Retirement is Another Lifetime When I announced my retirement there was a distinct divide in the reactions from my colleagues. Some were happy for me and a little jealous, while others told me I would be back to work in six months. This last statement puzzled me until I dug deepe … | Continue reading
Taking Our Space Space is essential in life just as space between logs is essential for fire. Space rekindles attraction between longtime partners. Taking space between tasks revives us. And giving our grown children space enables them to develop their own lives. I don’t know abo … | Continue reading
Invisible to Invincible: The Next Crone Age Imagine this scenario: You’re walking down the street on a warm spring day, enjoying the shop windows full of artfully displayed wares. People smile and nod. Some wave. Some pause to admire you as you pass, maybe one or two even whistle … | Continue reading
Seller’s Remorse Truly, even our own front door is a great threshold, no matter how familiar the worlds within and without may be. There is a new world behind every door. —Rev. Dr. Molly Housh Gordon We bought our house in North Carolina on the first anniversary of our first date … | Continue reading
Women in Artificial Intelligence On December 19, 2024, having finished my holiday shopping, I was relaxing by browsing Substack articles about one of my passions, AI (artificial intelligence) (Yes, that’s relaxing. Proud data geek here!). I came across a post by an author I won’t … | Continue reading
Women and Artificial Intelligence On December 19, 2024, having finished my holiday shopping, I was relaxing by browsing Substack articles about one of my passions, AI (artificial intelligence) (Yes, that’s relaxing. Proud data geek here!). I came across a post by an author I won’ … | Continue reading
Crisis Journal 2025 When the Pandemic began in 2020, I started a journal of extraordinary days that morphed into an online community where writers shared their daily thoughts. The value lay not so much in the final product as in the act of capturing the gritty reality of daily li … | Continue reading
Tips for Traveling Your Creative Path at Any Age In 1977 at 28, I decided to make my way as an artist and writer. I knew that to succeed required more control of my time than I’d had in previous jobs. I quit my position as Program and Communications Director at an educational non … | Continue reading
The Creative Crone Renaissance – Return to play We began our lives as scientists and artists, exploring our world and engaging in play. Then school prepared us for that long stretch of years when we worked, cared for others, and kept our home life going. While some of us found cr … | Continue reading
In Praise of Older Romance One of the reasons I write romances with protagonists in their sixties is to debunk the myth that the older we grow the less alive we are. I understand this presumption because when I was in my twenties—back when I knew everything with a certainty real … | Continue reading
The Fear of Freedom Defining Our Goals in Later Life We spend much of our adult lives racing around like chickens with their heads cut off. Sadly, the entry of most women into full-time employment, which happened in our lifetimes, did not mean that spouses took on half the unpaid … | Continue reading
Becoming a Cool Grandma On a sunny morning last Thanksgiving, my grandchildren and their cousins were getting restless. And who could blame them? They’d discovered the kid-sized buckets and shovels hidden in a closet, the beach beckoned, and their parents were busy chatting and p … | Continue reading
The Magical Power of Life Review December is a busy yet contemplative time. We are down to the essentials. Outside our windows the branches are bare, while inside the house, the packages are shipped and the cupboards empty as we ready for holiday travel. The New Year is upon us w … | Continue reading
Getting Through the Tough Times with a Trip to Evergreen I don’t know if it’s possible to break the dashboard of a Mini Cooper, but I gave it a good try. The day after the 2024 Presidential election I was disappointed and stressed about the future. I was sitting in the driver’s s … | Continue reading
The Unfettered Joy of Trying Something New Here in the Interregnum, we don’t know where we are going and aren’t sure how we got here. That makes it tough to decide how to spend our time. Cycling through all five stages of grief at intervals is tempting, along with survivalist pla … | Continue reading
Where did it all begin —Vinspire Publishing A little over twenty years ago, Vinspire Publishing began with a different name at a kitchen table with four women who wanted to bring back Retro Romances. We all watched movies from the early years, and we wanted to celebrate that in o … | Continue reading
