Category: Ageism

Nude Talk + Book n Vid Inspo + Abortion + Aithal on Writing

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podcasting audiobook audio booth
Recording an audio book at home rocks! And it’s hot…
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1bKmdGi98yHTSe70pLcbyf?si=789879fe10a049ac
Happiness Between Tails has a podcast/audio version! Click the Spotify podcast link above. And please give it a follow.

Releasing my novel is taking longer than I’d like (understatement). At this stage, I’m recording an audiobook version of the first section, which is truly fun!

The audio booth I fashioned within our petite guest-bedroom walk-in closet is soundproofed with a mishmash of bedding held together with clothespins. Photos of me using it must wait for cooler temps. Without air conditioning, I recorded in my birthday suit, standing on a towel to sop up dripping sweat.

Once voicing and editing of the first chapter are done, the audio will become a promotion tool. The book version (yay! yay! yay! is finished!) needs a cover image and formatting. I’ll try again for a great traditional agent before I self-publish.

All this makes me stress that I’ll never finish — which is why I take great pleasure in discovering people who accomplished great things later in life, whether they’re real life or fiction.

Art goddess Beatrice Wood learned pottery throwing after age 40, then she really hit her stride many years later. A friend of hers was so touched by her that she photographed her for a book of her wisdom as she turned 100 in 1993! By the way, Wood penned her autobiography at 95. My review of the book below for Amazon and Goodreads: “Spectacular & Inspiring — absolutely wonderful in every way!”…

Cover of book: Playing Chess With Heart: Beatrice Wood at 100 Hardcover – February 1, 1994 by Beatrice Wood (Author), Marlene Wallace (Photographer)

Here’s just one of many wonderful and timely quotes from within its pages, this one about abortion…

“Let us face it, it is not a question of whether the law is right or wrong where abortion is concerned. Any woman desperate enough will go to an abortionist regardless of whether there is a law against it. To speak of saving a fetus is to ignore the dangers facing a woman having an illegal abortion — which could mean the loss of two lives.” from the book, “Beatrice Wood at 100.”

Regarding wisdom gained through experience, I urge you to check out and share blogger Equinoxio21’s (who’s guested here before) post at his site, where he discusses abortion…

Continuing on the subject of treating each other decently, I recently much enjoyed Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Raise an Antiracist.” My review of it for Amazon and Goodreads: “Complete candor about a subject that’s scary to talk about. Kendi writes with needed honesty about how difficult raising an antiracist child is, but how essential it is.” …

 

Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Raise an Antiracist."

Dreams are ageless! Art Carney well earned the Oscars he won starring alongside an orange stripey cat in the uber-inspiring and entertaining “Harry and Tonto.”

Today’s guest blog post is by Aithal, who’s guested here before. He’s published six books, the first book set in India. His latest is a USA-to-India thriller. Here’s his advice for novelists…

So You Think You Can Write by Aithal

So you want to be an author, huh? Join the queue. Millions of dreamers want to be one, and they are very talented writers with a repertoire of fancy and obscure words that are seldom used. Their grammar is perfect, and their statement construction is flawless. So it should be a no-brainer for them to write great books everyone wants to read. Right? Wrong.

Many elements make up a good book. The most critical aspect (at least in my opinion) is that the story should come from the heart. When I started to write my first book in January of 2010, it took me less than a week to pour my initial thoughts down. However, to expand on the idea, to read over and over again for typos, tighten the storyline, etc. — took me about fifteen months. Was it worth it? Absolutely. It was a journey down memory lane that I thoroughly enjoyed. If you decide to write a book, don’t hurry. I know you must think, “it’s easy for you to say.” But believe me, it’s worth it. I, too, was very impatient in the beginning as I was very eager to have my “masterpiece” out.

My thinking was straightforward. To make people read my book and let them decide if it was worth their time. Unlike seeing a movie (where one spends only 2–3 hours of their time), reading a book is at least a week of their time. So it better be worth it. Spend time upfront, and you’ll reap the rewards. Enjoy the journey. Don’t be in a hurry to reach your destination.

