought you have at least 10 on there.

SPEAKER_03 2:41

Yeah, I think I have 14 out now. We just had four more that released in August. Okay. And um, I started out my career thinking I would write picture books because I had another life of being a teacher and I have a degree in elementary education. And I was staying home with my kids and started writing, and I thought, oh, I should write picture books. That would be so easy. Turns out those are probably the hardest books in the world to write. So you have to tell a good story in like 500 words, and okay. I could never get them shorter than like 5,000. I'd go to conferences and take it and put it in front of an editor or an agent, and they'd be like, You have a great voice. You should think about writing a novel, because this is you're not a picture book writer. Not with this anyway. So um, yeah, so we kind of sat down and started writing my first novel. When my kids were really little, they'd go to bed at night. I'd stay up late and write all hours of the night and um got my agent with that. And that um was just a story of a girl who could see spirits and can kind of tell the difference between good and bad spirits. So that discerning of spirits was a big part of that story, and she was able to like resolve a crime mystery that happened in the town that she was living in. So that was my first book. And then somehow I kind of fell into like retelling legends. So a lot of my books right now are monster legends, ghost stories. Um, we have another one coming up that we have to finish for release in 2026 that is about witches of the Northeast. So that one is more focusing on like the history. So everything I write is kind of dark history or dark legends. I've also written nonfiction books for kids about um like the Haitian earthquake that happened, um, the Holocaust, the Titanic sinking. So my brand is if it's dark and sad or scary, I like it. I'm here for it.

SPEAKER_01 4:33

So so where did you get the inspiration for all this? Like your all your subjects, I guess.

SPEAKER_03 4:38

Well, you know, I like I said, I started out with that novel about a girl who could see spirits. And when I put the first 10 pages of it in front of the person who would eventually become my agent, um, she got super excited about it. And then I had to hurry up and finish it so I could give her the rest of it. And when I did, she wanted to work together. And she said, now I need you to read this book called Get Known Before the Book Deal. And so I went home and read that book, and it was all about platform building. And it seemed to be geared more toward people that wrote nonfiction, and I had written fiction, but it was really about like taking what you have and what your audience is going to be and building a platform for that audience so that you can connect with them in a really natural and organic way. So um I thought, well, I wrote a book about a girl who can see dead people, so obviously I need to start going ghost hunting. So um I formed a ghost hunting group of creative professionals, so we're all artists and authors, and we go to different locations across the US for paranormal investigations for creative inspiration.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 5:48

And so just kind of starting with that, I started to build this platform and became known as the creepy lady.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Okay. Have you ever been to the one in New Orleans?

SPEAKER_03 5:56

I have not been to New Orleans yet. I need to go.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

I've been been there, and my wife and I did a ghost tour there. Yeah. It was super interesting.

SPEAKER_03 6:04

My co-writer is going in, I think, next month, actually. And I'm like, Can you just put me in your suitcase? We need to be going together.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Yeah, you should. So back up to your, I guess, your childhood. Did you like to watch like scary movies? Did you like where did where did this all come from?

SPEAKER_03 6:17

Well, now I have to really wave my freak flag because um one of the things I learned. So when I started to decide I was gonna write, I joined a professional writers organization. And I my personality is to just to go big or go home. So of course I offered to like be the regional leader for the organization. So I was one of the re regional leaders of the organization for about 10 years. And so we would bring in editors and agents from New York often, um, because that's where publishing lives um and dies. And um they would always tell us to write what you know. And so I had a lot of experiences growing up where I would see ghosts, and so it was a very natural thing for me to be interested in.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 7:04

I didn't like to watch scary movies as a kid because I felt like sometimes I was living a scary movie, so it was not something I gravitated toward.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

And the only reason I asked is because I was the guy that stayed up till midnight watching like Freddie Krueger and you know, Friday the 13th with my mom.

