Nadine Feldman, Author

celebrating strong female characters and whatever else strikes my fancy

novelist

Blog of The Week: The Creative Penn

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Normally I don’t recommend blogs that pertain specifically to writers, because not everyone who reads my blog is a writer. However, many of you are, so a good one is worth mentioning now and then.

Recently I enrolled in Joel Friedlander’s Self-Publishing Roadmap, and as part of the package he included several bonuses, one of which was Joanna Penn speaking about marketing novels. I’ve been following Penn on Twitter for a while, but it wasn’t until I heard her webinar that I became a true-blue fan. In less than 90 minutes she boggled my mind with her generosity and spirit. Through a combination of free and paid information, she provides expertise on navigating through new media. In addition, she writes novels, so she knows the challenges of marketing fiction successfully. Many of the experts I’ve run across online are great at nonfiction but provide little help for me, so Joanna is a great find.

Not only is her advice useful and specific, but she is also one of these chirpy, cheerful sorts that lets me know that I can fix my mistakes. I made some rookie errors with the production of The Foreign Language of Friends, even though it’s the third book I’ve produced. It was the first one, however, in this brave new world of e-publishing, and there are things I would do differently.

Is it too late to relaunch a book, I wondered? Never, Penn says. Unlike traditional published books, self-publishers can relaunch a book at any time, even years down the road. I busily scribbled notes and now have a plan for going forward — and a plan for setting up new work for the future.

Penn also has a regular podcast that I’ve found helpful, too. I just have one question: when does she sleep?

For those who aren’t interested in writing/publishing tips but want to go straight to fiction, Penn keeps a separate blog for fiction with the tagline “ancient mystery, modern thrill.” I’m looking forward to reading her books. In the meantime, she’s going to save me a lot of time, money, and heartache on my authoring, and she can do the same for you, too!

Get Ready for the Summer of Indie!

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Thanks, Marlene Dotterer, author of The Time Travel Journals: Shipbuilder (a great read, if you haven’t checked it out yet!), for letting me know about the Summer of Indie.

What’s that, you ask?

If you’re a writer or reader or both, you’ll love getting info about great indie books at the Go Indie website. It’s a great way to get to know up-and-coming authors and their books. I’m going to participate. Are you in?

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A blog note: my editor has just returned Blood & Loam to me with her latest revisions. Although the book is getting closer to completion, it still needs a fair amount of work. It’s a dark tale that takes me to places in my mind that I’m uncomfortable going, so it’s taking additional effort and drafts to get the story to where it needs to go.

In addition, I have started working on a new idea for a novel that has me jazzed! It’s great to be working on books after taking a rather long break, but it does mean that I have to clear my schedule to make room. For that reason, starting next week, I will continue with Wednesday and Thursday posts. I will leave the Tuesday posts as “optional” for now.

Good Morning, Monday!

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I hope everyone had a great weekend! Since I am neck-deep revising two novels, I have kept busy. I’m trying to get the latest versions done before we embark on our next trip in a few weeks. These revisions include increasing detail, so I’ve been “shopping” for my characters, buying them clothes and cars that show their lifestyle. My character Julia absolutely needed a little Mercedes Cabriolet convertible–red, of course! In my real life, I’m not fond of shopping (unless I’m with my sisters!), but I confess that I am having fun feeling like I’m revisiting childhood dress-up play.

As we enter into mid-August, for many of you the nests are emptying out. It’s a good time to think about playing dress-up with our own lives, whether that means trying on new clothes or trying on new activities to discover or rediscover our interests and passions. Last year I learned that I loved gardening, even though I never tried it until age 51. Who knows what surprises are in store, if we just open ourselves to this new phase? What can we learn about ourselves and what holds meaning for us?

While we’re playing dress-up with our new lives, we may feel like young adolescents in other ways, too, as hormones create interesting situations and force mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual transitions. This week, for our Book Discovery Tuesday, I am going to write about Susun Weed. While she has a new book that I haven’t yet read, I have found one of her older ones, The New Menopausal Years, to provide supportive help and relief for menopausal symptoms. It’s tough to be excited about the midlife years when we’re battling exhaustion, depression, and hot flashes! With warm, encouraging words, Susun initiates us into menopause, acknowledging both the challenges and the invitation to shed old roles that no longer serve us.

