Malena is someone I’m proud to call friend. She’s smart, sassy, and talented–and she’s also genuinely kind. Malena is the owner/founder of a consulting firm, Athena Institute, and works to promote reading and friendship at www.BookEndBabes.com. She’s also a wife, mother, and a published author who has recently dipped her toes into self-publishing via e-books.

I invited Malena to stop by and talk about her latest venture, and I’m glad that she accepted. So please welcome Malena Lott as she dishes about friendship, karma, and what “superpowers” really are!

Friends with Superpowers

As my grandma who raised me used to say, “you get more bees with honey.” Now my grandmother was gone before The Secret became a world-wide publishing sensation and the Law of Attraction began getting mainstream cred.

My grams was simply talking about the Golden Rule: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. But the bees line also says that you will attract more by offering people what they want. Something good.

Now that I’m of a certain age – somewhere between college and AARP – I’ve had enough experiences with intention to know that if you set your mind to it and give it frequency and visibility, it will start materializing in your life. Some people write things down, others create vision boards. I’ve done, and do, both.

We begin to understand that all things are made of energy and everything is responding to everything else. You bounce the ball against the wall and it comes back to you. The same goes for words, beautiful or ugly, and actions, positive or negative. While I try to surround myself with positive people, I also get that it’s my attitude that others will respond to. I recently turned a bad experience into a good one simply by not reacting to the drama and then doing something nice for the person who was being ugly. Guess what? She wasn’t angry anymore and I was able to change the story. Could I have left it alone? Sure. But we’re not being a doormat by practicing loving kindness; we’re living from our highest self. When it comes to friendship, it’s the only sustainable option.

In my first novella, Life’s a Beach, the Law of Attraction and Karma hit the beach in a playful story about two women who are strangers but are drawn together and don’t know why. They’ve each gone on vacation with intentions to make change happen and figure out “what’s next” in their lives. Avery wants a marriage proposal from her older boyfriend. Georgia wants to save her marriage after a rocky year, separation and therapy, but even their marital bucket list doesn’t seem to be working. The women are opposites in almost every way, yet a friendship develops until they discover what has truly brought them on the beaches of Mexico and turns their lives upside down.

Wouldn’t it be great if we realized we have Superpowers? That our thoughts and actions can change not only our own lives, but those around us? We are powerful beyond measure. I’d love to leave you with the quote I’ve used the beginning of Life’s a Beach by Virginia Woolf; “Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”

Life’s a Beach is available now in the Kindle store.

Please visit Malena’s website HERE.

You can also find her on Twitter @malenalott and Facebook.

Last year I had the pleasure of being a guest author on a popular radio show—Reading With Robin, a WHJJ Providence, RI talk show devoted to authors and readers. Robin Kall, the show’s creator and host, is lovely, bright, sharp, and very funny. Her show is filled with fast-paced repartee that often segues into surprisingly diverse topics.

Robin loves books and is fascinated with the authors who create them. She’s a respected voice on the literary scene and is known for her good humor and tremendous support to both seasoned and debut authors alike.

I wanted to introduce Robin to those of you who read my blog, and I’m delighted that she accepted my invitation to be featured here on Brava! So please welcome Robin Kall as she discuses—what else, books!

Reading for Pleasure

Reading for pleasure should be just that; a source of enjoyment or delight. When I am reading a great book, I can’t wait until I can get back to it. On occasion, I have been known to read the book in one sitting. (no, it wasn’t Gone With The Wind!)  I had always subscribed to the notion that once I began a book, I needed to finish it. There just seemed to be too much guilt attached to doing it any other way. This wasn’t anything that I was ever told, it was the possibility that the plot would pick up and that I might miss something that was enough to keep me going.

Many books and many years later, I have matured greatly in terms of letting go of a book that just isn’t doing it for me.
There is (almost) nothing I want to hear less than, “you just need to give it about 200 pages and then you’ll love it!” No, that isn’t going to happen. I’m not saying a book has to grab me right at the beginning, although that’s a great at way to start. I am able to get a sense in the first 40 pages or so and that’s when I’ll know if I am going to “go the distance.” If I’m that far into it and have reread the pages over a few times because it’s just losing me, then it’s time to say enough!

