EXITING CAIRO—JENYFER MATTHEWS

The Middle East is a beautiful place filled with the magic of the ancient world liberally mixed with modern. It’s filled with people good and bad—as with any place you visit in this world. Despite the political structures, scratch the surface of people, regardless of race, and there is a commonality; they want to be happy, have a good life, a secure place to live with plenty to eat, raise their children in safety to thrive and succeed. Unfortunately, that isn’t always possible due to political instability. Such is the case with Egypt and in January of 2011, a campaign of non-violent civil resistance which featured a series of demonstrations, marches, acts of civil disobedience, and labor strikes. Millions of protesters from a variety of socio-economic and religious backgrounds demanded the overthrow of the regime of Egyptian President Mubarak. It wasn’t a particularly safe time for westerners to be there. Various governments started evacuating their people living in Egypt.

My cyber friend, and romance author, Jenyfer Matthews and her family were among those evacuated. I knew she had lived in the Middle east for over ten years. It was home to her children. I was curious about the changes she and her family faced relocating back to the States and the effect on her writing career.

It’s been just over a year since my family evacuated Egypt, days after the first wave of the revolution. After we left, my children and I spent much of the year in limbo, staying with family and friends, waiting to see what would happen next – and whether or not we would be returning to Cairo. Just after summer vacation, days before I would have purchased tickets for us to return to Cairo, my husband was offered a job in Michigan.

About face!

If I had been paralyzed by anxiety and indecision in the first part of last year, suddenly I had too much to do in a very short period of time. My husband had already returned to Cairo after visiting us on his summer vacation and worked out his notice period and organized our personal things for shipping. I came to Michigan to find a rental house and then packed up my car for our move. The children and I arrived on Labor Day, the day before school started. We spent the first week on air mattresses, but they started school on time!

Being anxious and perpetually stressed out didn’t do much for my creativity last year either. I managed to get my backlist formatted for digital and paperback release but wasn’t able to add anything to my unfinished stories. Since returning to the US, I’ve had the opportunity to stretch my creative muscles by stalking garage sales and refinishing furniture that I find – a practical occupation as well since we lived in furnished housing while we were abroad and have very little furniture of our own. A pleasant side effect of that creative outlet was to find my mind wandering while sanding and telling me stories again.

Our transition to living in the US again after a decade abroad hasn’t been without its bumps. I’m a naturally chatty person and when you live abroad, you tend to make friends fast. It probably has something to do with being out of your own element, but I’ve met and bonded with people nearly instantly in my travels and am used to that sort of interaction now. However, I think my instantly familiar manner is a bit off-putting to the classic Midwest reserve if the people I’ve found myself chatting to in the produce section of the grocery store are anything to judge by! (That’s me, the talkative blond by the bananas)

I’ve also had to adjust my shopping habits. Having daily access to a Target is a dangerous thing! I’m used to what I call binge shopping – or trying to buy a year’s supply of “X” at a time because there was nothing that came close to Target in Cairo and I had to stock up on everything in the summers. Having a mall within ten minutes of my house doesn’t mean I need to visit it every day – I can shop at will, when needs arise now. Amazing.

One thing I love love love about Michigan is the number of weekly garage sales. I’ve always loved garage sales but it’s great to be able to use the bargaining skills I honed in the Middle East to get a great deal.

Do I miss Cairo? Of course. Cairo is a tremendously large and polluted city, but Egypt is the kind of place that gets under your skin. Life in Michigan isn’t as exciting or as challenging a place to live on a day-to-day basis as Cairo was – but when “exciting” is punctuated by the sound of gunfire, the constant threat of political instability, and rising crime rates then I’ll take the less exciting option, thanks!


If you want to read more about Jenyfer's thoughts on this and her life back here in the States, check out her blog

Three popular contemporary romance novels by Jenyfer Matthews together for the first time in one volume for one amazing low price. —Here to Stay, One Crazy Summer, and All the Way Home

BUY: Amazon, Smashwords

I am an American recently returned to the US after more than a decade in the Middle East, most recently living in Cairo, Egypt. Aside from writing, I'm a married mom of two, a decent (if reluctant) cook, an encyclopedia of random scientific / medical facts, a wine lover (but not a snob!), and a Capricorn. I love to travel, spend time with good friends, and laugh at life's surprises. View of life - definitely half full. You can find Jenyfer: Facebook and her website.

WRITER ON THE RUN

You’ve probably heard, Paul McCartney’s song, BAND ON THE RUN, at some point in your life. There is a certain sense of urgency to get out of where ever they are to freedom. To escape.

Much like my guest today, Jenyfer Matthews.