On Wednesday, we’ll talk more about uncovering our identities now that our roles as mothers diminish. We’ll look at how to find and rekindle old dreams, as well as how to manifest them. We’ll look at ways to cut away those activities that drain us or otherwise take us away from those dreams so that we can take time each day to take care of what truly matters to us.

I’m excited that some of you are starting to contact me and share your experiences! Please keep the feedback coming. Also, if you have a favorite blog to recommend for our Thursday blog feature, please let me know. Have a great week!

Women Friends: How Do We Keep It Together?

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I read a lot of women’s fiction, and often a group of women come together in a particular situation and form deep, lasting bonds with each other. Heck, I’ve even written a book that follows this pattern! I didn’t write it to honor my best gal pals, though. The women I feel closest to are scattered all over the country. When we get together, not nearly often enough, it’s as though no time has passed, but I don’t have a group of local women to meet for coffee and commiseration. I think I wrote my novel in part to create characters that I wouldn’t mind hanging out with!

As I worked on the manuscript, I grappled with what I see as changes in friendships that have occurred over the years. I remember as a young girl when neighbor ladies came over to visit my mom. My grandma, a seamstress who worked out of her home, kept a pot of coffee on for people who dropped by for fittings and a chat. She enjoyed the confidential nature of those conversations, saying, “I could blow the lid off this town if I wanted to.” But she didn’t, because she valued her relationships.

Fast forward a few decades. For a time I worked in an office made up entirely of women. Overall, it was a great time. Yes, we had our moments, but we often hung out together socially, and we had a lot of fun. I saw none of the competition among women that I would see later in an environment of both men and women. I was in my 30s then, and I was in a “golden age” of friendships, complete with those long, sharing telephone calls that sometimes extended late into the night.

Where did those friends go? Our company merged, and many of us went our separate ways through resignations and layoffs. We held things together for a time, but other jobs, commutes, and family responsibilities intervened. After that, I enjoyed the company of female co-workers on other jobs, but nothing clicked in terms of friendship.

I also found that in the environment of other corporations, some of the women bonded together in a “mean girls” sort of way. Once I was invited to have lunch with a group of ladies, and their sole topic of conversation was to gossip about another co-worker whom I happened to like. Needless to say, I was never invited to their group again, and had they invited me, I would have turned them down.

As we age, many of us are part of the sandwich generation, where we are caring for children and parents at the same time, often while holding down a job and trying, at some level, to keep the house clean. I was fortunate during this period to have the option to drop my corporate responsibilities, but it also created a level of social isolation. My buddies still have jobs, and they often don’t stop even to have lunch these days. Some, I have stopped asking.

I don’t give up easily, though. I chat with a few of the neighbors from time to time, and I find some promise there. I have bonded with some of my fellow women writers, which feels good, even if that’s all online.  I visit my scattered friends when I can. And, of course, when all else fails, I can always make up new characters and revisit old ones!

I’d love to hear from women on this. Are your friendships alive and well? How did you meet? How do you keep your relationships strong over the years?

Reframing the Menopausal Mind

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When I was a kid and frequented t-shirt stores during vacations, I frequently saw a t-short that said, “Watch out! I’m low on estrogen–and I’ve got a gun.” Of course, these days wearing such a shirt would invite visitors from Homeland Security, but as a woman of “a certain age,” I can appreciate the sentiments of the shirt.

This type of thinking about the menopausal mind, though, has also worked against women. Growing up, as women started to take charge of their careers and seek greater levels of leadership, I often heard the question, “What if a woman President, while in a menopausal temper, hit “the” button?” The implication of course, is that a menopausal woman cannot handle her mood swings–and that men don’t have them. Yet I often observed in my work life that the men most concerned about my emotional nature had high levels of emotion themselves.

Yet, while I have confident in my abilities not to do anything (too) foolish, I have a few days a month when I feel my world crashing down around me. Fatigue and depression smother me, the deep-in-the-pit kind that partners closely with despair and hopelessness. It doesn’t make me less capable, but it ain’t pretty, either.

