Professional women

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COVER REVEAL: RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

Reconcilable Differences cover

The final new book cover

 

RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES: BEARING SCARS

Finally Reconcilable Differences is ready for publication. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this is a book that was originally written over ten years ago. For all the revisions, it will always carry the scars of having been my first, and because of that, the vehicle for my learning curve as a writer.

 

In some ways, this seems appropriate for a book that’s about exactly that.  A woman, Kate O’Day, who carries the emotional and psychic scars of a long-ago sexual assault, and the emotional trauma of dealing with and healing from that over many years. Kate, like her story, has been in a long iterative process of revision, learning and rebirth.

 

I’m so happy to be able to share Kate’s story with you at last. It’s an important story, and as one reviewer said, “we get to ride along on this harrowing journey without getting too beat up along the way.” Reconcilable Differences explores how sexual assault can lead to repressed memories, PTSD, and compromised self-esteem that has deep and lasting impact on a woman and her ability to form lasting and intimate relationships.

 

I felt it was important to explore these subtler psychological dimensions, since they are rarely discussed, in the context of growing awareness of rape culture, and how it supports, prolongs and institutionalizes the oppression of women for the duration of their lives.

 

 

A HOPEFUL STORY OF HEALING & SELF LOVE

 

But this is not meant to be a dark or a radical book. My goal had always been to tell a love story. A sensitive and intimate exploration of one woman’s journey toward self-knowledge, self-acceptance and love. Although Reconcilable Differences isn’t a classic romance, it is a love story, as Kate navigates the reawakening of a love she lost long ago, along with her own sense of self.

 

It’s ultimately an optimistic story that hopefully resonates with readers, allowing insight into the inner life of a woman searching for identity, fulfillment, balance and love. In that regard, it speaks to us all.

 

HAVING IT ALL

 

Regardless of your personal experience, everywoman’s life shares certain common threads. Despite changes over generations, and from place to place, women have always had to struggle to find their place in society. No matter what choices you are given, or what decisions you make, there are always options, always consequences, always disappointments. I don’t think this feeling is particular to my generation, but I do feel that my own life is a reflection of this truth, and so I write with insight and authority on subjects that have touched me personally.

 

The Having It All series of novels is my way of exploring modern women’s lives as they try to integrate the particular circumstances of their families of origin and personal experiences with perpetually conflicting goals. How do we balance freedom with security, self-expression, identity and autonomy with love, family and belonging? As we variously lean in and try to participate fully in the world, we also need to keep a finger on the pulse of our inner lives to ensure that we don’t sell ourselves short. True empowerment means living fully in our own essence, and having the freedom to make and live with our choices without regret.

 

WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK?

 

This is a good moment to reflect on why I wrote this story, and why I believe you should read it. Women’s Fiction encompasses the woman’s journey no matter where or when or how she lives, and by donning the mantle, and walking in the shoes, of characters that are like, but different from ourselves, we learn. We become sensitized to the particular challenges women face, and we can apply those lessons to our own lives, hopefully for the better. We learn about the world, we learn about ourselves, and we learn about each other.
We are all on a journey, and honest compelling storytelling has always been an important way for us to broaden, deepen and strengthen ourselves for the road. I hope you join me on this journey and both read and enjoy Reconcilable Differences. There are more stories where this one came from!

 

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The Cut Direct

WHERE HAS BUSINESS ETIQUETTE GONE?

 

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BY-GONE DAYS

 

Those of you who read Regency fiction will know what this term means: The cut direct. For those that don’t, it refers to the social snub, a complete diss. Which was done very rarely only under extreme circumstances when a person was in the wrong place at the wrong time or behaving in an inappropriate way for their social class or the setting, or importantly was known to have done something shocking or socially unacceptable. It was extreme and it was noteworthy and it was a shocking cut down.

 

It was not done simply because you were too busy or self-important or didn’t like someone. Despite the accentuated social hierarchy in Regency England, people in those days understood that every person was worthy of acknowledgment regardless of their place. Whether a servant, a merchant or a member of the nobility, everyone had an appropriate address and everyone was acknowledged. It was ungentlemanly and unkind to treat people badly or to just simply ignore them. Not that there were not social boors then as now.