SPEAKER_03 7:18

I hated those movies. Um, but yeah, so I was always the kid at the campfire with my friends in high school who had a lot of great ghost stories, but they just were like actual real stories of my life.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 7:29

So yeah. If it seems natural to write a story about a girl that could see dead people.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 7:40

Where I was just like, why is there a lady walking into the bathroom and I'm home alone? That's weird.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

Sure. So these stories are they they seem like maybe they're part fiction, but part nonfiction too?

SPEAKER_03 7:51

Just kind of Well, a lot of our books are what I call narrative nonfiction, um, which is basically the legend books, we're taking reality, we're taking true stories. We're doing a lot of research to find encounters with monsters and ghosts that have been reported in newspapers, which you'd be surprised how many stories are in newspapers about people having these type of encounters. And we're taking those stories and creating kind of a narrative around them. So I kind of think of it as like if you're watching uh a reenactment on one of those shows on the travel channel, you know, and they have actors recreating a real encounter that someone had. It's kind of like that. So we have the wiggle room to kind of create dialogue that would be logical in those scenarios. Okay. But they're but they're nonfiction retellings of creepy encounters.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Wow. I I gotta I gotta hear a couple of your real life encounters.

SPEAKER_03 8:48

Oh gosh. Let me think. I think one of my favorite ones um was when I was in, I would say probably early middle school or late elementary. I think it's probably early middle school. And I was at my dad's, my my dad and my stepmom lived on a farm um out in the country. And the other part of my family, my mom and my stepdad, we also lived on a farm. My stepdad was a cattle, had cattle, and my dad had pigs. And so I was kind of just the farm kid, just depended on, you know, which farm I was at. I was always at a farm. But, anyways, I was in the in the old farmhouse. At that time, it was over a hundred years old, so it was quite old, quite an old house. Um, and my dad was gone. My stepmom was upstairs working on some art. She's an artist, and she was up there, and we were the only two people home. And I was sitting downstairs in this little den where we had the TV. And the den opened up to another, like more formal sitting room, and then in the front of it, like conversely, it there was a hallway that went to a bathroom, and you would go down to the kitchen. And kind of where beside that door that would go down the hallway toward the kitchen was our TV. So I had that opening, you know, here in front of me, and on the right side of me, I had the opening into the other room, right?

unknown 10:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 10:06

So I'm sitting there. Okay, my my dad's side of the family is very religious. And so um we weren't really allowed to watch a lot of television. That was, you know, just part of them trying to shelter us from the world. And so we had marbles that summer that we only had so many marbles a week that we would be able to use to watch a show, and we pretty much could only watch like PBS. I gave um my bar my marble to watch a show, and so like this was a thing, like this was one of my few shows of the week. I was totally engaged in whatever TBS shows, probably like a Bob Ross or something. And I'm totally engaged in watching it, and I see out of the corner of my eye someone come in from that living room area. So they come in from the right and they walk and turn and go down that hallway. So they go through the doorway right next to the TV. And I I see them as plainly as I'm seeing you sitting here across from me.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

And they go into the bathroom and someone you didn't even recognize.

SPEAKER_03 10:59

I didn't notice. I didn't I didn't even think to think about it. I just assumed it was my stepmom.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Okay, so you just kind of saw it like peripheral kind of thing.

SPEAKER_03 11:06

Yeah. And I saw the bathroom door open, heard it close, and I've just thought, oh, um, my stepmom just went into the bathroom, which is kind of odd because she has a bathroom upstairs, but I didn't even think about it. Um, so I was just sitting there watching my show, my show got done. She never came out, and I thought, well, that's really weird that she would go in there and be in there for like half an hour and never come out. So I walked over and I knocked on the door.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

So the door was shut.