Nancy Pearl, author of BOOK LUST, has some sort of math equation that she suggests.

“Pearl urges readers to abandon books they dislike after 50 pages, though she does point out that frame of mind often determines one’s opinion of a book” She then goes on to say that for every year over 50 you are, you subtract that from 100 and that is the amount to read. That’s a bit complicated for me; I just think we need to have our own sense of when to just put down the book!

The popularity of book clubs is something that has brought this “fear of not finishing”…front and center. This must be connected in some inexplicable way to the phenomena of not eating everything on the plate! With so many people joining book clubs there seems to be a proliferation of “assigned reading’ as opposed to selected (reading.) While I do think that stretching our reading selections can be a good thing, if you start to get the sense that this particular book club is just not for you, know when to get out.

I bumped into an acquaintance a couple of weeks ago and as I know her to be a big reader, I asked her what she was reading. Well, you should have seen her big smile dissolve into a frown that if she didn’t remove it soon, I worried that it might get stuck that way.

“The good news”, she said, “is that my house has never been so clean.”

I immediately knew that she was referring to the fact that in order to avoid the book, she was doing everything except reading it. She told me that the women in her club were more “scholarly” than she.  Her opinion of the book they were reading was Pulitzer “schmulitzer” – she’s not reading that book!

This encounter brought to mind a similar situation that occurred while I was on a panel discussion at the Reading Across Rhode Island Conference . We were discussing book clubs and how to use them in terms of that year’s selection, which was David Baldacci’s WISH YOU WELL. One woman raised her hand and proceeded to talk about how negative and depressing her book club was. I knew she was serious about this, but I simply said something to her about finding a new club. Why would she waste her time being with people who were bringing her down? Time is just too valuable for that. It was that simple.

Perhaps there should be some way to “shop around” for the appropriate book club. Try it out once or twice before you decide if it’s for you. Employ the “Goldilocks” method. When a book club works well, it’s the greatest thing! I’ve heard of groups who have been together for thirty or forty years. Even though many circumstances in their lives have changed, the books have bound the members together.

“Reading With Robin” is an on-air book club of sorts.  Anyone can join – you can either read the books we discuss or just tune in to see if you’re interested. We try not to give too much away.

Read what you enjoy and enjoy what you are reading!

Please visit Robin’s website HERE.

You can also find her on Twitter @robinkall and Facebook.

She’s smart, pretty, and exceptionally talented–and her name is Camille Noe Pagán. A journalist specializing in health and nutrition, Camille’s articles have appeared in O: The Oprah Magazine, Allure and Glamor, just to name a few. She’s also a wife and busy mom to a toddler and a newborn.

Today is an exciting day for Camille, one she surely will never forget. It’s the day that her debut novel, The Art of Forgetting hits the bookshelves. I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of Camille’s book which explores the surprising ways lives are reshaped in the aftermath of tragedy, and I highly recommend it.

To celebrate this exciting day in Camille’s life, I invited her to be my guest on Brava, and I’m delighted that she accepted. So please welcome Camille as she talks about her journey into print.

Want to Write a Novel? Do It Now, Talk About it Later

Once upon a time, in a far away land (that is, New York City, circa 2008) I decided to go for my lifelong dream and write a novel. So I started a draft … and made the mistake of talking about it.

“But publishing is dead,” some colleagues told me. “You have to be a Big Name to get published.” “Better have a hedge fund manager for a husband or a trust fund, because you’ll never make a dime.” “The criticism will kill you,” said a few well-meaning authors. “It’s so brutal that if there’s anything else in this world you can do, even if it’s mowing lawn for a living, then do that instead.”

People said all kinds of crazy things. All of which boiled down to: You can’t do it.

And God help me, I believed them.

A recent series of studies from Harvard researchers revealed just how profoundly we’re influenced by others. If our friends and relatives become obese, our odds of gaining weight nearly double. If our loved ones smoke, the chances that we’ll light up skyrocket. And if the people around us are depressed, or even just unhappy, we’re significantly more likely to suffer from a low mood, too. As I learned, the negatives are catchy.

