Graduating into a New Life

Calling all readers! Thursday, we're featuring Pets on Parade, so please send your pet photos in to JuliaSpencerFleming at Gmail dot com! 

 

 

 

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: If it’s May, there must be a graduation in the Hugo-Vidal family, right? And you are right, dear readers - we are all gathered in Norfolk, VA to celebrate Veronique’s graduation (and pinning) as a Respiratory Therapist. I am SO proud of her. Veronique worked for several years after getting her BA from the University of Virginia, but like a lot of liberal-arts-educated millennials, she wasn’t seeing much in the way of income or advancement. 

She was always interested in health care, though, and I remember when she first told me her idea about becoming an RT. We were walking on a sandy beach during one of her visits in Maine, and she laid out a whole plan, including how to finance it. I was impressed because unlike the rest of the family (which tends to be disorganized, dramatic and/or too idealistic for our own good) Veronique had analyzed which health care job had the best return on investment. Needless to say, this was not something Ross or I did when deciding to become a full time writer and a special ed teacher, respectively.

It’s been a grueling two years for her - she spent the first summer after getting into the competitive program catching up on biology and chemistry courses she hadn’t taken at UVA. From then it was four semesters and another summer of full-time classes plus practicum: the students were rotated through six different hospitals in the area to experience all the areas where RTs might be called. Keep in mind, this was during the second year of Covid.

Every time I called or Facetimed with Spencer, Veronique would pop in, say, “Hi, mom!” and then vanish back into her home office, where she studied at night. Every. Night. It’s one thing to fling yourself into degree work when you’re a kid; it’s another thing entirely to quit a job and take on grinding degree work at thirty. That, I’ve told her, is the most impressive accomplishment of all: to risk leaving what’s not working and reinventing yourself - in her case, first as a full-time student and now as a skilled medical professional!

Reds, I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Veronique. What’s a time when you took a risk to reinvent yourself?

LUCY BURDETTE: Congratulations to Veronique–what an accomplishment! Our nephew is graduating from a residency program in emergency medicine–so grueling! This is the same program our daughter attended so we know first hand how hard they have to work!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Congratulations to Veronique! Do tell her she has many cheers from all the Reds! It must have taken such courage to reinvent herself, and in such a demanding profession.

I suppose I reinvented myself when (with a history as a chronically bad student and already a couple of years older than my classmates) I enrolled in a hard but wonderful college as a sophomore and earned a degree in biology. Quite a few years later I reinvented myself again when I made up my mind to write a novel. I’ve never regretted either decision and I wish the same for Veronique.

 

RHYS BOWEN: Adding my congratulations for Veronique. Well done! My daughter Anne went through a similar reinventing a few years ago when she decided to leave her job in the advertising industry and become a psycho-therapist. Three very intense years of study and now she’s a qualified therapist working with at-risk children. I’m naturally very proud.

I don’t think I’ve ever re-invented myself. It was always a natural progression from college newspaper to BBC to writing screenplays to books. I guess I must enjoy it!

HALLIE EPHRON: BIG congrats to Veronique! And what a great career path (and job opportunities!) she has ahead of her.

I’ve always been a “keep a foot on the boat and a foot on the dock” kind of risk taker. So when I started writing (aka learning to write) when my youngest went to college and I had a room to write in and time to do it. I worked part time for years getting better, working freelance so I could keep our fiances in good shape and manage the time. Which explains why it took me 10 years to go from thinking I’d like to write to having a book accepted by an agent. For many more years I kept writing freelance on the side. No leaps for me.

JENN McKINLAY: Congratulations, Veronique!!! That is fantastic! And how very smart to make the shift when you did. I made a life change up when I was 25. I moved cross country from CT to AZ to pursue being a writer in a cheaper part of the country where i could actually afford to love working part-time. It took longer than I thought but I think I might have made it finally. Kind of wish I'd thought of being an RT first...

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: This is so inspirational! Hurray, Veronique! Brilliant. Oh, gosh, I feel as if I reinvent every day. But I guess it was in 1970. With absolutely no plans or career path, I thought--okay, all I want to do it change the world. How can I do that? Maybe I'll be a reporter. And naive me marched in the biggest station in Indianapolis, with zero experience, and somehow got a job as a radio reporter. I always think: I took a HUGE chance--and so did he radio station, right?--and somehow I found my calling. I did it for more than 3 decades. And then, I had an idea for a book.