Through supplements and herbal tonics, which I’ll discuss in more detail in future blogs, I have been able to even out my moods more during the month, and I have hope to quiet the storm a little bit. I hold on to the words of my late, beloved mother-in-law Jenny, who promised me that I will feel liberated in my post-menopausal years. Oh, Lord, I hope she’s right!

For a while I medicated with birth control pills, but after two years of taking them, without much relief, I was concerned about continuing a dose of artificial hormones. I also didn’t like the idea of masking whatever I might be feeling. Just as I stopped coloring my hair because I wanted to see its real color, more and more I wanted to see, and feel, the real me.

What I find most interesting, though, is that I am changing my attitude about those mood swings.*

It’s tough to get through the depression, but the other side of it, which always comes, fascinates me. While in the funk, I ask myself, “What are you trying to tell me?” Usually it’s something I need to do, or not do, or to do differently.

This time around, the message was about completion. I had too many projects laying around in some stage of progress, and nothing getting done. So, I made some adjustments. First, I hired an editor to work with me on two of my writing projects so I can get them done more quickly. Time will tell, but so far she impresses me as someone who “gets” my work but who will provide honest feedback to make it better.

Second, I changed my routine so that I get my daily word count in early in the day, before taking on errands or housework. Only the gardening comes first, and that’s to beat the worst of the heat. Most days, I’m getting to work on my word count by 7:30 a.m.

Once I made these simple adjustments, I felt clean and shiny and new again. By listening to my depression and taking its counsel, I found my way back to joy. I hit my word count by 8:30 a.m., got some exercise, and wrote some more. More and more, I believe that the menopausal mind is one that insists on truth, even when it’s unpleasant, and that’s a good thing. Better that than pulling out a gun, anyway!

 

*If you suffer clinical depression, please do not hesitate to get help through therapy and, possibly, medication. The kinds of mood swings I’m talking about here tend to come and go quickly and do not qualify as clinical depression.

A Writer’s Labor and Birth

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While 50 pages of my novel sit at the agent’s office, waiting to be read, I am busily doing one more spit and polish on the manuscript. My editor had made recommendations, which I followed, but I want to make sure that all my latest changes make sense…either in case the agent wants the rest of the story, or I decide to query other agents, or I decide to self-publish again.

As I get closer to the end, though, I feel a familiar sensation, one that hits me every time I finish a project. That is, a fear of death emerges. Now, I hesitate to some degree to talk about this, but a few years ago I learned that I’m not the only writer to feel that way, so I might as well tell the truth. It’s not as bad as it used to be– it’s one of the main reasons I didn’t start writing until I was 39. These days I just say, “Yep, here it is again.”

Thing is, every time we write a book we are reborn in some way. Maybe it’s a piece of myself that I don’t need anymore that dies, and that’s what I struggle to let go of, but finishing a book is a bit like having a baby, except you’re not dealing with diaper changes, cries, and sleepless nights.

Well, sometimes we still get the sleepless nights, but it’s not the same. Like a baby, though, the book needs nurturing even after it’s “born.” We send it around to publishers and agents, announcing that we have the cutest baby book ever. If someone says our baby is ugly, we take offense. And, we must care for it, revising, resubmitting, getting feedback, etc., to help form it into the best little citizen book we can. We don’t know what it will be when it’s grown up, or how others will perceive it.

In the meantime, though, we wring our hands and fuss over it, doing our best and wondering where the damned manual is–because for all the books that exist on the craft of writing, there is no definitive way of creating a novel. In fact, I have already learned that each novel has a life of its own. I’ve finished two and started a third, and each one takes a different path, just as each child does.

We learn, in the end, that some efforts, despite our best intentions, are stillborn. They don’t quite work, they languish unpublished, or they don’t sell. It hurts, and we grieve. Sometimes we wonder if we’ll ever be parents at all! Still, we proceed with determination, like everyone who wants to parent a child, and we keep trying. We learn that when we allow ourselves to love, whether it’s a child we have or a book we write, we may die a little in the end. We may be disappointed. But we will not be sorry that we allowed ourselves to love in the first place–for that is where life’s magic resides.