SPEAKER_03 11:32

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I knocked on the door and I was like, Hey, are you in there? And nobody answered. And I opened the door and the light was on, but the room was empty.

unknown 11:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 11:40

So I walked upstairs to where my stepmom was doing her art. And I said, How did you sneak out of the bathroom? I didn't even see you. And she was like, I haven't left this room the whole time you've been downstairs watching your show. And I was like, Well, that's weird. Again, I didn't think too much of it. Okay, now you have to fast forward to when I was an adult. I bought my first home and we found out after we moved in that someone had committed suicide in it. And I had been having some experiences in the house where I was seeing a woman standing in our bedroom doorway at night, and I couldn't understand what, you know, she just would stand there and stare at me. And it made me really uncomfortable. And then I found out from our neighbor that the woman who lived there before us had killed herself in the house. And I called my stepmom and I was crying, and I was like, I can't live here. I bought a house and there's a ghost in it. And she's like, I am like a lady died in it. And she's like, Oh, Jess, people die in houses all the time. Just like, remember that house we had when we you were a kid out on the farm? She's like, a lady died in that bathroom. And I was like, No way.

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Dude, talk about the chills. Holy shit. I got the chills right now.

SPEAKER_03 12:49

I know. I'm like, I knew it. I I knew someone had was in that bathroom.

SPEAKER_01 12:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:53

So Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:55

All right, we gotta say, we got can you have any more? Can I have one more story?

SPEAKER_03 12:58

I have so many more. I just don't even know where to begin. Um if you don't mind. I don't mind. I love talking about this stuff. It's my favorite. There was a while when I was writing my first novel, our first house that we moved in here, and we have a propensity to buy houses that are haunted.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

I want to deposit. Did you end up selling that house?

SPEAKER_03 13:17

We did. Did you? Actually, I contacted the real estate company and I told them, because I had asked, like when we were looking at the house, I just had a weird feeling. It was a great house and a great price. And I just I just kept asking, has anyone died here? But I asked multiple times during the process of looking at the house. And then when we were closing, we were enclosing, and again, I said, I just need to know, has anyone like died in this house? And um, they're like, oh no, nobody died in the house. And um, turns out the lady who was selling the house was the cousin of the woman who committed suicide. So they fully knew that she had died in the house and they lied about it. And so um, by law, they didn't have the legal requirement to tell me that someone had died in the house, but because I had asked and they lied, they were legally responsible for taking the house back. So the company that sold it to us um actually had to buy it back. But yeah, that was an awkward conversation too, because I had the president of this the biggest real estate company in Nebraska, which is where we were come to my house come to that house. And um, I was like, you don't understand. I can't live here, I see dead people, and I don't want to live here.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

I see dead people, I love it.

SPEAKER_03 14:35

Um yeah, so another ghost story.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

That's the title for this podcast, Will, is I see dead people.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

I'm like that kid in the movie, only not as cute.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Yeah. It's a good movie.

SPEAKER_03 14:45

It is a good one. Um, another good ghost story. So we bought our house here in Lakeville, and nobody died in it. So, really, I have to say, you can't determine if a house is gonna be haunted if if someone died in it or not. And sometimes I think it's just me.

SPEAKER_01 15:00

Not everybody sees dead people.

SPEAKER_03 15:02

We don't. My husband is so normal, he does not see dead people. But my kids notice things. And when we moved here, my son was two, two and a half, and we had just had our daughter. Funny story, we actually I had my daughter the day that we signed the paperwork to move into the house. We were supposed to, I was she was due like two weeks later, and my water broke that morning, and they had to bring the closing to the hospital. And I signed the paperwork from my hospital bed having contractions, and then had a baby like two hours later. So we moved into this house, and um there were the first night we were there, so I was upstairs. We had bedrooms on the second floor, and I was in bed, kind of woke up and I I looked um at the foot of the bed because it felt like somebody was standing there, and then there there was a shadow figure standing at the foot of the bed, um, kind of off toward where the window was, kind of between the bed and the window. And I thought, oh, that's weird. Maybe someone's standing outside and their shadows like casting into the window. Really, it was my first night in the house. I didn't have a, you know, real paradigm for how the house was laid out and stuff. But then it took me a second to realize, oh, we're on the second floor. Like that doesn't make sense that someone would be standing in the window. They would have to be like levitating. So that's even weirder to me than there's a ghost in my bedroom.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

But that can happen.