 

JULIA: How about you, dear readers? Have you or someone you know taken the leap into a new life? 

Life Lessons in The Reluctant Fortune-Teller @KeziahFrost

LUCY BURDETTE: You met debut author Keziah Frost in the fall when she wrote a terrific post for JRW on editing. But now her new book, THE RELUCTANT FORTUNE-TELLER, is almost out and I asked her to return and tell us more about it. Welcome Keziah!

 KEZIAH FROST: We all have more than one career in us.

That’s what my protagonist Norbert, a retired accountant, learns in his seventy-third year as he launches into an occupation he never could have predicted for himself: that of town fortune-teller.

My debut novel, The Reluctant Fortune-Teller, is said to be witty. I hope it is! We need laughter now more than ever. It is also about many things – among them, how people reinvent themselves – to their own delight and peril.

Norbert is having trouble making ends meet. He is a practical man, and doesn’t believe in card reading or anything to do with the psychic world. But when three forceful women he knows from his art league show up on his door step and insist that he can solve his financial crisis through telling fortunes—and that they can teach him how to read cards…, well, you’ll have to read the book to find out all about his delight and his peril.

And just maybe, Norbert’s journey to create a new version of himself will inspire you, as well. I hope so!

In elementary school, a kind teacher told Norbert’s class that each child has a special gift to share with the world. We all have heard this claim. It seems that some people know just what their gift is, while others wonder if they’ll ever find theirs, or if they even have one at all. Norbert was in the second category, wondering in his later years if he had any gift at all. He doesn’t feel special or gifted in any way. He certainly isn’t a person that anyone notices or listens to…. That is, until he goes into business reading cards for the tourists and residents in his quaint lakeside town. 





As “Norbert Z, the Amazing Psychic,” Norbert suddenly becomes interesting. People make appointments to listen to him and they press money into his hands to show their faith in his abilities.

As Norbert’s new career takes shape, his confidence grows; he comes into a new sense of himself; he changes.

We live in a time of continuing education, mid-life career changes, and post-retirement careers. In my own life, I’ve been a college English instructor, a painter of pet portraits, a bilingual teacher, a birth doula, a bilingual counselor and now: a psychotherapist and a novelist. Each new career identity has benefitted from lessons learned in all the previous ones.

And what about you? Have you had more than one career, or more than one identity in your life? Do you believe you have at least one more gift in you that is asking to be developed? Do you dare to open that gift?

The Reluctant Fortune-Teller will be released by HarperCollins/Harlequin/Park Row on March 6, 2018. It is Keziah Frost’s first novel. In the back of the book is a fortune-telling guide, so you can get together—perhaps with your book club—and read fortunes using Norbert’s method. There are also questions for discussion. And if your book club would like to
Skype with Keziah Frost to discuss The Reluctant Fortune-Teller, you can just contact her through her website.

Keziah Frost is a psychotherapist who has felt she was “supposed to” write novels since she was in fifth grade. That was five decades ago, and she is thrilled to see her first novel ready to go to print. She had so much fun writing this one, she hopes to write many, many more. (Says Lucy: And check out her blog, which includes Norbert's readings of various book people, including Lucy herself...)

A Choice of Jewelry

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  So all this week we've been talking about reinvention: Gigi's recovery from cancer and her new outlook on life; Alice's cleaning out her basement, finding those old photos and transforming them into plots; Cindy Cavanagh's watching her book transform into a TV show; and Becky Masterman beginning a whole new career. So how did they do it? And is there a roadmap to reinvention? 

Nancy Cole Silverman has some suggestions for that very adventure--including jewelry!

The Gold Watch vs. The Brass Ring
   by Nancy Cole Silverman

When my father retired he was given a gold watch. Times change, and as I approached retirement, I was looking for a brass ring.  After nearly twenty-five years in radio the station I worked for was merged with another, and like many of my colleagues, I was purged; thrown out like yesterday’s newspaper and forced to reinvent myself.

In my debut novel, Shadow of Doubt (Henery Press 2014) my protagonist, Carol Childs, a middle-aged, single mom, is working for a talk radio station and has left her secure position as an account executive to pursue her dream job as a reporter. However, her enthusiasm to reinvent herself isn’t matched by her new boss, KCHC’s boy-wonder, Tyler Hunt, who considers her the world’s oldest cub reporter, in search of a good story.

