Mrs. Grey will see you now (3 things I learned coming out of the hair color closet)

Continuing the extended metaphor I began back in 2011 with this post on My Publishing Career as Illustrated by My Hair, in which I detailed a circuitous journey that began in the 1970s. Back then, a slow-to-blossom tweenage flower child, I was ironing my hair straight and selling erotic short stories in the girls' bathroom at the local roller rink.

My long auburn locks disappeared during chemo when I was in my early 30s. For ten years, I kept my hair super short and colored it various shades of red in an attempt to ward off the bad cancer juju. During my 40s, I let it grow, gave up on the auburn and went with an ash blond that made the increasingly ashy roots less noticeable.

When I hit my 50s, I decided to stop coloring my hair and embrace my grey. That was easier said than done, but here I am, and along the way, I learned three important lessons, which I intend to apply to life and writing as I enjoy my hard-earned silver era.

Thing #1: It's a process. Whatever "it" is, it's a process.
I suppose it would have been easier to just cut the hair off and start over, but I've done the micro-short-to-hippie-long hair transition before. There's a lot of bad hair days as you hang in there through the awkward stages. The temptation to cut (like the temptation to abandon a book that becomes a struggle) is always lurking.

In order to keep the length, I had to allow a few inches of roots to grow out. Years of hair color had to be stripped away. Then I had to nurture my hair with cold water and conditioner for several weeks before the final process of low-lighting, high-lighting and toning to match my true color.

As a structural editor/book doctor, I've held the hands of several authors as they did a similar strip, recovery and restoration process on a book. The key is that natural root. Once you can see the authentic soul of the book, you know what to do with the rest.

Book process, life process, color process, whatever. Patience and persistence will be required. Bet on that and assemble a great team. Which brings me to...

Thing #2: A lot of experts are terrified of change. Because it means they won't be experts anymore.

For years, stylists kept telling me there was no way to go grey without cutting off my long hair, but I started seeing young women doing it for themselves on YouTube. Apparently that's a thing now, young women with grey hair, and as soon as that trend took hold, well, whadya know! Shut up experts. Young women do what needs to get done. (Which brings me to Thing #2 subsection A: Young women, you have a lot more power than you think. Use it wisely.)

This is reminiscent of the dragging acceptance of indie publishing in the traditional publishing world. Agents and publishers were loathe to accept this new universe because it meant the crumbling of the system in which they were super comfy, even though the vast majority of authors were not. Lamest battle cry ever: "That's the way it's always been done." Whether I'm looking for a colorist, oncologist or freelance copy editor, I want someone who has ten years of experience, not one year of experience ten times.

I knew I'd found the right guy when Sergio Sepulveda at Visible Changes told me, "There's always a way to do something. It's just a question of 'has somebody figured it out yet'." Apply this to publishing big time. The only thing we know for sure about anything is that it is not the same as it was yesterday. Expertise in the way things have always been done is a great foundation for the purpose of exploring, building and inventing the way forward. It's less useful when it becomes the La-Z-Boy recliner from which experts advocate for status quo.

Thing #3: If someone tells you not to be yourself, they are wrong. 

Before Sergio, every stylist I consulted tried to warn me off the idea of embracing my grey with the same dire (in their minds) prediction: "You'll look older." The thing is, I AM older. I'm thrilled to be older.  Why invest time, energy or money in not looking like myself? For whose benefit would I be doing that?

Sergio's take on it: "There's nothing more beautiful than a woman who's happy about who she is." Can I get a "Amen" up in here?

It kills me to see authors jumping through hoops to please agents, acquiring editors, theoretical readerships and nebulous trends. It's like trying to reinvent yourself to please an indifferent boyfriend. Down that path lies despair. Your power to create, your best hope of happiness, and yes, your marketability lie in your uniqueness. Embrace it with joy!

Here's the new older me with the amazing Sergio, awesome haircutter Hua, their shampoo-slinging sidekick Justin, and a totally fabulous photo-bomber rocking her own silver streaks.

It takes a village: Me, Hua, Sergio, Justin and Foxy Frostentip

UPDATE 2/2/17 ~ Having escaped the abusive environment of chemicals and color, my hair has grown out a lot faster. I now have 100% virgin/chemical free, 99.9% gray hair. And I love it.

Screw it. I'll just be myself. (A New Year's Resolution)

Realizing that I've made pretty much the same five resolutions every New Year's Eve for the past three decades, I've decided to exit 2012 - one of the worst years of my life - with a single guiding principle: Screw it. I'm just going to be myself.

My Top Five Retired Resolutions archive:
#1 Stop using bad words. Yeah. Fuck that. Sorry.

#2 Lose weight. Based on 35 years of empirical study, I can conclude with some certainty that dieting, self-loathing, guilt and constantly talking about my weight is not going to make me a size 7. I am a size 14. Bam. Weight problem solved.