SPEAKER_03 16:26

So that was my first night there. Woke up with a shadow figure in front of me in the bed, in the bedroom. Um, and from then on, there was just activity in that house. Like the kids' toys would play on their own. They had a little um play school thing that was like a zoo, and you'd push a button, and this monkey would go up to the top and hit the top and make a little monkey noise. You know? That thing would go off at all hours of the night. They had a kitchen set in their bedroom, and you could turn it to different languages, and we would always have it on English because they were little and we were trying to help them learn words, you know, like hot and cold and water or whatever. And that would always play in the middle of the night on speaking French for some reason. I don't know why. But it would wake my husband and I up constantly, these toys playing.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

Did it speak French normally?

SPEAKER_03 17:18

It could.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 17:19

That was an option, okay. But we never had it set to that.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Got it.

SPEAKER_03 17:22

We'd come home from being gone and we walk into the house, and there was this standing toy that the kids could stand at and like push buttons, and it would play music. Um, and that would be playing when we walk in the door.

SPEAKER_02 17:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 17:36

Just stuff like that. Like these toys would be playing on their own all the time. We'd leave the house and we had two garage doors that would go into the house, one up by the kitchen and one down by this um back room where the laundry room was, and we'd leave and the doors would be shut, and we'd come home and both the doors would be wide open. And that was weird. Um and one night I was sitting downstairs writing, and it was late, probably like midnight, and I was just sitting there with my laptop, and in the living room, down the hallway from the living room was this back room that was unfinished, which eventually we made into a bedroom and a bathroom, but that's where our laundry room was. And back in this room we had a lot of just stuff that we weren't using. It was kind of storage. We had an old dresser that my husband's grandmother gave us and boxes we hadn't unpacked and that sort of thing. And um, all of a sudden, out of that back room, this red ball that my son had came rolling down the hallway. And I was like, maybe there's a breeze. And always looking for a logical explanation.

SPEAKER_02 18:41

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 18:41

And um the ball came down the hallway and came into the living room. It stopped kind of in front of me and took a hard right and then started rolling toward the glass door across the room from me, and then stopped and took a hard left and started rolling further down the living room. And I was like, Okay, I'm going to bed. You know, I'm just like cracked it up.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

You were able to go to bed after that?

SPEAKER_03 19:07

Was getting out of that room. Um, fast forward, another thing that happened. Um, there was a thunderstorm going on. I was again downstairs in that room writing, and my son, who was two and a half at the time, comes downstairs and he's scared. And he's I'm like, oh honey, it's not scary. You know, Thunder's just like, God, it's upstairs moving the furniture around. You know, it's just like noise is no big deal. Just trying to like make it no big deal. I'm like, it's not scary. And he looks down the hallway toward that back room and points, and he says, It's not scary like that man. And I'm like, and like, yeah, that man's not scary. Let's go to bed.

SPEAKER_01 19:44

Did you see it too?

SPEAKER_03 19:45

I did not see it. But he saw something. He saw something. My daughter. Yes, totally. And he would like like wave off in corners of the room and I wouldn't see what he I mean, there was no one there. He would talk to people that I wasn't seeing. My daughter would be terrified at night. She'd pull her blanket so tight over her face that you could see her little eye sockets. Like it was just like pulled so tight. She didn't want to be able to see out around her because her room was scary to her. And one night we were laying in bed and she was doing that, and I was watching the corner of the room. There was like this black, like shadow that moved up the wall and then like across the ceiling, and then like went back down the wall. It was just like all this weird stuff that was happening. There's actually an episode on, I believe, the travel channel about this where I shared this whole story. Really?

SPEAKER_01 20:39

Is it on your website?

