Our special guest today is award-winning and best-selling author, Amey Zeigler. She is best known for her heartwarming and laugh-out-loud romances, reminiscent of the chick-lit genre of the early 2000’s mixed with a healthy dose of women’s fiction. Her most successful book, The Casserole Dish, is a tribute to a neighborhood that taught her how to offer the olive branch of forgiveness, using her own experiences with depression and loss to guide the characters through their journey. It also explores the theme that everyone has a reason for acting the way they do and to not judge people too harshly. Although The Casserole Dish has won a few awards, what touches Amey the most is the many readers have contacted her and shared how the book has impacted their life. What keeps Amey writing books is how words heal her readers. She once had a friend who’d been through a tough time and was struggling. She read one of Amey’s books and called her, laughing so hard, she couldn’t even speak. The humor in the book helped her through a tough time. This became Amey’s main motivation for writing, to heal the wounded soul, to make them laugh or cry as a moment of catharsis. In her twenties, she lived in Switzerland and France for sixteen months as a volunteer missionary, learning to speak French. She struggled to adapt to the culture and to speak the language. Humor is pain plus time. She wrote the laugh-out-loud and award-winning romantic comedy, The Swiss Mishap, as a love-letter to Switzerland and all the experiences she had while there--all reimagined in the voice of a chocohaulic young woman getting the wrong internship. You can sign up for her newsletter on www.ameyzeigler.com or follow her in Instagram http://www.instagram.com/ameyzeigler You can find The Casserole Dish Amazon or B&N at https://tinyurl.com/md8b8sne

A little about today's host-

Shawna Rodrigues left her award-winning career in the public sector in 2019 to consult and publish her first novel Beyond the Pear Blossoms. Her desire to connect and help others led to the launch of her podcast The Grit Show shortly thereafter. When she learned women host only 27% of podcasts, her skills and passion led to the founding of the Authentic Connections Network. She now helps mission-driven entrepreneurs better connect with their audiences by providing full-service podcast production and through a community for Entrepreneurs & Podcasters – EPAC. Podcasting is her primary focus, so she continues to support the writing community through this podcast, and her writing time is mostly focused on anthologies.

She offers a free 7 Steps to Perfect Your Podcast Title to anyone interested in launching a podcast. You can also follow her on Instagram-@ShawnaPodcasts, and learn more about the network and community at https://linktr.ee/37by27.

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[00:00:09] Shawna: Amey Zeigler is an award-winning author of romantic comedies and mysteries. Her laugh-out-loud Rom-Com, The Swiss Mishap, won third place in the Book Buyer's Best for Contemporary Romance. The Casserole Dish was the 2022 Rone Runner-Up. Her ten years of theater training in college and high school inspired her to narrate her own books. She spins stories with humor, charm, and heart, often with a dash of action and adventure. When she's not writing, she is teasing her three kids, globe-trotting with her husband (for book research of course!), or trying new things.

[00:00:48] Amey: Thank you, Shawna. I'm so happy to be here. This is a lot of fun.

[00:00:59] Amey: Oh, well, I think the most interesting thing is that I'm not really from anywhere. My dad was in the military growing up, and so I had the opportunity to be able to move around and experience so many different cultures, even here in the United States. I was born in Colorado, then we moved to Alaska, Georgia, California, then back up to Alaska or Arizona, back up to Alaska, then Virginia, then Utah, and then Arizona.

[00:01:34] Shawna: This is interesting. We're asking, this is our opening question for all of our authors. There is like a statistically significant amount of military backgrounds. kids Who are in the military who become writers. So I wonder if like living a lot of places helps to fuel a creative mind.

[00:02:14] Amey: And so they do like the places that I've been inspire me, and that's another reason why I love to travel is because I just draw from. Experiences and the people that I see and meet and, and incorporate those into my books.

[00:02:40] Shawna: That's a fun little, little bonus. I like it. So tell me like, so to get to know you better, let me ask you a question about this traveling. Like what is the favorite place you've traveled?

[00:03:17] Amey: And so he just bought 'em for October 12th. He just, Plucked a date out of his head. And we kept watching the news wondering when the Japanese government would open Japan so we could go back there. And they opened it like two weeks before we left. And it was for the exact day. He had bought these tickets for it back in January. So we were on the first flight over there. We were the first like, Touristy people that just bought tickets and didn't go through all the riga ma roll. We were there the first day and it was amazing. Like being able to experience another culture that is so different from ours was just so mind broadening, like I loved it.

[00:04:13] Shawna: Oh, I love that. So the unforeseen bonus, is the shopping specific for you.