10 Things to Know When You Turn Sixty “Aging happens, because we cannot stop it, and it is not what we feared.” –Victoria Smith, Hags On the morning of my sixtieth birthday party, my firstborn and I walked to a breakfast cafe in Berkeley. “It’s funny,” I said. “I don’t feel old. … | Continue reading
Surviving Overwhelm: Context, Impositions, Self-Care and Genetic Flaws I am almost always overwhelmed and the ‘Big O’ is now my middle name. I have begun to accept the suchness of my particular modus-operandi. To give some clarity, let me confess that my personal biggie is that I … | Continue reading
On Taking Space (Inner and Outer) In her poem, “Fire,” poet Judy Brown reminds us that fuel is not the only thing a fire needs; a fire also burns because of space between the logs. Space enables fire in the same way that space rekindles attraction between longtime partners. Space … | Continue reading
It Started With a Coffin In the late nineties when the book and movie of The Garden of Good and Evil were all the rage, my husband and I traveled to Savannah to see the locations in the book. We stayed in a Bed and Breakfast on one of Savannah’s famous squares. As bed and […] | Continue reading
The Power of Late Bloomers The attempts to disempower an American woman unfold across her lifetime. She is sexualized as a young girl, loses her reproductive freedom as a young woman, takes on the “Second Shift” as a mother, and becomes invisible after menopause. Rendering women … | Continue reading
Living The Dream All my life, I dreamed of literary success. I wanted to write and publish a blockbuster novel and enjoy the life of the successful author. The universe had other plans, so I set the dream aside and applied myself to earning a paycheck. While rearing my son, climb … | Continue reading
Proscriptions based on gender are illusory — that’s what I learned from women bronc riders This spring, my historical novel, Sunny Gale, was published by Pronghorn Press. Sunny Gale is a fictionalization of the era of women’s professional rodeo from roughly 1895 to the early 1930 … | Continue reading
Welcome to Amsterdam In the early years of raising my son who has cerebral palsy, I subscribed to a magazine for parents of children with disabilities. The magazine was full of information about dealing with schools and physicians, and the tone was resolutely upbeat. One particul … | Continue reading
3 Ways to Report an Adverse Medication Reaction I recently spoke with a woman over 65 who was recovering from a serious adverse reaction to a prescription drug. She notified her doctor and stopped taking the medication, but she wanted to do more. She was concerned that in the fut … | Continue reading
Our Flower Blooms Power! Do you use a vibrator? Is it connected to an app on your phone? Does the app have controls that personalize the experience and make your pleasure feel like a game? Or maybe you went to one of those websites that let you design a digital lover, your dream … | Continue reading
None Dare Call it Normal The email landed in my box with a nearly audible thud. Dear Stella, It’s time for your online follow-up visit to the Brain Health Registry! Just like your first visit, you’ll be asked to update your information by answering questionnaires and re-taking br … | Continue reading
DNA and Democracy I have just published my new book: DINA: Nature’s Case For Democracy. In it, I describe how democracy preceded humans by about two billion years. Of course, we don’t call it democracy in nature. We call the beings that practice democracy by their common names li … | Continue reading
A Quilt is More than Fragments By age 92 my mother was no longer independent, though she lived in the house my parents had bought sixty years before. My brother and I were far away, and Mom depended on the kindness of neighbors and a bit of hired help to shop for her, do her […] | Continue reading
Small-Press Publishing in 2024 Flashback to 1988 in San Francisco when I was the publisher of Foghorn Press, a start-up with no capital. We had big dreams—dreams that actually manifested in high sales. Each year, we shipped 40,000 copies of our lead title, the guidebook Californi … | Continue reading
What to Expect When You Are Seventy Having been in my seventies for all of six months, I am only marginally qualified to write about this decade. But never having been reticent about sharing an opinion, whether informed or not, here is what I know so far. If you’re a Crone in Tra … | Continue reading
Embracing Sensuality in Midlife: A Journey of Liberation and Self-Expression If you would have asked me in my twenties and thirties to show up on social media and modeling campaigns in my bra and knickers, I would have run a mile! I wasn’t comfortable looking at myself in the mir … | Continue reading
