Welcome to author Jesi Lea Ryan  joining us today to talk about new release “Surreal Estate”.

Jesi talks about Psyshics and brought a giveaway to participate in!

Welcome Jesi 🙂

Psychics: the good, the bad and the ugly

Are psychics real? Some people swear by them. Others see them as the worst of charlatans who prey on the vulnerable. I guess I’m somewhere in the middle. I’d like to believe there are forces out there that we can’t explain, but I don’t have any definitive proof. The possibility of psychic abilities being real makes me want to research the subject personally.

Over the course of my life I have visited several psychics, had my cards read, got my aura photographed, received a past-life reading, had my astrology diagramed, had a session with a shaman healer, slept with a gris gris under my pillow, carried a bag full of crystals in in my purse, and had my home saged by a wiccan priestess. Maybe it is all bogus, but I like to hedge my bets. Here is what I have learned through my psychic adventures.

The Good

The best psychic experience I’ve witnessed was a reading done for my mother. The psychic’s name was Paul, and we saw him at a psychic fair in Madison, WI. At the time, my mother was sixty-four-years-old, very physically fit and had been single for twenty-five years. Paul knew nothing about her other than her first name and date of birth, and from this, he gave her a very detailed reading. He said she was healthy and would live another thirty-years, but she had a wall up around her blocking relationships out. If she didn’t want to spend her remaining years alone, she needed to open herself up to the idea of love, to letting someone into her life. He claimed there was a man on the fringes of her life that she already knew, who could be the one for her, if she let him. The man was not emotionally ready for a relationship yet, but sometime after the new year, he would become available. If she let her defenses down and took a chance on him, he would be her partner. (I’m simplifying this, but really the man was very detailed.)

This reading was in early fall. In December, a man at her gym became a widower after his wife passed away from a long battle with cancer. This was a man that my mother was friendly with but didn’t know incredibly well. In February, he asked her to dinner. Seventeen months later, they were married.

I was so amazed at Paul’s accuracy, that I went to see him myself a year later. My reading mostly centered around my writing and my career. Again, he was incredibly accurate. He told me that I was going to have to maintain a day job to supplement my writing for many more years (not what I wanted to hear), but I would find a moderate success if I stayed the course. He also gave me a book idea, which I haven’t written yet, but it’s still on my radar. He told me I would be getting a job offer late in the fall and that I should take it. (I started the job on November 22^nd of that year.)

Overall, I would say Paul had some real talent. Unfortunately, I don’t have his last name, or I would be tempted to seek him out again.

The Bad

When I got my aura photographed, and it came out solid indigo. That’s it. No other colors. Indigo means the person is an instinctual/intuitive thinker, brave, intelligent and honest. That pretty much describes me, so I’d say that was accurate — if a little vague.

“Vague” describes 90% of my psychic experiences. If you tell someone they will experience a change, then anything that happens in the months afterward, they’ll attribute to the psychic’s accuracy. It’s just human nature.

My big takeaway from having my astrology charted was that I shouldn’t make big life changes when Mercury is in retrograde — probably the most generic piece of advice you can get from an astrologer.

When I had my oracle cards done, I was told to trust my inner guide. Um, isn’t that just a fancy way of telling me to believe in myself and do what I want?

The Ugly

Psychic: You’re a smoker.

Me: Nope.

Psychic: But you used to smoke.

Me. Nope.

Psychic: But you have smoked a cigarette before.

Me: Well, yeah. A cigarette here and there in high school. But I was never a smoker. Probably no more than twenty in my life.

Psychic grins: See! I knew I saw you smoking.

Me: *rolls eyes*

The ugly psychic experiences are the ones that have stuck with me the most. These are the ones that are so off base, I wanted to ask for my money back. I had a woman go on for twenty minutes about how my husband and I would quit our well-paying jobs, move to Viroqua, Wisconsin, live in a broken-down farmhouse, but be incredibly happy “living on love.”

Oh, hell no! I’m sure Viroqua is a lovely little town, but I’m a city girl. I thrive on people and culture and diversity. Viroqua is the antithesis of everything I am about. And I’m not all into money or anything, but why would I dump my comfortable middle-class lifestyle to struggle in an old farmhouse? No matter which way I tried to look at this reading, it didn’t make any sense to my actual life.

And then there was the pet psychic who gave me terrible advice on how to deal with my difficult cat. She told me to swaddle the cat in a blanket, tight enough that it couldn’t escape. Then lay it down on the bed next to me and let it cry itself out for hours. Once its will broke, I should let it loose, so it would know that I was the one who have full control over them. That sounded awful! No way was I going to psychologically torture my cat. I actually found that advice abusive.

Whether good, bad or ugly, all these experiences have informed my writing of psychic characters. You can check out my new novel, Surreal Estate on November 5, 2018. And if you have had had real-life psychic experiences, tell us about them in the comments below!

About Surreal Estate

Sasha Michaels is a psychic with an affinity for houses. And he’s homeless. Go figure. After months of sleeping rough, he stumbles upon an abandoned house, and the lonely place beckons him inside. He’s finally safe . . . until someone comes blundering in to his hideaway.

House-flipper Nick Cooper lost everything in the recession. Desperate to revive his business, he turns to a loan shark to fund his comeback project: flipping an abandoned house full of potential. But it turns out the house has an unexpected occupant.

Nick and Sasha make a deal: Sasha can stay in exchange for helping with the renovation. To both of their surprise, the closer they get to the loan shark’s due date, the stronger their feelings for each other grow. Problem is, Nick isn’t the only one with feelings for Sasha, and now the house doesn’t want to let Sasha go.

Now available from Riptide Publishing!

Amazon

About Jesi Lea Ryan

USA Today bestselling author Jesi Lea Ryan grew up in the Mississippi River town of Dubuque, Iowa. She holds Bachelor’s degrees in creative writing and literature and a Master’s in business administration, along with an assortment of Associate’s degrees, certificates and designations, none of which have anything to do with writing books about psychics.

Jesi considers herself a well-rounded nerd. She loves studying British history, exploring foreign cities on Google Earth, watching TED talks, listening to true crime podcasts, floating in her pool, and reading or listening to books — approximately two hundred books a year in many different genres. The side effect of all this is that she’s the ideal person to have on your trivia team, or what a former co-worker called “a dump truck of knowledge.”

Her biggest vice is procrastination. #TheStruggleIsReal

Jesi spent most of her adult life in Madison, Wisconsin, but now lives in Maricopa, Arizona, with her spouse and two exceptionally naughty kitties. Summers may be brutal, but at least she doesn’t have to shovel the heat off her driveway.”

To celebrate the release of Surreal Estate, one lucky person will win a $20 Riptide gift card! Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on November 10, 2018. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following along, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!