That's me, the little toe-head (blonde) girl in the front.

First, A Little Background

I was born on January 24th, 1962, in Salem, Oregon. My dad was an aeronautical engineer, and my mother was a church organist. Before I joined the family, there were already three other children. A fourth, my parents’ second child, was a daughter who, unfortunately, only lived six weeks before she died of pneumonia. So, technically, I am the fifth child. I also have a younger sister and brother.

Due to the nature of Dad’s work, we traveled the states by car quite a bit when I was young. For much of his professional career, he worked on government contracts, designing aircraft for the military. So, we moved wherever his job took him: Georgia, Ohio, Colorado, and Utah. We settled down in Utah because our family was Mormon (Latter-day Saint/LDS). Mom wanted to stay put in one location so that we could put down roots.

We remained in Utah the rest of my childhood, except for a brief stint in Long Island, NY, during my junior year of high school.

Shortly after we returned to Utah, I met and married my first husband, who joined the U.S. Army a few months later. That lifestyle took us to several different destinations: twice to Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Washington, four years in Germany, then to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and finally back to Utah. Along the way, I gave birth to my three children and did many different things to earn an income and gain an education.

MUCH LATER

In 1997, my first husband and I split up, and I moved back to Oregon. I met my sweetheart, Jeff, and we built a life together there. I helped him run his software development business, and he helped me launch and run my gourmet coffee, tea, hot cocoa, and biscotti business: Brown Paper Coffee Company (BPCC), which consumed much of my time for nearly four years.

LIVING OFF-GRID

Jeff and I purchased 20 acres of bare land in Central Oregon's High Desert. We lived an off-grid lifestyle with our six kids, ages 6 to 16, for a year and a half.

During that time, I taught myself how to make handcrafted jewelry and ultimately turned that craft into a small business.

While in the desert, I also taught myself the art of pyrography (burning art and lettering onto wood or leather) and turned that skill into a small business.

RAW FOODS TO TAROT READINGS

We moved back to the city to improve business opportunities, and eventually, Jeff reconnected with an old high school buddy who owns a software development company in Central Oregon. This friend recruited him to help manage his backlog of clients. So, off we went back to that part of the state. It was during this time that my younger cousin was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and I decided to research dietary approaches that might help heal him of this disease. I learned about the benefits of a raw-food diet and tried eating this way myself. You can read about My Experience Going 100% Raw here. I adjusted my eating plan and formulated the idea for what became my online magazine - Eighty Percent Raw. I created the website and recruited over 25 raw food chefs and healthcare professionals who contributed recipes, articles, and reviews every month for several years.

PROFESSIONAL SPIRITUAL COACHING

The magazine never generated much income, so I had to do other things to make money. I hadn't considered pursuing jewelry-making or pyrography as real businesses yet, so I had to do something else for income. Back in 2003, I thought it might be fun and interesting to learn how to conduct tarot card readings. I always had a gift for insight; others frequently came to me for personal advice. So, after learning the cards, I began practicing with family and friends. Turns out I had a knack for performing readings. I continued to improve my skills over the years, and in 2008, I got my first job working for an online spiritual coaching (or psychic reading) website. From 2012 to 2015, I earned a pretty respectable income conducting tarot readings for people worldwide.

WORDPRESS WEBSITE DESIGN

Performing readings for clients was fulfilling...for a while. But eventually, I became emotionally drained from people who became dependent on my services...asking the same question in many different ways as they could think of...but expecting a different result. Yup! The definition of insanity, lol! So, I pulled away from doing readings and once again found myself looking for another source of income. This came when my son introduced me to WordPress website design. I had been creating websites for my own businesses since 1997. But I wasn't a fan of writing HTML and didn't really want to learn to write CSS. So, when my son showed me how to create a site using WordPress, it was a total revelation! I've been building my own websites with it ever since. And I even found a handful of paying clients who were willing to hire me to create websites for them, too!

In conjunction with website design, I learned about affiliate marketing. I have promoted some really fantastic products and received ongoing commissions from recommending them to my followers.

PROFESSIONAL PYROGRAPHER

I continued administration work for Jeff's software business while improving my handcrafted jewelry and pyrography skills. I started a Facebook page for my jewelry and have sold quite a few of my designs to friends and followers there. You can view some of my creations HERE. But what really stuck with me was my pyrography. I decided to focus on wood-burning instead of jewelry because everybody and their dog makes jewelry. However, pyrography is a very unusual hobby that most people have never heard of. I created a website called Portland Pyrography. With our move to Texas in early spring of 2022, I obviously had to change the name. Now my official online pyrography presence is Piney Woods Pyrography. That hobby turned into a small business that I have spent many years cultivating, though I don't work it full-time. There just isn't that much demand...Mostly, I think, because people just aren't aware of the art form. But I've managed to generate quite a few clients over the years.

WRITING

More recently, I've become a published author. I have published four middle-grade fantasy novels and am currently working on the fifth.

My adult children have mentioned that they "didn't know I had it in me" to write fiction. But apparently, I do, lol!

In December 2019, I published The Golden Telescope, the first in my Jack Mac Paidin MG (Middle Grade) fantasy series.
In November 2020, I published Book Two: The Kidnapping King.
On December 7th, 2021, I published Book Three: The Magical Legacy.
December 30th, 2022, I published Book Four: The Risky Reunion.
Book Five: The Order of Light is on hold at the moment while I write a YA Dark Fantasy spin-off trilogy. Dark Awakening in the Demon Realm is Book One in that trilogy. I'll keep you posted on my progress in both books.
Seven more books are outlined for my Jack Mac Paidin series; if all goes well, I will publish them over the next three years.
Then Series 2: Jack and the Immortals will follow.
Partridge is my maiden name and no longer my legal name. After joining Facebook, I started using the hyphenated version, thinking that adding the name my school pals knew me by "back in the day" would make it easier for people to find me and reconnect. My mother liked that I adopted my birth name as part of my public image, so it stuck. I decided to use it as my official pen name.
I also spend some time working as an editor. If you’re an aspiring author, I would love to talk to you to determine if I might be a good fit for your project. Contact Me at: tracy@macpaidinpublishing.com

OTHER PASSIONS

INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL

International travel and culture are a huge passion of mine, and I feel very fortunate to have lived in one foreign country (Germany) and traveled to seven others: Canada, Mexico, Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco, Italy, and Greece.

NETWORK MARKETING

Over the years, I've joined nearly 30 network marketing or Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) companies. You can read about those experiences in my My History With Network Marketing(MLM) post.