August 12, 2010

What's your secret weapon?

When you think no one is there, someone answers and how! That someone turns out to be the incredible Jane Friedman.

Don’t know her? Let me introduce her to you and tell you what she did for me! If you are a blogger, writer and care about the creative process, you’ll want to follow her on Twitter.

Jane is currently the strategic director of Writer’s Digest, where in 2001 she took over as their managing editor. She is a force with her award winning blog There Are No Rules. She knows all there is to know about the publishing industry, about marketing, and she cares about each writer she meets or discovers. I found her through one of her bloggers, the wonderful Darrelyn Saloom. Here’s her latest blog entry on meeting the fab memoir writer Mary Karr along with this terrific photo she posted of a Window Dressing on Royal Street. Hope it’s okay to borrow that photo here, Darrelyn, from your home in The Big Easy.

Somehow I manage to get Jane to follow me on Twitter and somehow, the gifts that come in life continue to surprise, she decides to interview me about my memoir (Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story. She wants to know about starting late, about the blog to book, about the new-to-the-game publisher, 3ones.

Read the interview with Jane.

What follows are more retweets on Twitter of the interview link than I can count and two bloggers who blog about me on their sites. Let me introduce you now to Belette who writes about me in the entry entitled “I am mad for older women with white hair.” No that’s not me in the photo: That gorgeous model, still working and beyond fabulous! Belette is a psychotherapist who blogs: thus, I guess, her choice of anonymity. She’s been named one of the top ten blogs for Francophiles and is rated as one of the top 15 memoir and psychology blogs.

But, as the French Fry cutter salesman keeps saying in my book, “Wait, there’s more!” I discover through a friend that another blogger has posted an entry about me. Debbie Ridpath Ohi writes a fascinating blog of “Daily Diversions for Writers” and chooses, bless you, Debbie, to post about me.

And then in my e-mail I discover that DCguide.com wants to link with me.

I believe in the goodness of the world. I believe as Martin Buber so wisely tells us, “All real living is meeting.”

August 02, 2010

I must have done something good

Do you recall that line from the song in The Sound of Music? That’s how I feel because The Foodinista found me! Her website gives me fantastic recipes, the chicest of the chic ideas for home and fashion—even if I can’t afford that gorgeous vintage watch or fit into those skinny jeans. She cooks, she nests, she loves and she READS! Who knew?

Who knew also that she turns out to be a well-known contributing editor for Bon Appetít ? Read her candor and her story along with a great recipe for Buffalo Wings here. She writes a wine column for Bon Appetít among other things and she’s recently become the blogger for Herman Miller Lifework.

Herman Miller Lifework keeps the gorgeous design of this incredible artist alive. I sit in his office chair to write and, truly, it is the best chair I have ever written in—an Aeron Chair—after the foam in my old chair not only deteriorated but gave me a rash where no one wants one. But I digress.

And that’s what TheFoodinista does as well in the best sense of that word: She doesn’t follow the original plan. She invents, she creates, she discovers.

How else could I have ended up as one of her entries? She’s not exactly doing book reviews. But she read my memoir and said, “I loved loved loved the book. Your memoir is like a breath of fresh air, air that has been liberally peppered with Nietzsche.”

What a gift: She interviewed me with the coolest questions ever! If you’d like to know whether La Perla is the best revenge or what I think is the great seduction dish of all time, click interview and find out. Everything on TheFoodnista’s site is gorgeously illustrated. I think the book must be coming soon! Or should be!!

All I can say is, I must have done something good.