A year after I had started, and quickly abandoned, my first attempt at writing a novel, I decided to try again. This time, I didn’t tell a soul—not even my husband (my biggest cheerleader), until he finally insisted on knowing what I was up to every night as I typed furiously on my laptop. Once I had written a first draft of what would become my debut novel, The Art of Forgetting, I shared my news with a few trusted friends. When I finally sold my manuscript to Dutton, the majority of my friends and colleagues had no idea I’d been working on a book.

You don’t have to work in secrecy. But if you want to forge ahead on your work-in-progress, you must protect that spark of hope that gives you the courage to sit down and keep typing. Surround yourself with positive, supportive people—people who believe in you and won’t begrudge you your dedication or your success. When someone starts in with “you can’t’” “you won’t” or “it’s impossible,” smile and nod—then walk away.

It’s not about becoming delusional. I don’t know about you, but I already have a little voice in my head that says, “This manuscript might be crap. What if I can’t pull this off? What if this is the worst thing ever written?” That voice? She doesn’t need any encouragement. She needs to hear, “You’re NOT nuts. It IS possible. You CAN do it.”

Feedback is a crucial part of the writing process, and when it comes time, you must be open to it, even when it’s less than glowing. While you’re writing that first draft, though, get out your earplugs and avoid naysayers like they’ve got a bad case of swine flu. Lock yourself in a closet with your laptop if you must. Do whatever you can to protect your dream—because without it, you really can’t do it.

Please visit Camille Noe Pagán’s website HERE. And visit her blog

You can also find Camille on Twitter @cnoepagan and on Facebook

Today is an incredibly special day for the lovely and gracious Amy Hatvany–it marks the launch of her latest novel Best Kept Secret. Amy, who previously wrote under the name of Amy Yurk and has two novels in publication, The Language of Sisters and The Kind Of Love That Saves You, is especially excited about Best Kept Secret, and so are many others as it is already garnering praise!

From earning a degree in sociology to decorating wedding cakes, Amy has done many things in her life, but none were fulfilling. Finally she decided to go after her dream of writing a novel, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In celebration of this special day, I invited Amy to be my quest on Brava and I’m delighted that she accepted. So please welcome Amy Hatvany as she shares some thought-provoking and candid thoughts.

The What-if Cliff

As an author, the question I get asked more than any other is how I got published. People want to know the secret, and while I know you’ve all heard it before, it still pains me to say that there isn’t one. There was me at twenty-six, hating my desk job and knowing that if I didn’t at least try to write the story simmering in my veins, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. There was me, feverishly pounding away at the computer until I had what I thought was a completed manuscript; there was me, researching agents and writing nine thousand versions of an attention-grabbing query letter. Finally, there was me, lucky enough to have a marvelous agent show interest in the book, followed by months of tearing my hair out over revisions. A year later, my first novel landed on bookstore shelves. And then another, two years after that.

That was almost a decade ago, and I’m here to tell you that while there’s no secret to getting published, there’s certainly a surefire way to avoid it. It’s a simple lesson, but one I learned the hard way. Are you ready? Okay, brace yourself, because this one’s a shocker…

When you don’t write, you don’t get published. (Clearly, I am a student of the obvious!)

I won’t bore you with too many details as to why I stopped writing, but suffice to say my confidence was thoroughly shaken by the much-dreaded and despised…“Book That Didn’t Sell.” And then, a painful divorce made worse by a dangerous dance with too much wine. My carefully constructed life melted away at the seams.

Luckily, that detour was short-lived. I found my way into recovery almost six years ago, though it took a while for me to regain the belief that I could and should be a writer. I was terrified that the novels I’d produced in my twenties were some kind of fluke. What if the merlot in which I’d bathed my brain damaged it beyond repair? Perhaps I should just settle down into a nice, safe career in Human Resources and call it good.

But my writer-mind would not be still. A strong concept haunted me – the story of a woman struggling to come to terms with her alcoholism while she fought to regain custody of her son. It thrummed through my body, desperate to be told. I felt pretty rusty and stilted when I began, hesitant because while the plot and characters were fictional, many of the emotions behind the story were mine. There were dark memories I had to revisit, and it took some time to build up the courage to get the emotional side of those experiences fully onto the page.

