O is for Overwhelmed: A to Z blogging challenge

The women in Going Through the Change are all overwhelmed in different ways by their lives, perhaps no one more than Jessica. Jessica may be the youngest main character in the book, but she has had more than her fair share of trouble and disappointment in her thirty-two years.

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As a child, she had dreamed of Olympic glory as a gymnast. She'd worked hard all her life, only to see it all disappear in a single afternoon participating in a three-legged race at a track and field day at school. The knee injury was a career-ender. Still, she wasn't one to mope.

She went to college to study physical therapy, a degree she didn't finish because she married Nathan.  She might have been happy with Nathan forever, but everything changed when she got ovarian cancer. She fought it and won, but the experience left her shaken. She wasn't the woman she once was.

Going through early menopause and mourning for the additional children she would never have didn't help. So, when she developed strange changes, she took it hard.

"Leonel was incredibly strong. Patricia was impervious to harm. Even bullets couldn’t get through her armor! What good was she? A former gymnast who floated like a balloon? She felt strangely jealous. None of them had asked for this, but the other women had gotten amazing and useful powers. She didn’t get a super power; she got a disability."

She felt sorry for herself for a while, but she pulled herself up and was amazing. Her arc was the most fun for me as the writer to create because she changed the most. Jessica overcame that feeling of being overwhelmed, which is yet another reason that she's my hero.
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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

N is for Nerd: A to Z blogging challenge

If you know me now, then it's not that surprising to you if I announce that I am a nerd. I'm not apologizing, just acknowledging. I'm comfortable with who I am now. But, like many a middle-aged nerd-girl, I spent my teenage and early adult years trying to hide my nerdy-ness.

Teenage Me, circa 1987ish

I tried to dress like an 80s pop princess (I was bad at it), even though I really wanted to wear Converse sneakers and ironic teeshirts with jeans. I pretended to be engaged by teenage romance novels, when really I wanted to read science fiction and fantasy. I pushed the comic books under the bed when my friends came over so I could pretend I was interested in hair and makeup.

I don't know who I thought I was fooling.

As a college student, an English major even, I was a victim of my own snobbery.  I was convinced that the books I enjoyed weren't capital L Literature, and tried hard to develop a taste for postmodern cautionary tales and experimental theater. The then-husband was a bit of a culture snob, too--though the chip on his shoulder originated in other ways.

I'm not sure when I stopped pretending to like things I didn't really like just because I thought I should like them.

What I really like are superhero stories. Not just for the powers, though those can be pretty awesome. No, it's more about that human element, that huge broad, dramatic canvas to explore issues that might otherwise seem mundane. I want an underdog to cheer for. I want a character who doesn't get it right the first time out, but you know they will eventually.

There are a lot of those stories out there, but, mostly, they're about men. So, I wrote Going Through the Change, a nerdy little superhero book for me and other women like me. Women who are fully grown up, with all the problems of adult life. Women with messy, real sorts of lives. And, of course, superpowers.

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

M is for Menopause: A to Z blogging challenge

Going Through the Change was born as an idea from a conversation with my husband. Geeky folk that we are, we were having a conversation about superheroes. We were comparing the stories of those born with powers (The X-Men, Superman, Wonder Woman) and those who gain powers through accidents (Spiderman, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four). 

Somewhere during that conversation I was struck by the idea that hormones cause superpowers. After all, a good many of these stories have a teenage angst origin story. Even for people born with powers, puberty seems to be the trigger for manifestation. So, I said, "Well, if hormones cause superpowers then menopausal women should be the most powerful people on the planet." 

The hubby turned to me and said, "Write that down!" And I did. Fast forward a few months (okay more than a few…) and you have: 

cover art by +Polina Sapershteyn

Midlife mutant! With great hormones, comes great responsibility! They took supplements…and ended up super supplemented! They're not your father's superheroes, but they might be your mother's!

This book was my ticket to play with menopause, taking common complaints and turning them into superpowers. Who knew that writing about menopause could be so much fun? :-)

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!

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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

L is for Linda: A to Z blogging challenge

I've got a crush on Linda Alvarez (Luckily for my husband, she's fictional). I'm in good company. More than one of the other characters has noticed her charms, too. Her name means beautiful, and she certainly is beautiful. Becoming a man didn't change that.

Here she is as drawn by +Charles C. Dowd See what I mean?

Besides being a beauty on the outside, Linda also possesses a heart of gold. She's a nurturer.  That's her gift, and her curse. She cares a lot, maybe too much. 

If all my characters are me, then Linda is the part of me that feels guilty anytime I take time for me that I could have given to someone I love. She's trying to balance her life, too.  She loves her children and grandchildren, and, most of all, her husband. When she was transformed into a man, she was sure the life she had loved was about to end. 

She was going to lose him. Her David. Her vida. This wasn’t just aging, a little sag, or another skin problem. It had been hard enough to talk to him about ordinary woman stuff. He was so old-fashioned. He thought of periods and childbirth and hormones as mysterious things just this side of magic. Things men were not meant to comprehend. 