Reinvention is never easy. There are always those closest to us that refuse to see us in a new light.  But along the way I’ve picked up a few tricks that helped me find my way as a novelist.  

not this kind of radio, of course...

After a long career in radio, working both sides of the desk - that of reporter, and later as a sales exec and general manager of a sports radio station (God has a sense of humor!) - I learned it’s seldom the job, but the skills, that define the person, and we don’t leave those behind.  With take them with us. 

So, here’s my bag of tricks. 

#1. Identify who you want to be and what you want to do. Look around, dig deep inside yourself for those lost dreams and hobbies you never had time to pursue and go after them.

# 2. Match your skill sets to that of a new profession.  Are you organized? Detail ordinated? Goal driven?  If you’re a writer, chances are you possess a wealth of skills you’ve never thought about and that many companies need.  

# 3.  Talk about what you want to do in the present tense. Focus on the future, not the past. Will Rogers, famous for his social commentary, said it best.  I’ll paraphrase: If you want to know the direction a man is going, don’t just listen to what he says, look where the tips of the boots are pointed. So often people say one thing and do another.  The fact is we can’t move forward if we continually have our feet pointed in the wrong direction.

This brings me to my forth trick and with it a word of caution. 

# 4. Warning!  I don’t advise this for everyone, but I threw away my business rolodex.  It’s too easy to look backwards and talk about yesterday.  If you plan to move forward, your time and your conversations must be about what you’re doing now. Not about what once was.  Make new friends, seed your new database with people who can help you to advance in a new direction.

#5 Join clubs. Read books. Dress the part.  Hollywood is famous for its stars, and many have reinvented themselves more than once.  Katy Hudson became Katy Perry, going from gospel rock to mainstream pop music. Remember the underwear model Marky Mark? Who could forget those abs? He became Mark Wahlberg, a major success on the big screen today. Of course those of us in California can hardly forget Arnold Schwarzenegger who went from body builder, to action star, to politician. 

And, speaking of politicians, Sheila Kuehl, once known as Zelda Gilroy, Dobbie Gillis’ wannabe girlfriend, today is a member of the LA County Board of Supervisors.

Nobody said reinvention was easy.  The path is frequently peppered with problems, and like my protagonist, Carol, we’re sometimes faced with difficult questions and decisions that may challenge the very things we thought we knew and held dear.

In SHADOW OF DOUBT, Carol is faced with a dilemma.  Her next door neighbor, Samantha, is the niece of a top Hollywood talent agent and has become an invaluable source for insider industry news. But when Sam comes to Carol with news of her aunt’s death, things take an unexpected twist, and Carol starts to wonder if she’s being played by Sam to cover up a murderer.  

I love that as a novelist I’m able to twist the facts and turn up the heat on my characters -something I could never have done when working in a news room.  I hope you enjoy my new novel shadow of doubt. After years of writing broadcast copy and news, it’s been nice to reinvent myself as a novelist.

HANK:  How about you, Reds? What steps have you ever taken to reinvent yourself--as a writer? as a reader? As a person? 

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Nancy Cole Silverman credits her twenty-five years in news and talk radio for helping her to develop an ear for storytelling. But it wasn’t until 2001 after she retired from news and copywriting that she was able to sit down and write fiction fulltime. Much of what Silverman writes about today she admits is pulled from events that were reported on from inside some of Los Angeles’ busiest newsrooms where she spent the bulk of her career. In the last ten years she has written numerous short stories and novelettes. Today Silverman lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Bruce and two standard poodles. 

SHADOW OF DOUBT

When a top Hollywood Agent is found poisoned in the bathtub of her home, suspicion quickly turns to one of her two nieces. But Carol Childs, a reporter for a local talk radio station, doesn’t believe it. The suspect is her neighbor and friend, and also her primary source for insider industry news. After a media frenzy pits one niece against the other—and the body count starts to rise—Carol knows she must save her friend from being tried in the court of public opinion.

But even the most seasoned reporter can be surprised, and when a Hollywood psychic shows up in Carol’s studio one night and warns her there will be more deaths, things take an unexpected turn. Suddenly nobody is above suspicion. Carol must challenge both her friendship and the facts, and the only thing she knows for certain is that the killer is still out there. But the closer she gets to the truth, the more danger she’s in.