 You’ll remember the last time she visited (The Reluctant Trailblazer), she was living in Cairo, Egypt the past five years and living abroad for the past ten years. Anyone who has watched the news of late knows of the unrest and change of regimes happening in Egypt. Jenyfer shares some thoughts and observations on her Blog. Scary times to live in a foreign county and especially as an American.


Evacuation is never fun. It’s fraught with a sense of urgency and danger, worry over those in your family and pets, hard choices of those things to take and those to leave, a list of things to remember, and all this with a deadline over your head.


Jenyfer shares what it was like to have to condense the life of a family into four suitcases and run.



There’s a common game: what would you grab if your house was on fire and you only had five minutes to get out? I had a little more time, but recently had such an experience in real life when my family was evacuated from Cairo, Egypt with very little notice.

A friend called me from the US State Department and told me to go to the airport as soon as I could - and that we should be prepared for only one checked bag each, no carry-ons. We had lived abroad for a decade, five of which were in Cairo. I had to decide in a hurry what was important enough to fit into four suitcases.

I backed up my laptop on to an external hard-drive to preserve precious photos of our children and our travels and also my manuscripts. I packed nearly all of my jewelry, making sure that I got the special items from my late MIL, mother, and grandmothers on both sides. I packed the negatives from the baby pictures as well as the journals I’ve been keeping for each child from the time they were toddlers. All that in addition to a selection of warm clothes for each family member – wherever we were to end up, it was likely to be cold.

Most things we have accumulated I dismissed without thought – clothes can be replaced as can dishes and knick-knacks. I would miss the tea set and the Buddha statues I had purchased on trips to Cambodia as well as paintings and tapestries collected over the years, but they were not a priority – neither were our beautiful carpets. The only items that caused me more than a few pangs at leaving were the many quilts that I’ve made over the last decade. Anyone who crafts understands that you put your heart as well as time into each item. I can only hope that my house doesn’t literally burn down and that they can be recovered in time.

I packed every scrap of currency we had, spare change from several trips, as well as an accordion file full of vital documents, including birth certificates and vaccination records. I also made a few mistakes in my haste – such as packing both of my son’s toothbrushes but none for my daughter and my e-reader but no charger. (I boarded a plane for the first time in a decade with no reading material at all, not that I could concentrate to read) I did not bring a rubber band for my hair and ended up pulling it back with a couple of Silly Bandz donated by my daughter. Some choices were purely sentimental. I left behind a beautiful red patent leather purse my husband bought me as a gift on a trip to Italy but brought along a pair of leather sandals that I wore when I left the United States for the United Arab Emirates in 1999 and that came on many travels with me, including my first visit to Egypt as a tourist. I won’t wear them anytime in the coming months, but it seemed wrong to leave them behind now. I took a black evening bag and a set of cut glass salt and pepper shakers that belonged to my grandmother but left behind a heavy wool cape given to me by a dear friend which would have been infinitely more useful but would have taken up too much space.

How do you condense the life of a family into four suitcases?

I feel like the heroine of one of my own novels at the moment – unexpectedly losing nearly everything and having to rebuilt their life when they least expect it. I hope that for the majority of you such a scenario remains a party game, but is interesting to notice how quickly the “stuff” you have accumulated over time becomes meaningless when you have to prioritize and choose.

• What would you save if you only had 24 hours and one suitcase per family member?

ONE CRAZY SUMMER BLURB:

Summer Donahue is not Ben Martin’s type of woman. Ben is conservative, thoughtful and the model of self-control. Summer is whimsical, spontaneous and just a bit flaky. So why, when she breezed into his office like a tropical storm, was he so instantly and inexplicably attracted to her?

Summer consulted Ben to have her business’s taxes done. But when it comes to light that Summer’s ex-husband and ex-accountant Malcolm has embezzled most of her liquid assets and put her on the brink of bankruptcy, Ben throws aside all of his iron-clad rules about getting personally involved with his clients. Summer and Ben go to Mexico to find her ex and save her business. But in the process Ben loses more to Summer than his personal credo — he loses his heart as well. Excerpt

“Fans of Jennifer Crusie will love Jenyfer Matthews’ fresh, fun voice. ONE CRAZY SUMMER is contemporary romance at its best.” Gemma Halliday

Buy: Amazon, Smashwords

Jenyfer Matthews writes books for fun. She is an American currently living in Cairo, Egypt. Aside from writing, she's married, a mom of two under ten, a decent (if reluctant) cook, an encyclopedia of random scientific / medical facts, a wine lover (but not a snob!), and a Capricorn. She loves to travel, spend time with good friends, and laugh at life's surprises. View of life - definitely half full.