Kirkus Reviews aren’t free, but are highly effective. I recently got my last book reviewed on Kirkus Reviews. They are well-respected in the publishing industry. Your book will get more eyeballs where they matter…like bookstores, publishers, agents, librarians, etc.

What bolsters your confidence when your goals seem beyond reach?… 

Lust! + Podcast: More Eats 4 Less by Angela Bell

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Today's title and cover of nove, "Vladimir," by Julia May Jonas.
Want to listen to a podcast/audio version of Happiness Between Tails? Click the Spotify podcast link above. And please give it a follow.

Sensuality! Passion! Fun! As writers (here’s about the novel I’m writing) and readers, only good can come of finding what sets us afire. Figuring out how to unlock the shackles of cultural conditioning can be tricky, though. Learning about groundbreaking artists and their work can helps.

For instance, take how Emma Thompson has done it again — she’s the English actress who forever reaches further and further. By this, I’m not merely referring to the storyline of “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.” In it, a 50ish recently widowed woman decides that, once and for all, she’s going to have good sex. She hires a twenty-something male prostitute.

What’s beyond incredible is the fact that we’ve never before seen this story on-screen — and why not? Why are post-menopausal woman who desire sex seen as aberrant, laughable, and even despicable?

Check out the film’s equally ground-breaking humanizing of a male sex worker who, moreover, isn’t repulsed by older women.

“Vladimir,” by Julia May Jonas, (which I recently finished in audiobook format and to which Rebecca Lowman lent a superb narration) offers a reckoning of sexuality. That of everyone, including love and relationships, both public and private. Aren’t the title and cover great, especially as it’s a literary novel, not the saucy romance genre implied?

The protagonist is a college prof in her 50s who has an open marriage with her college prof husband. We enter the story when he’s accused of overstepping his authority because he used to have trysts with students. Even though the rendezvous were with consenting women in their twenties and older, and they occurred before the college had instituted regulations against it, he’s about to lose his job. So there’s that.

And then there’s how the wife is judged because she neither sides against him nor divorces him. Not that anyone knows it, she’s had extra-marital relationships with men of all ages. Then there’s how their adult lesbian daughter judges the parents. There are also the students, the faculty… And in walks beefy Vladimir, who throws the protag into lust overdrive.

My review for Amazon and Goodreads (by the way, do you use Goodreads or anything like it?):

Julia May Jonas takes risk after risk with this novel and beckons us to — ooh lala — dare I say it? — think!

What do you think about how older women are portrayed?

Passion at Any Age: Writer/Actress Lee Gale Gruen

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“No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatsoever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than others.” Martha Graham (United States, May 11, 1894 – April 1, 1991), modern dance pioneer.

“God has pitted you against a rought antagonist that you may be a conqueror, and this cannot be without toil.” Epictetus, Greek philosopher, (c. 50 – c. 135 AD)

Cover of “Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement Years,” by Lee Gale Gruen.

That kind of encouragement from people who actually achieved great things later in life, bolster me to muscle through and finish writing my novels. Heck, anyone can tell us we’re never too old to embark on bold new adventures. But we all know what they say about seeing! To get any eyeful of believing, let’s take a gander at actress/author/blogger/lecturer Lee Gale Gruen.

A retired probation officer, Lee Gale first visited us here to describe her newfound passion for acting. Bringing her father along to classes inspired her to write her first book, “Adventures with Dad.”

These days she continues to act, now in the East San Francisco Bay Area. Catch some of her performances by typing her full name into the YouTube.com search bar.

Since she recently published a second book, “Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement Years,” I invited her to tell us about that too…

Actress/author/blogger Lee Gale Gruen.
Actress/author/blogger Lee Gale Gruen.

Passion at Any Age by Lee Gale Gruen

Too many retirees and seniors have no idea what to do in the new stage of their lives called retirement. Many sink into isolation and depression. When I first retired, I had no clue what to do next. My 37-year career as a probation officer was over, and my children were launched. I struggled for a long time to carve out a new identity for myself.