 

Which brings me to my reason for my blog post today which admittedly is a bit of a rant. This is been bothering me for sometime now.

 

Be Nice or LeaveFALLING STANDARDS

 

In the last couple of years, I’ve had occasion to apply for employment or to make inquiries with a number of business people. And I’m frankly still shocked at the lack of appropriate business etiquette that seems to be the norm in today’s world.

I sometimes wonder if it it’s a problem unique to the younger generation but I hope that that’s not the case and I would rather not believe that.

 

Although if it is a demographic phenomenon I can only assume that the current generation have learned their bad habits or failed to learn good habits from their parents, teachers and mentors. Perhaps we simply forgot to pass along what we understood and took for granted.

 

Free-Vector-3d-Social-Media-Icons-Pack-2012-New-Twitter-StumbleUpon-PinterestANOTHER CASUALTY OF THE ELECTRONIC AGE?

 

Alternatively, and more likely, this can perhaps be explained by our sudden global immersion into an age of electronic communication. Early on (The 80s and 90s?) there was some kerfuffle about lack of etiquette in email communications and people talked about that and took the time to critique and to pass along what they felt were important guidelines for appropriate behavior.

 

Now of course we have Facebook and Twitter and Instragram and LinkedIn. All these new, abbreviated forms of communication added to our options for and to further confuse our standards of appropriate social congress.

 

But things have clearly gotten out of hand.

 

Standards of behavior and modes of communication that might arguably be appropriate for some of the new social media platforms should not therefore translate into our person-to-person, face-to-face interactions. I should say that this does not apply to follows, friends and likes. But I’ll leave advice about what’s appropriate on those platforms to the social media experts.

 

telephone and keyboard in officeA SOCIAL OBLIGATION

 

It used to be and not so very long ago that if you phoned someone and left a message they were socially obligated to return your phone call. It didn’t matter if they were busy or if they didn’t want to talk to you or even if they didn’t like you. The onus was on them and it reflected poorly on them if they simply ignored your message. The same went for written communications and invitations, which clearly extends into the world of e-mail. It maybe electronic but it’s still mail.

 

If you’re very busy and very important… It’s likely you have staff and one of their responsibilities is to take care of your correspondence. Note the word correspondence: the CO and the RE meaning that it involves two parties and it’s reciprocal.

 

Sadly we live in an era of spam. We are all of us bombarded with email spam, with advertising, with telephone solicitations of every kind. All of them intrusions into our privacy (you remember privacy don’t you?) And the stuff of course must be ignored and should be ignored but that’s another rant.

 

But I’m talking about our personal one-to-one communications. The kind that impacts on our daily lives and our livelihood. I realize that sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between one and the other. It’s my belief that we need to assume that a person who’s contacting us with their own name has a good reason to do so, is doing their job and pursuing some worthy goal and deserves to be acknowledged respectfully and politely. Until proven otherwise.

 

trash behind mesh fence

FINISH WHAT YOU START

 

Furthermore if you initiate communication with a person or persons and then someone responds to that you owe them the courtesy of a reply. If you post a job and receive responses to that in the appropriate mode and manner then the onus is on you and it is appropriate business etiquette to acknowledge and reply to those responses. It is just plain rude to ignore them.

 

No matter how busy or important you are you owe those people the respect of an acknowledgment. Very likely you have staff whose job it is to do exactly that. It’s up to you to say thank you for responding and then let people know if the position is been filled or if their application is unsuitable. They’re worthy of that. Has our new, electronic age of communication so depersonalized our exchanges with other human beings that we can now without compunction treat them like trash?

 

Everyone’s time is valuable. If someone made the effort to find your notice, to prepare materials, and to submit them, how can you imagine that it’s alright to just ignore them? Is that how you treat your clients? Is that how you want to be treated? Let’s remember the golden rule people. We’re supposed to be living in a civilized society.