SPEAKER_03 20:40

Um, I don't know if I have a link to it on my website or not. I should do that. That that would be a smart digital marketing move, wouldn't it?

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Will is that the the travel channel you said?

SPEAKER_03 20:48

I think it's the travel channel, yeah. And it's called My Horror Story. Um, and I I think the episode is titled The Heirloom from Hell or something.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 20:58

So yeah, we were having all these things happen, and um it was super scary, and I hated it. My kids were scared. Um, and I called my my mother-in-law, and I was like, I this sounds crazy, but I have to tell you what's going on. And she said and I told her all the stuff that was happening, and she said, Do you have anything of my dad's in your house? And I was like, I don't know. Um, her dad had committed suicide many, many years before when my son was a kid, or my husband was a kid. I I never knew him.

SPEAKER_01 21:31

So your your stepmom's first husband?

SPEAKER_03 21:34

It was be my my mother-in-law's your mother's mother-in-law's mother-in-law's dad. Okay. My husband's grandpa.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Got it.

SPEAKER_03 21:41

So I was like, I don't know. We had this dresser that your mom gave us, which was which was kept in that back room. Um, and sh I ext, I just she said, What does it look like? And I described it to her and she goes, You take that in the backyard and you bust it into pieces and set it on fire. And I was like, Um, I can't do that. We just moved here, but in the Apparently, that was like a the piece of furniture that they got when they got married. It was his dresser where he kept all those things. Um he shot himself, and I don't know if that's where he kept the gun, you know. But we did get get rid of it. And I do feel bad about this, but I don't really do regrets in life, but I do kind of regret we donated it. But I theorized it was this only haunting us and not gonna haunt other people.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Little foreshadowing, you're gonna see this or run into this somehow again.

SPEAKER_03 22:34

I'm like, I know, I feel bad.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

It's gonna come back and bite you somehow. You're gonna have another story. We're gonna have to have you back out back on.

SPEAKER_03 22:40

Yeah, if anyone has a haunted dresser, let me know. I'll come get rid of the ghost for you.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Wow. So talk a little bit more, a little bit more about the business side of the books and how all that's going and kind of your seem like an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_03 22:53

Yeah, really writing books is like having your own business. And I have a great agent, so that really, really helps. And we have really landed in such a sweet spot with our publisher. Um, I think it was like eight years ago, they reached out to me about writing a book about monster legends. And so I contacted my best friend, Natalie Fowler, who's also a writer and part of my Ghost Storythink group, which was my group of ghost hunting um creative professionals.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

She's the one on I saw in several of your books. She was your the core writer, right?

SPEAKER_03 23:23

Yep. So when they when um Adventure King came to me with the suggestion of creating a monster storybook of the Midwest for them, I reached out to Natalie and we both decided it'd be a lot of fun to do that together. So we did that one together and I don't know, it just kind of took off. It did really well. Um, they re-released it a couple of years ago. And when they re-released it, um we saw the royalty check that we got on the re-release, and we're like, why are we not writing more of these? Okay, this is a this sells really well. They had us write a couple more, and then I think it was maybe last year that we showed and thought like realistically, how many of these books could you write a year? I know they're selling Lily Wal for them on a business perspective. It's a good deal for them to have more of the books too. So we did four last year, and we're doing three this year. We just finished one and are finishing up the second, and then we have the one about the witches Aborigine um for this collection coming out in 2026, and then we just got our contracts for 2027. Those books are doing great, and that's a great relationship to have with a publisher who's like, hey, how many how many books can you do about these are selling? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

So when you're when you're co-writing, um, you guys kind of get together and brainstorm. How does that kind of come together?

SPEAKER_03 24:33

Yeah, we typically like come together and brainstorm the initial stories that we want to use. We kind of take into doing a lot of it online. At first, it would be look get together at a coffee shop and freak everybody out by talking loudly about serpents that are eating people and that kind of thing. Um, but now we do a lot of it with Google, which is really handy because we can both be in that Google Doc at the same time. Like I can see her in there screwing stuff.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

See we have to be together.