Three Crones to Watch Out For The subject of “super-agers” came up in a recent Old School Office Hours (which, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is a weekly Zoom gathering of folks interested in anti-ageism, convened by the esteemed Ashton Applewhite). You know who we mean by … | Continue reading
The Vista of Years In this decade of my life, I find writing about my childhood in the 1960s to be comforting. I don’t write exclusively about that era; many of my personal essays chronicle more recent years with my husband and daughter and our rural life in Western North Carolin … | Continue reading
Drugs after 60 – And Not The Fun Kind I react badly to most medications – sometimes badly enough to warrant a MedWatch report to FDA. A bit ironic, given that I spent my career in biotech writing submissions to FDA for product approvals. But knowing what I do about medical regula … | Continue reading
Schroedinger’s Breast: Welcome to Mammogram-O-Rama When the mammogram center called the week after my scan, I knew it was not good news. Those folks don’t ring you up to say hi. “Your scan shows calcifications,” the woman said. “We need you to come in to see if we can resolve you … | Continue reading
A Next Life Bucket List “I have a next life bucket list: More sex, better singing voice, the ability to tan.” –Billie Berlin, interviewed in Aphrodite’s Pen: The Power of Writing Erotica after Midlife I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t believe in much, actually, except an … | Continue reading
Roe v Wade – The Voices Project The Supreme Court handed down Dobbs v. Jackson in June 2022, reversing the 1975 Roe v. Wade decision that established abortion as a constitutional right. When women say, We will not go back to back-alley abortions, that raises the question: What wa … | Continue reading
3 Steps to Push Back on Medical Ageism When my mother trained in the Cadet Nursing Corps during World War II, the young nurses were taught that physicians could do no wrong. But, paradoxically, if a doctor made a mistake, it was the nurses’ duty to cover for the doctor. Mom worke … | Continue reading
God Save the Queen In the Fall of 2022 I received several emails, cards and a phone call offering me condolences because Queen Elizabeth II had died. I was touched but surprised. I hadn’t thought about the royals much since I left England in 1976, though I was aware of the queen’ … | Continue reading
Medicare for Some Five years ago when I turned 65 it was time to choose my Medicare path. The choice took about five minutes. I knew nothing about Original Medicare, MediGap plans, and Medicare Advantage plans (except that Original Medicare sounded a bit like KFC Original Recipe) … | Continue reading
Collaborative Women – The Path is Easier with a Friend Joan: You and I met a quarter of a century ago, working for a public relations company called CIIC in Nyack, north of New York City. We were freelancers working remotely before that was a thing, so we must have met at a comp … | Continue reading
In Which the Author Interviews Herself Over the past five years I’ve interviewed lots of authors for my blog. And with the launch of my new novel, “Vampires of a Certain Age” this month, I thought: Why not interview me? So here goes… Me: What on Earth made you de … | Continue reading
A Memoirist Discovers the Magic of Fiction Linda Joy Myers A memoirist for decades, I’m still in a bit of shock having just published a novel! My debut historical fiction book The Forger of Marseille was released in early July, and so far all signs suggest that people are interes … | Continue reading
Fear Sells – Revisiting the Brain Health Registry In 2020 I signed up for a clinical study out of UCSF called the Brain Health Registry. This study of 100,000 people uses online questions and cognitive testing to gauge brain health over time. Its stated goal is to enhance researc … | Continue reading
A Coming-of-Middle-Age Commencement Address: The Intersection of What If and What Next I published my first novel a mere six days after my eldest child graduated high school. The metaphor is not lost on me. In fact, the juxtaposition of these milestones helped me process my feeli … | Continue reading
Crone Culture Becca Levy’s work at Yale University proves that for the sake of our health and longevity, it is essential to cultivate a positive attitude about aging. One great approach is to explore the culture of women past midlife. Because here is the secret: Despite the often … | Continue reading
Waiting for Friday….. About my new book… My new novel Under the Blue Moon is about a woman who has been living for years with grief and regret and a man who, as a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, has recently become homeless. The book cuts back and forth […] | Continue reading