I kept writing. Not necessarily with the goal of getting published again, but because characters and images bubbled vigorously enough inside my head to dizzy me. The only way to find relief was to set them free. I returned to the passionate girl I used to be, pounding away at my computer, sure of nothing other than the fact that words were my paintbrush, the page my canvas, and I could not cease writing until the picture became clear.

Of course, I am thrilled to have found a home in publishing again. I’m grateful for my amazing agent who stuck by me and for all the other people who have believed in me along the way. BEST KEPT SECRET comes out from Atria Books on June 7^th. Another novel, OUTSIDE THE LINES, will be released in February, 2012, and a draft of the one after that is almost complete.

I wish I could tell you what made all of this happen for me again, but other than taking a deep breath, plummeting over the “what-if” cliff, then buckling down to do the work, I simply don’t know. Somewhere along the way I discovered that writing is the path home to who I am; the way I make sense of the world and remain (relatively) sane. Any success I experience is secondary to the comfort writing brings me. And that is a secret I have no need to keep.

Please visit Amy’s website HERE.

You an also find her on Twitter @AmyHatvany and on Facebook.

Lauren-Rain Snow is someone I would love to have as a neighbor. She’s talented, generous, and very, very wise–you can see that in her lovely eyes. She’s also genuine. When she retired from social work where she specialized in child welfare cases for thirty years, the old dream of writing was soon ignited. Drawing from her vast experiences, Laurel-Rain is an expert at creating characters and detailing their behaviors, inner thoughts and motives in her novels.

Through a chance meeting via social media, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Laurel-Rain and I’m delighted that she accepted my invitation to be featured on Brava. So please give her a warm welcome!

Real Life Experiences

When I look back on my life—and these days, there is much more time behind me than ahead of me!—I ask myself certain questions about how I came to this point in my life.  What were the defining moments for me?

On a couple of my Internet sites, such as Authors Den, I posted a little snippet about myself, and it goes like this:  “I feel like I’ve lived about five different lives…and you can read about them in my five novels.”

Perhaps this sounds glib, but in many ways, it seems to summarize the passages of my life.

As a child, I lived on a farm with very traditional, strict parents.  Any free time I had was something I had to steal after all the chores were done.  And if, for a few moments, I escaped the scrutiny of my controlling father, I felt very lucky indeed.  My greatest passion was reading, followed soon by my “scribblings.”  Like Jo March, in “Little Women,” I turned to my writing as an outlet…and a hope for the future.

Some of these childhood, adolescent, and young adult experiences became the fictionalized core of my novel “Web of Tyranny.”

My college (radical) exploits formed much of “Miles to Go.”

“An Accidental Life” spotlighted events from my social work career, zeroing in on the struggles of young pregnant teens on drugs; these characters were fictionalized, but the events of their lives were very real…torn from the pages of case files and changed substantially to protect the privacy of the clients.

Therefore, in many ways, I did live the experiences described in my novels.  Even the ones I am now writing.  Currently working on two WIPs, I have chosen to move the time period ahead to the present in one that I am calling “Defining Moments.”  In this work of fiction, I am featuring an English teacher who dreams of becoming a writer: something she does achieve once she reaches retirement.  My experiences were similar, except that my primary career was in social work.  My Main Character in “Defining Moments” had a very different childhood from mine, and in most ways, is unlike any of my incarnations—except for the writing part.  And the fact that she becomes an obsessive blogger.

I chose to incorporate that particular “addiction” of mine into the story because it felt like something authentic that a writer could and would do.  My character began to blog and network as a way to market her books.  In the end, she lost herself in the process because of her complete immersion into this world of detached social connections that she found on blogs and social networking sites.  Finding her way back is a struggle, but in the journey she discovers some important clues about who she is.

I believe that, in “writing what we know,” we do sometimes borrow from our life experiences.  Perhaps the insights we have gleaned can be offered to our characters.  Or our struggles can become theirs.  Through these expressions of our “real life experiences,” we can hopefully connect to readers.

Please visit Laurel-Rain’s website Here.

You can also find her on Facebook