#3 Work smarter, not harder! This too often translates into trying to do what works for other people. Practicality is the enemy of exploration. I have to do what feels right to me as an artist and works for me as a sole proprietor, and so far, working insanely hard seems to have yielded the most fruit. Plus I like working hard. I'm a disorganized, "method in the madness" workaholic. In size 14 jeans. Self-help gurus can suck it.

#4 Be a purveyor of shalom. This is a lovely ambition in theory, but sometimes the world needs shit-disturbers, tell-it-like-it-is-ers, boat-rockers and contrarians. For 20 years, the only prayer I've spoken on behalf of my career is "Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace." Praying for book deals or for certain people to get syphilis is too narrow-minded for the wide-open possibilities of modern publishing, so I plan to stick with that, but genuine, lasting peace usually comes in the wake of healthy change, so upheaval serves that goal - in personal and professional arenas - far better than denying one's self and placating others.

#5 Be a better mom. Over the years, the specifics ranged from making a daily hot breakfast to chore charts to a total ban on television in our home for two years. God knows what my kids (now in their mid-20s) will tell their analysts about me, but they are a couple of awesome blossoms, no one's been arrested lately, and I can go to sleep at night knowing I did my best. My role from here on out is to love them, not to finance their foolishness, enable their self-doubt or critique their decisions. The best thing I can do for them is give them permission to be themselves by living the mandate I'm resolving to better embrace:

"To thine own self be true."

Reading FEAR OF FLYING at 15 and 50 (Jong holds up beautifully.)

I first read FEAR OF FLYING in 1977. I was 15. My algebra teacher nicked it from my hand, threw it in the trash can and told me it was pornographic garbage, but I was already halfway through the book and smart enough to know that wasn't true. I rescued the book and spent a few weeks in detention, but it was well worth it. FEAR OF FLYING blew my tiny mind on several levels.

Because of the open discussion of sex in FEAR OF FLYING, some of the other important themes get back-burnered. For me, having been raised in the 1960s attending Wisconsin Synod Lutheran churches and schools that were dominated by German culture, the greatest impact of the book was how it made me rethink everything I'd been taught about Jews. (Unscrupulously greedy. Killed Jesus. Automatically going to Hell.) Here was the fresh antidote to the heartbreaking guilt of Anne Frank and Corrie ten Boom, along with an electric cattle prod of enlightenment for a child indoctrinated with the party line about how Jews caused the Holocaust by telling Pontius Pilate, "Let his blood be on us and our children!"

Erica Jong's brilliantly wry descriptions of her family, observations about psychoanalysis and running inner dialogue about desire, ambition, pleasure, displeasure, sanity, insanity and womanhood freed my mind in a way that every 15-year-old mind needs to be freed if the 50-year-old to come along later is to be anything close to happy.

Jong's wit and intellect profoundly impacted my understanding of literary craft, and I went on to consume everything else she wrote. My evolution as a reader serendipitously coincided with her evolution as a writer. I consider her body of work a major element in my education as an author.

So now I'm 50, and I just now finished rereading FEAR OF FLYING for the first time since I rescued that battered paperback from the trash. It holds up beautifully, despite the intervening years. The world has changed, but the human heart has not. It never has and never will, and that's what blew my tiny mind this time around. FEAR OF FLYING is a book that begs to be revisited and deserves a place in every enlightened woman's library.

Highly, truly, passionately recommended.

The Tao of Mac

Gary sprained his hand last night at work, and it's swollen up like one of those old fashioned baseball mitts. For years I've kept bags of frozen peas on hand for the purpose of icing my aching wrists and hands after hours of typing. I got one out, and it was frosted solid. I realized I haven't had to ice my hands since Gary gave me this MacBook Air for Christmas.

I'm not one of those Apple heads. (I haven't been thrilled with my decision to switch from a Droid to iPhone - especially since a recent update left it navigating like a drunken sailor.) But I have to give credit where it's due. I love my MacBook.

Please understand, this was a profound improvement in my quality of life. There are times when my ghostwriting schedule forces me to crank out 3K words a day (and if you're a writer, you know that 3K good words means also typing 5K off-the-mark words that end up cut or reworked.) Many was the midnight hour that found me lying on the floor fighting tears of agony, my forearms decked with frosty delights from the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant.

The realization that it's been 10+ months since I had to plan for and facilitate that pain - it just blew me away. How did I not notice that? How was I not celebrating it every day?

I suppose it's because the MacBook allows me to focus on (and celebrate) what I'm writing. The presence of pain is impossible to ignore; the absence of pain is something we take (if we're lucky) completely for granted.

A hallmark of great technology: it disappears into its own functionality. Instead of cluttering and upstaging life, it provides a vehicle for it. Like a really good bass player (or a really good ghostwriter), it provides structure and soul without calling attention to itself.