[00:04:33] Amey: People as far as you can see. And like I lifted up my phone and like snapped a picture, like such a tourist and I was like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. You know? And it was, it was amazing. I think the hardest thing was not a lot of people spoke English, and so I had to rely on my husband for translation cuz he speaks Japanese fluently.

[00:05:13] Amey: I I would totally go back.

[00:05:16] Shawna: Yes, I love that story. It's a good story. You're good with a. So now, which was your first novel? Cause we heard about a couple in our intro, but what was the first novel that you had published?

[00:05:44] Amey: But there were so many things even in Switzerland, which is like the most first world of all, first world countries. Like they have things that squirt the toilet, you know, the toilet seat, so it's all nice and clean and and beautiful and rich countryside. , but there were so many funny things that happened while I was there that I was like, I have to write this in, in a book.

[00:06:20] Amey: And I think that's why. The Swiss mishap is just so funny. But I actually published Baker's Dozen first because I, I wanted to make sure I could find a publisher that would treat the Swiss Mishap with the love and respect and the, just the, the labor of love that that was to create. And when I published with The Wild Rose Press, I knew, I knew that, that they would be okay with the Swiss Mishap.

[00:06:45] Shawna: Oh nice. That was very smart cuz like your first book is the one that's closest to you and the hardest to write, so you wanted to make sure it was treated. That is very smart of you.

[00:07:00] Shawna: Oh, that's wonderful. So how many books have you published now?

[00:07:10] Amey: I don't count. I started out traditionally published and I love my small press. And then I just, they couldn't handle how quickly I was writing and producing books and so I started self-publishing and my first was The Casserole Dish. And , I didn't even intend to enter it into that, um, Rhone contest.

[00:07:43] Amey: And it really, it, it went well. It's made way more money than all my other books, which is terrible. I hate talking about money, but it just blew my mind that people wanted to read this book and it just did so well. which blew my mind. And then it won, uh, the runner up in the Rhone, which I couldn't believe.

[00:08:13] Shawna: That's

[00:08:17] Shawna: dive in. And I love, I love the synchonicity like you talk about you and your husband and the trip to Japan and how things lined up. so when you just find your path, like the way things just fall into place is beautiful.

[00:09:00] Amey: Like all of those things happened while we lived in St. Louis. So like I use those experiences and then, use those to write fiction that I think really connects with people.

[00:09:23] Amey: my gosh, that is a great question. So when I was nine years old, I took some paper and some, you know, the blue cheap paper, what is that called? The, um, construction paper. And I folded it in half and stapled it and I wrote young author. On the, on the front as the title. And I wanted to write books when I was nine years old.

[00:10:07] Amey: I had, he was a tough teacher. He was a tough teacher and he didn't let me get away with, with stuff. And it's something I've always wanted to do. And so when my husband, I was, I had just given birth to my second child, my, my 16 year old. and I felt like I was dying. I struggled with postpartum depression and I told my husband I've always wanted to write and I've just never been able to do it.

[00:10:47] Shawna: Keep going.

[00:10:56] Amey: But it really did finally come together and I started trying to get published and things like that and I was just so grateful for my supportive husband who, um, who didn't criticize. He just said, keep going. And that was really important.

[00:11:15] Amey: Oh, of course. If you Google my name and spell it right, you'll find me because my mom gave me that extra special e. You can go to my website, that is www.AmeyZeigler.com you can find me there. My books are all on Amazon. A lot of the ones through the Wild Rose Press are all wide, so that means they're, you know, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, apple

[00:11:45] Shawna: remember the Amey's with e.

[00:11:49] Shawna: Well, I like it. It makes it more memorable. That's kind of a bonus thing. That's definitely a good thing.

[00:11:57] Shawna: Yes, I think people will, I think, well, we've said the extra E and we, well, they'll remember. They'll be like, oh yeah, the Amey with the E. She's the one with The casserole dish.

[00:12:11] Amey: So I actually that is such a good question. I've thought a lot about it. There are so many books that I have read that are just part of me, part of my childhood. And I think I am gonna go back to one set of stories that inspired me from my childhood. I read all the Nancy Drew and I wanted to write mysteries.

[00:12:44] Amey: But what I loved about his books, and this is what I strive for, is that I felt like those were human characters. That were real, that were experiencing struggles and that they were virtuous and they, they were self-sacrificing and they wanted you know, good to triumph over evil. And I think that's, that's true.

[00:13:37] Amey: And I wanted to create that for other people. So, yeah.

[00:13:53] Amey: Well, thank you Shawna. I certainly appreciate this has been a very fun little tidbit of time that we've been able to share together, so thank you.