SPEAKER_03 24:59

We don't have to be together, but we do get together quite a lot because she's in the area too. So it's always a good excuse to get together over a glass of wine and talk about monsters and sure. Um, but yeah, so we do we do the research, the initial research, we create like a spreadsheet of potential stories, and we have um, you know, the free will to go in and select the ones that kind of are speaking to us that we feel like we want to work on. And we highlighted our own colors so you can look them in and see who has which one easily just by the color that it's highlighted in. And then um we write them, we send them to each other in the Google Doc. So we'll, you know, put a note in that spreadsheet that it's done and ready for review. We each have free reign to go in and do anything we want to it editorial-wise, and we don't do red line edits, we just edit it so you can't see what the other person has done. But then the version who initially writes it has the opportunity to go in one more time, make changes to it, and then we consider it finished. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 25:58

And how how many pages or how long are these books that you're well, three or four year on?

SPEAKER_03 26:03

Well, we do about 23 to 30 stories, and each one and each of the stories is two to five pages long, totally. They're nice little short stories. I didn't joke, it's like the perfect book for your bathroom. Not that we all read on the toilet. But if you do, it's the perfect book for your bathroom.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Or if you fall asleep, Reedy, uh get one dye and go to bed.

SPEAKER_03 26:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Huh. Very cool. So the name of the podcast is called The Chills, and like in your line of work, what gives you those feel-good chills moments, and it's it's kind of funny what you were talking about with the the darkness radio. Like when I was coming up with the name, like chills, I'm like, people are gonna think it's like scary stuff. Yeah, you know. So I guess what what in your line of work gives you like those feel-good moments, like chills in a in not the scary dark way.

SPEAKER_03 26:47

Um well, I think what gives me the chills the most is we do um events, we do like retreats with Ghost Stories Inc., where we have people come together and we teach writing and art workshops throughout the weekend. And I'm also a certified mindfulness coach, so we'll have some mindfulness stuff in there as well. And then we do a ghost hunt on the end of the retreat, so on Saturday night. But the whole day you're spending with people just kind of tapping into their creativity. And a lot of people, when we first started doing this, were coming just for the boast hunt. Like they weren't interested in doing any of the art or the writing, but we would always encourage them, you know, just come try it and have fun with it. And it was that's what gives me the chills, is to see people tapping into their creative side because I think we're all created to being creative. Like that's our most basic human nature is creativity, and we kind of stuff it down because life gets too busy and we don't have the time to sit around and write poetry or whatever it might be. I love seeing people tap into that. My favorite.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Okay, very cool. If you and if you haven't told me already, like what how about Shoals like in a scary way? Was it one of those stories you already told?

SPEAKER_03 27:55

Well, I can't.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Or can you tell another one? Because you're the last guest today, so we have time.

SPEAKER_03 27:59

You know, I kind of joke, like I don't really get scared anymore. Nothing scares me. Not even watching scary movies now, which chose to terrify me, because I feel like I faced my greatest fear, which was ghosts. I grew up so terrified of that because it it was startling. And I would ask, you know, my parents, my dad specifically being very religious, his paradigm was only well, it's either angels or it's demons, and it didn't have wings, and there wasn't Hallelujah chorus playing in the background when you saw it. So obviously you're seeing demons, which was really scary. Um, but I faced those fears, and so I can go into like these dark, creepy places where I know they have a really tragic backstory, and I'm never scared anymore, which was kind of a bummer. Um, what scares me? Um well, humanity, social media, I feel like the downfall of mankind, but inactive on there trying to you know put some light and lemon to it. But yeah, that's probably the scariest thing right now, going on Facebook.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Sure. I I can understand that. So bonus question. Um give me top three of your favorite scary movies.