After trying many different things, none particularly satisfying, I mistakenly signed up for an acting class for seniors, thinking it was just a play reading group. I was hooked on acting that first day despite my lifelong stage fright. My 85-year-old father began attending the class with me and was my scene partner in the class showcases where we performed the humorous scenes I wrote for us. From there, I networked with classmates and learned about going on auditions. I eventually found an agent and booked real, paid acting jobs. I then got the idea of writing a memoir about it, and in 2013, Adventures with Dad: A Father and Daughter’s Journey Through a Senior Acting Class, was published.

Cover of "Adventures with Dad," by Lee Gale Gruen.

As an author, I learned that I was expected to promote my book. Fortunately, I had slowly and painstakingly been able to overcome my crippling stage fright as a result of my acting. So, I started giving interviews and appearing before groups, talking about the book. People shared their own stories with me about how lost they felt since they retired. I realized I had something to give back to the community. I could show people how to reinvent themselves in retirement. I had discovered the secret: find a passion which will motivate you to want to get up in the morning, get dressed, get out of the house, and embrace life. That’s what happened to me after I discovered a passion for acting.

I developed a lecture from my own experiences as well as research I did, and I began giving talks titled “Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement Years” aimed at the retiree and senior demographic. I also started writing a blog of the same name to share my thoughts, observations, and experiences with the goal of helping my readers reinvent themselves after they retire. I have been blogging and lecturing on this subject for the past eight years.

Audience members at my lectures began asking if they could buy a book about my talk. That has resulted in my recently published book which is an adjunct to my blog and lecture. All three share the same title, Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement Years. My new book contains the contents of my lecture as well as seven years of posts from my blog. It is available on Amazon by clicking here. My goal with my blog, lecture, and new book is to help retirees, those soon to retire, baby boomers, and seniors find joy, excitement, and purpose after they retire just like I did.

Seniors make up about a third of the population of the United States, so that’s a pretty big demographic. However, it’s often a forgotten group. It shouldn’t be. A group that big has great influence socially, economically, and politically. The senior population can learn to flex that muscle. It would improve their status and put them back into the role of wise and respected elders that they once held and really still are.  There is no need for retirees and seniors to feel like their life is over. Plenty of exciting pursuits and opportunities await them. They only have to figure out what they might like, where it is, and how to access it. My new book is geared to help each individual find activities and pursuits at their own comfort level. It will guide them through the maze in developing their own “second act” in life.

For more about her, her books, and to connect with her, visit her blog.

Do you worry that you’re too old to accomplish something you ‘re passionate about?

The Margaret Fishback Papers by Novelist Kathleen Rooney

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Note: here’s the audio/podcast version of the blog post below.

85-year-old Lillian Boxfish is out for a stroll — of over 10-miles! New York City!! New Year’s Eve, 1984!!! Alone!!!! In the middle of the night!!!!!

Wondering and worrying how the best-seller historical fiction novel would end was plenty to keep me turning the pages of “Lillian Boxwood Takes a Walk.” All the more enticing is that author Kathleen Rooney modeled Boxwood after the country’s real-life highest-paid advertising woman of the 1930s, Margaret Fishback.

Here, with Rooney’s permission for Happiness Between Tails to re-publish her article from this site, she describes the inspiration behind her book…

Kathleen Rooney, poet, professor, and author of “Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk.”

The Margaret Fishback Papers by Kathleen Rooney

Back in May of 2007, thanks to a tip from my best-friend-from-high-school Angela Ossar, I got to be the first scholar ever to work with the newly acquired papers of the poet and advertising copywriter Margaret Fishback at Duke University’s Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History in Durham, North Carolina. I didn’t know it at the time, but Fishback would end up being the model on which I based the protagonist, Lillian Boxfish, of my second novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, which would end up coming out just slightly less than 10 years after my visit to Fishback’s archive.

