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Petrina Aubol

EMAIL TO: petaubol (at) att (dot) net

Love, Action and New Beginnings.

From Petrina, but everyone calls me "Pet""

 

Ever since I first discovered pencil and paper I wanted to be a writer. After years of writing and editing student newspapers and magazines, I finally attained a degree with a dual major, English and Journalism from Syracuse University. Diploma in hand, a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a writer. I got waylaid by the small market radio business.

Twenty years later I escaped from this zany world and instead of pencil and paper, sat down in front of a computer and finally wrote something besides thirty second commercials and please pay your bill letters! At first I wrote newspaper and magazine articles, even produced a newspaper monthly double page feature before turning full time to fiction. My first book, DRIVE TIME, a satire on small town radio with much romance and adventure within the pages, was published in 2000.

My husband Dean and I have moved around a bit, but now are loving our life in East Tennessee. When not at my computer, I love to garden and with much space available on our four acre lot, annuals and perennials abound. Our neighbors are mostly cows, both beef and dairy. They are fun to watch along with many birds flitting around the pond.

 

Pet's Blog:

This blog is dedicated to every girl who felt the need to see how the other half lives. Pet Aubol and Karen Van have changed places. Pet, who grew up in the Big Apple, has traded in the rush hour express for a long country road in Tennessee. Karen has traded in the beautiful hills of upstate New York for the land of concrete and palm trees. This blog is full of musings on the life of a transplant.

The Transplants blog features great pictures of country and city with household and lifetime hints in general. Often you'll find a great recipe or two. Please stop by. Karen and Pet would love to have you! Click here!

Memberships:

Books:

 

Book

Marissa Palmer is an urban exile who escapes from her rotten life in the big city seeking a second chance at happiness. But will she find her dream while running a backwoods radio station in a mountain town inhabited mostly by nutcases? If you would like a copy of this romantic adventure, the cost is $5 including shipping and postage. Please contact Petrina for details.

Book

A Cup of Comfort for Breast Cancer Survivors, including Petrina's contest winning submission, The Challenge, is now in print and available through Amazon. Click here for details.

Book

EVERY OTHER WEEKEND, light women's fiction, stars a young divorced mom who sends the kids to dad every other weekend and gets involved with a much younger man.

GEEKY CHICKS TRY HARDER, light women's fiction, concerns a battle between a computer science professor who needs the last piece of land on campus to build a computer lab and a landscape artist determined to use it for a tropical garden paradise.

YEEHAW PAISANO, light women's ficiton, is where cultures collide when a disillusioned Jersey girl wins a Florida radio station in her divorce settlement and battles an interfering gang of relatives, the real mob, her rat ex, and a sexy cowboy.

 

Petrina's Projects:

Work in progress is SPY MOMMA, a story about a spunky grandma who answers the call of her family and goes on a spying mission to South America where she assists in a plot to dispose of a tyrannical dictator and becomes romantically involved with a younger fellow adventurer.

A future project: No title yet for a young adult suspense novel snatched from my own past but brought into the modern world about a conventional teenager who spends summers on the Jersey Shore where she hangs out with children of the Mafioso, and becomes involved with murder and mayhem.

A recurring theme in most of my books revolves around a dynamic woman who made bad choices at a young age then finds a second chance at happiness. While I write strictly fiction, the recurring theme comes from personal experience.

Also in the works is a nonfiction book highlighting excerpts and attitudes from the Transplants blog. Karen and I will continue our battle of country vs. city.

 

News & Events

Contest Wins:

2008 Adams Media “A Cup of Comfort for Breast Cancer Survivors” Contest - Winner!

SMRW's SSSS (Sweet, Spicy, Spooky and Suspense) - 3rd Place Sweet category with YEEHAW PAISANO!

SMRW's Christmas Line - 1st and 2nd Place! See my picture below. Contest rules were 1 sentence, 25 words max, using the words 'sparkle' and 'tradition.'

Funny, the first prize winner in the Christmas Line contest is sinister, the second grim. Never thought I had it in me. Of the six lines I entered, this is my favorite: "Dreaming of tomorrow's Christmas tradition, I awakened to moonlight sparkle and with amazement found Santa Claus sitting on my windowsill."

Thus starts a true story from my childhood, the one I'll be most likely to write.

My heroine of YEEHAW PAISANO, Mel Spadero, is not really sweet enough for the SSSS Sweet category. But she does melt some when she meets hero, Grady Cook. The story opens with Mel caught behind a crash between a truck toting oranges and a cattle carrier. She looks for a way around the accident so she can get to town and start out her new life as a radio station owner. The contest entry starts when she sees the cowboy. CLICK HERE for EXCERPT

 

Favorites

Authors & Writers

Television & Movies

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Spoon

Fork

In Petrina's Kitchen

Delicious Recipes to Tickle the Palate

Great Breakfast Dishes:


POTATO PANCAKES

These are made from leftover mashed potatoes, so good you'll always make extra mashed so as to whip up this delicious breakfast.

Mix the ingredients well in a large bowl and drop onto hot, lightly greased griddle. This should make six pancakes. Grill until brown and crispy on outside. Left-overs freeze well.

Serve with two slices bacon fried crisp per pancake and cold applesauce.



HOME FRIED POTATOES WITH HAMBURGER GRAVY

When we lived in Western Maryland, many of our neighbors were Seventh Day Adventists. It is against their religion to eat pork, so instead of missing out on delicious creamed gravy for breakfast, they used hamburger instead of sausage. Here's how to whip up a sensational breakfast. The gravy can be served on top of biscuits, Tennessee style, but we like the home fries.

Fry sliced potatoes in non stick pan with cooking spray along with half of the chopped onion. Sprinkle with garlic pepper to taste.

Break up hamburger and fry in pan sprinkled with olive oil cooking spray. Add the remaining chopped onion and garlic pepper to taste. Drain any fat and mix in flour (I use the easy mix kind) with the hamburger. Add the milk and stir until thickened. Add more flour or more milk to taste. For taste enhancer, add pat of butter to potatoes and/or gravy.

Serve on top of potatoes, or biscuits.


For hearty eaters, fried or scrambled eggs go well with either recipe


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Excerpt from YEEHAW PAISANO:

What was worse? Finding a town called Yeehaw Junction off the Florida Turnpike or experiencing near death on the road to Hicksville?

Jersey girls would definitely say the pits had to be Yeehaw. In Jersey, we face death by motor vehicle hourly. At this moment I should have arrived at the portal to my new life, a radio station I'd won in the vicious divorce settlement. Instead, stunned, I watched a sea of oranges spill onto the hood of my SUV. I was in one piece, shaking you bet, but intact. No injuries.

Peering into my rearview mirror, I shook my head. Impossible. Must be a freaking figment of my trauma. I tried blinking the image away. Didn't work.

The cowboy on horseback galloped ever closer.

Maybe I was in shock or something from being so close to a smoking mess of mangled metal and thinking that big truck could have hit me when inches in front of my SUV, the cattle carrier had plowed into the fruit truck.

That was the only explanation for the scene unfolding in front of me.

A cowboy in Florida? Definitely a freaking figment of my trauma. I'd traveled to Florida at least once a year since I was born, bunking with Nona, my grandmother, in Miami. I adored the sunshine state, but a cowboy on a horse? I sure wasn't in South Beach anymore.

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YEEHAW PAISANO goes on to recount many escapades of Mel and her cowboy including hassles with her nosey family when they show up on the prairie, interfacing with the small town folks and real danger when they get involved with the mob.

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