"All art is erotic." ~ Gustav Klimt

Happy 150th Birthday, Gustav Klimt!

A visit to Pensacola Beach and thoughts on branding oneself as sacred

Expanding on a comment I posted earlier in response to Dan Holloway's excellent post on The Cynical Self-Publisher about the difficulties of consistent branding in the current publishing/social networking environment.

Yesterday, I sat at a particular spot by the Gulf of Mexico in Pensacola Beach, where I lived when I was a kid. It was a dive back then: a small row of shabby Nixon-era townhomes with long flanks of empty beach on both sides and flea-infested, trash-strewn empty lots across the street. Now it's all swankypants. The old place was destroyed by a hurricane in the 1990s and replaced with high dollar apartments and upscale houses side-by-side the entire length of the once God-forsaken road.

I won't nostalgically argue that the old place was better. It wasn't; it was a shithole. But it was a shithole with a beautiful white sand beach. Yes, it's crowded now, but back then it was lonely. Yes, it's overly commercial now, but back then it was ill-maintained because only a few people cared about it. Eventually, all these new things will fall away and be replaced by something else.

What remains constant is the beach. The white sand and blue Gulf -- that's the source of the spiritual, recreational, educational, physical, emotional, financial power of this place.

All of which is to say that branding has to be about who we are, not what we do. Our nature is consistent; money, bizzyness, trends and opportunities are not. Each of us has this powerful natural wonder within ourselves. The question we're asking (though we might not like the sound of it) is: "How shall I best exploit this?"

The broad strokes are obvious:

In any development, as many windows as possible should face the beach. Key to our commercial value is a firmly fixed focus on the art and craft of writing.

Boardwalks and roads should be kept up properly. We have to make our work accessible and reader-friendly. This encompasses everything from excellent grammar to a well-designed, easily navigable website.

The beach must be protected from pollution. Greed, jealousy, negativity and grasping are bound to make an appearance. They should be disposed of quickly and appropriately.

Access to the beach should be open in some areas, controlled in others. Our secondary goal is to welcome as many readers as possible; our primary goal is to lead happy lives. We must reserve significant quantities of time, love and creative energy for ourselves, our work and our personal relationships.

Above all, the beach should be shared, enjoyed and loved. Honored. Because the beach came from God and ultimately belongs to God. It's both fiscally prudent and spiritually healthy for the beach to be consistently branded as sacred.

Shirley Bassey "If You Go Away (Ne Me Quitte Pas)"

Still crazy after all these years (Heart "Crazy On You" then and now)

Yes we get older...and bigger. But as much as I loved the ramped kid version of this song (and yes, I could play that awesome guitar riff at the beginning), I'm definitely into the big broad version. Way to evolve, Wilson sisters!
 

Gary's Chevy SSR and the definition of practical

I won't lie; I teared up when Gary signed the papers for this Chevy SSR yesterday.

"Your wife is more excited than you are," the salesman marveled. "Usually it's the guy who's crying 'cause the wife won't go for it."

It wasn't an impulse purchase; it was the sudden and unexpected realization of a dream he's had for years. He's wanted one since they came out in 2004. Priced and looked and Googled them a thousand times.

In Bald in the Land of Big Hair, my memoir about how I got my first book published while undergoing chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, I wrote a lot about Gary's dedication to our family and his role as my Rock of Gibraltar co-survivor. My favorite review of the book called it "a love letter to an extraordinary caregiver." And the book doesn't begin to cover how he's stood behind me through the feast and famine of my career as an author.

Beyond the basic fact that Gary deserves this -- and he's earned it -- is the basic philosophy that's guided our lives since cancer barged in and kicked us in the head. The most impractical, wasteful and foolish thing a person can do with his or her life is to not live it.

Gary's Chevy SSR and the definition of practical

I won't lie; I teared up when Gary signed the papers for this Chevy SSR yesterday.

"Your wife is more excited than you are," the salesman marveled. "Usually it's the guy who's crying 'cause the wife won't go for it."

It wasn't an impulse purchase; it was the sudden and unexpected realization of a dream he's had for years. He's wanted one since they came out in 2004. Priced and looked and Googled them a thousand times.

In Bald in the Land of Big Hair, my memoir about how I got my first book published while undergoing chemotherapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, I wrote a lot about Gary's dedication to our family and his role as my Rock of Gibraltar co-survivor. My favorite review of the book called it "a love letter to an extraordinary caregiver." And the book doesn't begin to cover how he's stood behind me through the feast and famine of my career as an author.

Beyond the basic fact that Gary deserves this -- and he's earned it -- is the basic philosophy that's guided our lives since cancer barged in and kicked us in the head. The most impractical, wasteful and foolish thing a person can do with his or her life is to not live it.