Through an internship she held as part of her Library Science degree program, Angela got to be one of the first archivists to process and organize the Fishback materials. As she did so, she quickly realized that Fishback — a proto-feminist who was, at one point, the highest-paid advertising copywoman in the world, as well as a successful and well-published author of light verse — was a figure after my own heart. I love re-examining and rediscovering unjustly obscure figures, so getting a travel-to-collections grant from the university to check out the Fishback material was pretty much a dream come true.

While I was there, I connected with Fishback — her joy in her job and the identity and satisfaction she clearly found from her employment, as well as how she balanced creative pursuits and family demands with monetary ones — immediately. But it took me a long time to figure out what to do with my newfound encyclopedic knowledge of her life and times. In that spirit of not-quite-procrastination, here’s one of the poems from her 1932 collection I Feel Better Now, called “Getting Down to Work”:

Now, almost exactly a decade after I first worked with her archive, my novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk — based loosely on what I learned at Duke back in 2007 — is coming out from St. Martin’s Press. I hope that it will call more attention to this overlooked person and her role in shaping advertising as we know it. As the divisional copywriter at Macy’s, where she first worked in 1926, she revolutionized the house style and the style of advertising generally by adding humor to her ads. The humor of the ads is present in the poetry as well, even as it tends to take a slightly more world-weary and melancholy bent, like in this poem “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow,” also from I Feel Better Now:

Fishback’s books, as one can probably see by the fact that these are photographs of photocopies, are sadly long out of print and almost impossible to get a hold of.

But some of my most treasured acquisitions from my research that are now part of my own archive here at home include bound Xerox copies of every single one of her poetry collections, as well as her etiquette guide and guide to motherhood.

Her etiquette guide came out in 1938 and is called Safe Conduct: How to Behave and Why

And her guide to motherhood came out in 1945 and is called Look Who’s a Mother!

Both of these books, as well as each of her collections of witty verse, including her final one, Poems Made Up to Take Out, dating from 1963 —

— are delightful examples of Fishback’s voice.

Without the spirit and intelligence I found while doing my research in the papers of Margaret Fishback, I would never have been able to create Lillian. These photocopies — along with everything else I discovered in the Fishback archive roughly one decade ago — make me so happy to have gotten the chance to unearth her exceptional life and work thanks to Angela.

About Kathleen Rooney: she is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and her most recent books include the national best-seller, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018). Her World War I novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is forthcoming from Penguin in August of 2020, and her criticism appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay. Follow her at @KathleenMRooney
Do walk in your city for fun?…

Paranormal Geezer-Lit Mysteries by Mike Befeler

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Anytime, especially n-o-w, is an excellent time to start something! In 2001, when Mike Befeler was 56, he set out to become a novelist. Since then, he’s authored 17!!!! books, including mysteries, a thriller, and a biography of a World War II veteran!

In this post for Happiness Between Tails, Mike discussed geezer-lit. Here he explains the ones he’s written that interlace the paranormal…

Photo of Mike Befeler
Geezer-lit author Mike Befeler

“Writing Paranormal Geezer-Lit Mysteries” by Mike Befeler

Most of my published books are geezer-lit mysteries, featuring older characters. A number of years ago, my agent suggested I consider writing a paranormal mystery. I read several and decided I would give it a shot. The result was The V V Agency, a paranormal private investigator mystery that introduced a new type of shape-shifter called a transvictus.

Then I decided to blend a paranormal mystery with older characters, and The Back Wing was born…

A normal person ends up in the back wing of a retirement home with aging witches, vampires, werewolves, and shape-shifters. And don’t believe the myth that vampires don’t age. They get older, move into retirement homes, lose their teeth, and gum people on the throat.

Needless to say, I enjoy writing humor with quirky characters. The sequel, The Front Wing, will be published this month.

 I love stories where older characters aren’t merely life-savants who are sentenced to die by the end of the tale. What do you think about how older characters are usually treated in fiction?