I hope my readers will love and admire Linda the way I do. She's the kind of woman I want to be, even when she's a man.
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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
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click the image to preorder on Amazon!

K is for Knowledge: A to Z blogging challenge

It's a running joke in my writing critique group that the NSA or anyone else spying on us would think us very dangerous people indeed, if they looked at our search histories. Any large writing project involves looking up information about something or another, and this book had me researching some very interesting things! Here's some of the highlights from my search history during the writing of Going Through the Change: 

bioluminescence 

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Chinese emeralds

crystals

diving weights

effects of smoke inhalation

explosive chemicals/lab materials

factors in flight

fire proof glass

how to fireproof clothing

lots of Mexican and Mexican-American foods

lucid dreaming

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metabolism

oophorectomy procedure and recovery

ovarian cancer

puberty

relaxation techniques

Spanish slang

testosterone in the female body, and the male body

traditional Chinese medicine

truth serum

why helium balloons float

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
____________________________________________

click the image to preorder on Amazon!

J is for Jessica: A to Z blogging challenge.

I wanted to have a diverse group of women at the core of Going Through the Change. After all menopause comes to all the women of the world. It's hardly a homogenous group. 

The main characters range in age from 32-67. Some have married, some have children, others have neither. One is a grandmother. They have different backgrounds, different attitudes about life, different joys and disappointments. They have in common a geographical area (Springfield, a non-geographically-specific middle size city in the comic book tradition of Central City and Metropolis), menopause, and, it turns out, Cindy Liu. 

Jessica, as drawn by +Charles C. Dowd 

My youngest main character in Going Through the Change is Jessica Roark. She came to be, in part, because of a conversation I had with my friend +Elizabeth Hein , author of How to Climb the Eiffel Tower and Overlook. She reminded me that age is not the only factor that might cause a woman to go through menopause.

Jessica, at age 32, is atypically young to go through menopause. She still has small children at home (two boys, ages 5 and 3). She was tossed into hormonal chaos by ovarian cancer, which she survived. 

When the book begins, Jessica is depressed. She's still grieving for the loss of her reproductive options, and she and her husband aren't really on the same page anymore. 

Because he had known her before, known what she had been like, and loved the old her, he mourned the pre-cancer Jessica. Maybe that was the difference. That Jessica had been a lot of fun. She had hosted parties, volunteered in the right charities, represented her husband proudly at formal events.

She had been beautiful, too, glamorous, even. Jessica tugged at her worn yoga pants ruefully. It was hard to care about things like fashionable clothes anymore. It was even harder to listen to the inane chatter at dinner parties and events. It all felt so empty.

The girl in the movie didn’t lose the man she had once known; she met him when cancer already had him in its sights. Jessica supposed Nathan had lost the woman he used to love, even though she was sitting on the couch today. She wasn’t the same person. 

Jessica has quite a journey throughout this book and is continuing to impress and amaze me with her resilience in the sequel I'm currently writing. I hope readers will connect with and come to admire Jessica as I have.
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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
____________________________________________

click the image to preorder on Amazon!

I is for Impossible: A to Z blogging challenge

Part of the fun of writing a superhero novel is removing the limits on what's possible. Nothing is impossible! People can fly, throw fire, transform into creatures, and have incredible strength. 

The challenge then, is in making sure that in this "anything could happen" atmosphere your readers have the oxygen they need to breathe, that the world and the people in it feel real, even while they deal with impossible things. 

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I think that's why my favorite superhero characters are the ones that are the most human. I've never been drawn to Superman. Nothing can hurt this man. He's so overpowered they had to invent another impossible thing (Kryptonite) just to have a way to slow him down long enough to build a story around him.

Peter Parker, on the other hand, struggles. He doesn't have enough money. He's got girlfriend issues. He's got some serious guilt issues. He's a flawed human being. In other words, he's interesting. Even without Doc Ock or Venom, I'd still care about Spiderman. 

As I wrote Going Through the Change, I wanted to write real

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women facing impossible things. These women have husbands, children, jobs, and friends. They have real world issues that women face all the time: health concerns, work/life balance problems, marriages, body image worries, aging and ageism quandaries. 

One of the things that has always drawn me to speculative fiction in all its many forms is that its a great playground for deep thoughts. Sure, on the surface, it might seem like a superhero story is all about the powers, but the best ones are about the people. The extraordinary, impossible circumstances of their lives just give a broader landscape to explore their issues in. 

My hope for Going Through the Change is that my readers think and have fun at the same time as they read it. 

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This posting is part of the A to Z blogging challenge, in which bloggers undertake to post every day in April, excepting Sundays, which amounts to 26 postings, one for each letter of the alphabet--preferably along a theme. My postings will all be about my debut novel and my experiences writing it and seeing it published.

Blogging A to Z is a great opportunity to connect with some excellent bloggers and interesting people. I encourage you to check out other participating blogs, too!
____________________________________________

click the image to preorder on Amazon!