 

It reflects very poorly on you and on your business and business practices. This applies equally in personal and social situations. And yet regretfully it seems to be the new norm.

 

What about you? Have you received “the cut direct”? How did it make you feel? Did it change your opinion of that person or company? If you agree with me, how do you think we, as a society, can address this failing? Create courses for students to teach social and business etiquette? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

 

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Professional Women, Love and Carl Jung

Recently I realized there’s a definite pattern to the books that I’ve been writing. In some ways I suppose it’s obvious, but since it’s quite unintentional, it kind of caught me by surprise.

The female protagonists, and often the males as well, in at least two of my novels, and probably another three that I’ve outlined, are adults in their mid-thirties to early fourties, and who have, for one reason or another, chosen to put their energies into their career at the expense of finding love. Sometimes their single-minded focus on their careers is related to their backstory– something that happened to them in their family of origin or in their youth. Sometimes their avoidance or downplaying of love in their lives is due to their commitment to their career, but often to their backstory as well. Sometimes committment is the issue.

These things tend to get muddled together, and often there are issues characters don’t want to admit to or confront. Personally, I think this makes for interesting values-in-conflict story-telling, just like Randy Ingermanson recently wrote.

When it comes to career, we’re talking about identity. For modern working women, this is a complicated issue. I discuss this a bit in the Essay elsewhere on my website entitled: What is it about romance? I also think that this pattern is not uncommon, and that not all women talk openly about this issue with their friends. Men possibly not at all. For a serious, career-driven woman to admit that she is looking for love seems like a cop-out. It’s something that should “just happen” but never take one’s attention away from the all-important career. It feels like they are pandering to outmoded “fairy tales” from the past. Perhaps today, with internet dating sites, the whole “mate searching” problem has become more open and explicit than it was in my day. Even if women are open about wanting to find love as well as have their career, I think it remains a challenge for modern women to be comfortable with the idea that they place importance on finding true love without feeling like their identity as a professional woman is somehow compromised, or that they will be perceived as not “serious.”

Identity in conflict with a character’s essence is how Michael Hauge talks about the character arc in a plot. It reminds me of Maureen Murdock’s writing in The Heroine’s Journey. It differs significantly from The Hero’s Journey in that for men, there is only the quest. For women, there is both the quest and the hearth–the desire and need to nurture and have a family. Perhaps these two goals have always been in conflict for women through the ages, but the Feminist movement brought it into the light. I happen to think that in these Post-feminist times (and I mean that like Post-Modernism, the Feminism hasn’t gone away, we’re just living in the historical wake of a huge societal change) the challenge is all the greater because each successive generation of women openly discuss the rights we’ve come to expect less and less. So much is taken for granted, that I think individual women often struggle alone to come to terms with these conflicting values without the rhetoric to guide them.

In Murdoch’s view, the Heroine’s Journey is not linear, but rather circular, or perhaps spiral. A woman may begin the journey by rejecting the “mother” and embracing the strong “masculine” role for herself, but she cannot attain her ultimate essence until she takes a little detour down to the underworld of the primal Earth mother, embraces her essential feminine, and returns, having discovered the source of her own power. Only then can she come to terms with her own mother, internalize the strong male and emerge empowered as her true feminine self, as both a “warrior” and a “mother” figure (whether or not she in fact is or becomes a mother). (My sincere apologies to Maureen Murdoch if I’ve completely mangled her ideas in my attempt to distill and condense them here.) This “coming to terms with the essential power of the feminine” brings to mind the re-told stories of Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her Women Who Run with the Wolves. There’s a Jungian link between these two writers, so the connection is no accident. In any event, the journey is a bit more complicated for women. Murdoch suggests that any given woman may be stuck at, or experiencing, a particular place along this path, which raises certain issues and puts particular challenges before our heroine.

This is how I envision my heroines. Depending upon their individual story, I try to keep in mind what challenge they most need in order to take the next step toward their own happy ending, and find a way for that to happen in my stories. You may or may not recognize Murdoch’s Jungian stages in my stories, but they definitely help me trace each of my heroine’s journeys.