You can visit her blog, Writing News & Disconnected Thoughts and her Website. You can find her available books and the excerpts,  here.

The Reluctant Trailblazer

My guest is woman’s fiction author, Jenyfer Matthews. She has also written three contemporary romance novels, published through Cerridwen Press.

Jenyfer is an American currently live in Cairo, Egypt, by way of too many places to name. Over the years Jenyfer has been a retail clerk, a department store model, a receptionist, a teacher, a freelance newspaper columnist, a librarian, a quilter, and a full-time mother.


Considering the brouhaha between traditional publishing and non-traditional, Jenyfer has some rather well thought out reasons for going non-traditional.



I never set out to be a trailblazer in the publishing world, but I published my first three books digitally, back before e-books were cool. It seemed like a sensible idea at the time – especially since I live in a part of the world where traditional bookstores are meh at best. I don’t think that e-books will ever truly replace paperbacks, but I love the instant gratification of being able to get books online and since I travel frequently, having multiple books available to me in one small device is hugely attractive as well.


Now I’m blazing another trail in the self-publishing world. I didn’t make the decision to self-publish lightly. I went through the traditional process of querying agents and publishers first, but I was doing it at a time when the economy was in the first stages of the melt-down. Agents weren’t taking on many new projects because publishers weren’t taking on so many new projects. I heard a lot of, this is a book I would have taken a few years ago but... In the end I had enough faith in my book to take the leap and do it myself. What did I have to lose? It wasn’t giving me any satisfaction hidden away on my hard drive.

There are up sides to self-publishing: no deadlines, no genre restrictions, no word count worries. However, there is a lot of responsibility too: writing, revising, editing, cover design, proofing and copy editing. Did I mention editing? For better or for worse, independently published books are judged more harshly than traditionally published books. If you're lucky you have a good critique partner, but if there are mistakes and problems with the book it still all comes back to you.

Editing and proofing are tedious processes, no doubt about it, but I suffer from another problem: the desire to endlessly revise. Maybe it’s just a word here and there, perhaps a few lines. It’s so easy to do when it’s primarily digital and you have all the power. It’s not even that hard to make changes when the book is available in print-on-demand form – all you have to do is upload a new file. Poof! Done. It’s hard enough to resist the urge to endlessly revise when it’s a new book you’ve put out there and you notice a typo. Now imagine the temptation when you get the rights to your backlist back…

I’m getting the rights back to my first three romance books on Christmas Eve. Best. Present. Ever. It’s entirely possible I’m a bit of a control freak, but I’m truly looking forward to re-releasing them myself at much more reasonable prices. The problem? The temptation to “fix” them.

My first book was published nearly four years ago and written a few years before that. In that time I’d like to think that I’ve grown as a writer and that I’m better now than I was then. The question then is, how much should you tinker with a book that’s already been published? All of the books have received good reviews so apparently readers like them as they are. Other than updating things a bit – the hero in my first book is a corporate lawyer with neither a laptop nor a Blackberry for goodness sake! – maybe I should just leave well enough alone?

As the author and now the publisher both, I have the ultimate decision making power. I’m doing my best not to let it go to my head or to paralyze me. My *plan* is to format, proof, and perhaps update those three books a bit and then leave them alone. I hope the perfectionist in me will cooperate.

I have other stories to write after all.

SEPARATION ANXIETY—Back cover blurb


Sometimes running away is the first step toward finding yourself...

Aurora has spent her entire married life transforming herself from a regular, middle class girl into the perfect society wife. Life seems perfect until she is unceremoniously dumped by her philandering cliche’ of a husband just before Christmas – and their tenth wedding anniversary.


Devastated and unable to face the social ostracism or the holiday parties, Aurora and her best friend Kat plan a trip to Amsterdam for a weekend…then decide to keep going. Aurora attempts to drown her sorrows with wine in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, finds her anger in Athens and Cairo, and reclaims her sexuality in Dubai. By the time she and Kat reach Bangkok at the New Year, Aurora is ready and eager to move on with her life.


Planned as a way to escape her pain, Aurora’s travels instead become a journey to a new sense of self and a whole new world – post-divorce. Excerpt

Buy: Amazon (kindle or paperback) and Smashwords (distributes to Apple, Sony and Diesel, etc)

~*~*~*~

Jenyfer Matthews writes books for fun. She is an American currently living in Cairo, Egypt. Aside from writing, she's married, a mom of two under ten, a decent (if reluctant) cook, an encyclopedia of random scientific / medical facts, a wine lover (but not a snob!), and a Capricorn. She loves to travel, spend time with good friends, and laugh at life's surprises. View of life - definitely half full.

You can visit her blog, Writing News & Disconnected Thoughts and her Website.