My friend and networking mentor Ron Sukenick, a professional business speaker, has been encouraging me to branch out into public speaking. I love telling stories and making people laugh, and Ron has persuaded me to climb out on what feels like a shaky limb and tailor those skills into something entertaining and useful to an …
Lee Snare, writer, poet, and friend, popped up on Facebook today. Lee and his artist wife, Marylou, are living in a retirement community in the Chicago suburbs. Until he moved, Lee was a valued member of my writers’ group. He’s also a retired engineer, and his writing was spare and precise, as fit his profession. …
It was such a great evening–I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the Hawthorne Book Club. I learned great lessons. First, don’t show up three days early, due to multi-tasking while entering the date in my calendar. Second, thank the Gods of Writing that I didn’t show up three days LATE. Third, just relax and understand that …
I saw an uptick in book sales last month, and it turns out, a book club in Fishers is making Revenge of the Soccer Moms its September book. The best part about this is that I found out about it on the same day I wasn’t chosen as one of the speakers for the “Walk …
CHAPTER ONE: LAST WEDNESDAY Maura’s alarm was set for 6 a.m., but her bladder went off at 5:28. Determined not to disturb her husband and the cat, she slipped silently out of bed. No, slipped wasn’t the word. Slipped sounds like a ballerina floating between rippling waves of satin to the accompaniment of flutes and …
Well, okay, not exactly groupies, but fans. My Facebook pal, Kate, saw a woman pull a copy of Revenge of the Soccer Moms out of her bag on a commuter train in suburban Chicago, and started a conversation. Other people sitting nearby got in on it, and now they have a book club thing going on the …
Thanks to Kate Shepherd Communications, I was asked to appear on the Morning News on Monday, July 3, 2017. Lindy Thackson made me feel comfortable, and she was so prepared! They even had snatched a photo of my kids from Facebook, and inserted it at an opportune time. The segment was less than 3 minutes, …
Discovering the classes at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival changed my life. I had been working on ROTSM for at least two years, and felt better about my writing than I should have. That’s hindsight, of course. I’ll skip the first part of a long story, and just say that I experienced an unexpected rejected …
I only wish I knew enough to write that book. I waste countless hours of my life enjoying social media, but now I need to make it a tool in my quest for world domination and book sales. There goes all my fun. My teenage son, Mikey, is trying to explain the point of Instagram, and how …
When I started writing Revenge of the Soccer Moms, I fantasized about lucrative publishing advances, movie rights, and national book tours. Okay, I still do. But I chose self-publishing over continuing to search for an agent who could sell my book. I had an agent who couldn’t sell it, or, to be fair, an earlier version of it, …