Lisa Kudro captures COMEBACK vibe: "I Will Survive"

I've been watching Lisa Kudro's fantastic faux reality show THE COMEBACK with a lump in my throat. It's agonizingly hilarious and even more true to Hollywood than ENTOURAGE. I know exactly what it feels like. Trying too hard. Giving too much. Wanting nothing more than the opportunity to do the work, which is hard to come by. And even harder to come back to.

Social networking for the antisocial

People keep pushing this whole agenda of auto-tweeting as a way to game the Amazon ranks, and I know it works. You do sell books, but... do you still have time to write books? (Do you still have a soul?) I get that twitter is about "building relationships," I'm just not clear on the quality of a relationship based on spam.

My thought all along has been to use twitter with a less aggressive stance, using hashtags to insert my two cents into a conversation that actually interests me.

Like this:

For women in the 60s, life began at #contraception. BT Sissel on the bad old #aspirin days. http://bit.ly/xctmgF

I've been assured that this is pointless. But I remain hopeful that "teachable moment" marketing that links the right message with the right moment has an effect that is perhaps less obviously and instantly measurable but ultimately more powerful, because it's about building a culture instead of a terribly impressive house of cards.

Twitter is an insanely great idea, and it's a powerful marketing tool, but it requires a certain personality type, and I'm not sure that's me. Does that mean I won't sell books? Maybe. I'm sure it means I won't sell as many. And at the end of the day, authors want to put their books in readers' hands.

So I'm determined to give it a shot.

I'll start by implementing this list of 5 Twitter Secrets to Become Highly Visible in Your Niche, one each day this week. Next, I'll take a crash course in Book Marketing 101 from World Lit Cafe founder, Melissa Foster.

Just in case, I bought the T-shirt.

Flash forward 29 years

Groundhogs Day 1983. I went backstage to greet some friends after their performance of "Fiddler on the Roof." This strange guy told me he loved me. Then he introduced himself and asked me to go for a walk. I had a can of Mace in my pocket, so I figured what the hey.

Flash forward 29 years...

If you want to give a writer a gift...

Gary's been a longsuffering observer (and listener) during the last year as I struggled to navigate treacherous territory between art and commerce, trying to make my way through the uncharted rain forest of indie publishing.

Today for my birthday, he gave me this WWI officer's compass and said, "The purpose is not so you can find your way. It's so you know your way."

Crazy For Trying FREE on Kindle this weekend!

Celebrating my birthday and the 50th anniversary of Patsy Cline's "Crazy" this weekend. My firstborn novel, Crazy For Trying, is FREE through Sunday! The song and I were both born on January 29, 1962.

Pardon me while I feel a little bit awesome about that...

Patsy Cline "Crazy"

Looking up some facts about the song that offered up the perfect title for my first novel, Crazy For Trying (which happens to be FREE on Kindle Select this weekend), I was ridiculously thrilled to discover that it was released the day I was born.

Patsy Cline "Crazy"

Looking up some facts about the song that offered up the perfect title for my first novel, Crazy For Trying (which happens to be FREE on Kindle Select this weekend), I was ridiculously thrilled to discover that it was released the day I was born.

What I have in common with "Crazy"

I was inordinately delighted to discover today that Patsy Cline's "Crazy" EP was released 50 years ago this coming Sunday, January 29, 1962 - the day I was born.

"Crazy" has been in my head my whole life, and offered up the perfect title for my first novel, Crazy for Trying.

To celebrate my big Five-Oh, Crazy for Trying will be FREE this weekend on Kindle Select.

THE HURRICANE LOVER official launch starts on Kindle Nation Daily today!

Incredibly excited about the official launch campaign for The Hurricane Lover, starting today with a nice big fat plug on Kindle Nation Daily.

Putting a new book out into the world is always simultaneously terrifying and thrilling, and this one is even more so for me because it's my first indie pub novel. (I've indie pubbed my backlist books, but this is the first original from my digital imprint Stella Link Books.

 One week from today, I shall turn 50. This is a great way to kick off the Power Decade!

Note to Cancer: I LIVED, MUTHERF#@%ER! Note to Publishing: I fear nothing.

Seventeen years ago today, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a virulent blood cancer. (Coincidentally, November 28, 1994 was also the Monday after Thanksgiving that year.) Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Every day since that one is bonus time. A gift, and I know it.

During chemo, I was clobbered by the realization that writing is what I was supposed to do with my life. An inconvenient discovery at an extremely inopportune moment, but my longshot odds of survival actually made my longshot odds of getting published slightly less ridiculous.

My goal was to live for five years, just long enough so that my children (ages 5 and 7 at the time) would remember me and maybe - just maybe - I could get one book published.

Seventeen years and a dozen books later, I'm taking a humbly grateful moment to say TAWANDA!