SPEAKER_03 29:03

Well, um, The Sixth Sense has to be right up there. Um, because that to me was like very much what it was like for me as a kid. Like that seemed so real to me. So that one, um The Shining will forever be one of my favorites, and then Finance of the Lands are just like psycho zeroids here and all our stuff.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

We'll have to send her the video of the one we did with our kids. We used to do a scary move with the kids every year for Halloween, and we we did a recreation of The Shining, just like a whole I guess probably like a three three three or five minute whatever video, but we'll have to share that.

SPEAKER_03 29:40

Yeah, I was pleased.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

I was like when the kids were little, you know, like the laying in blood, and so there's a have you ever seen uh vanilla sky or the butterfly effect?

SPEAKER_03 29:52

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Have you seen Vanilla Sky?

SPEAKER_03 29:55

I think I did. Was that with um cruise?

SPEAKER_01 29:58

The one that I love like the gory like spray crouvers and all balls, but some of the ones that vanilla vanilla sky for some reason freaked me out because like how one decision can like change your whole life. Yeah, or like the butterfly effect. If I turn if I took this way home today and I got in a car accident, you know, like what about taking a different way or something? Like that kind of scares the shit out of me. Like those small decisions that you do on your daily basis that can affect the rest of your life.

SPEAKER_03 30:22

Yeah, that's very true. And I release all of that, you know, like be a mindfulness kind of person. I kind of feel like I'm just guided by intuition and so I'm just trusting that something's gonna be in the right direction.

SPEAKER_01 30:33

Okay. So there's a way to work around that, huh?

SPEAKER_03 30:36

Yeah, you don't have to worry about it. I do that with my writing too, where I just kind of tell myself, like, it's not my book. I'm just the conduit. Yeah. So I'm just gonna sit here and just let the story come out and like take all the pressure off. So I like it.

SPEAKER_01 30:48

Anything else you want to share with the audience about yourself for the business?

SPEAKER_03 30:51

You know, really what I would share with people is just find the things you're passionate about and find a way to do something fun with them. And like I tell my kids all the time, just make this journey of life. It's so short, no matter how long we get to live it. If we get to be a hundred years old, it's still gonna go by and it's under by. Um, just have fun. Let the goal be to have fun. And I feel like everything else just falls into place from there.

SPEAKER_01 31:14

Okay, like that. How about uh share a little bit about your um digital marketing business, just so you can give give it a little plug?

SPEAKER_03 31:22

Well, I actually work for a company and um I'm super blessed. And it's and it's funny because they're a nonprofit organization founded by nuns. I'm like, are they gonna like me here? I told them before they hired me, I'm like, please Google me before you offer me a job. And then when they offered me the job, I was like, Did you Google me?

SPEAKER_01 31:40

Do you really know? How deep did you go?

SPEAKER_03 31:42

But I feel very accepted and loved there. And I'm I'm I'm an open book. I'm just gonna be who I am. And if if nobody likes me, that's fine. I don't belong there. Um, but yeah, I love working there. I love supporting the business that we do. It's for senior living and really supporting that phase of life and doing everything we can to ensure that people in that phase of life have the best possible, you know, final years they can.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

Sure. So how do people get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_03 32:12

My website is super easy, jessicafreeberg.com. And I'm always open to accepting new friends on Facebook, Instagram. I never put anything negative on there. I try to be a light in the darkness. So if you follow me, you don't have to worry, you won't know what my politics are.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Sure. It would be positive if it was. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming in. This was fun.

SPEAKER_03 32:30

Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah. It's a blast.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

Yeah. And that's a wrap, folks. A huge thank you to our incredible guests and of course all weather roof for making this podcast possible. If you enjoyed these conversations as much as we did, don't forget to hit subscribe and share the chills with your fellow business aficionados. Remember, it's not just about business, it's personal, and it's all about the people. Stay inspired, chase those dreams, and let the chills guide you. Till next time, this is Brent, signing off from the Chills Podcast. Catch you on the flip side.