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“This would be perfect for my man cave,” the husband always says, leaning back and shaping his hands into a rectangle as he indicates the spot on the wall where he’ll hang the “flat screen.” (The hip husbands never say “flat-screen TV.”)

The couple moves on to the master bedroom, which is easily capable of holding their king-sized bed, a couple of easy chairs, a coffee table, and a treadmill. It’s as large as my living room. But the wife enthuses over the “en suite,” the bathroom off the master bedroom. As a harried mother she longs for the en suite so she can luxuriate in its sunken tub, forgetting that she hardly has time for a shower, let alone a long soak in a tub.

“Oh, this is great,” the home-buying mother sighs over the open concept kitchen with its island and L-shaped counter that faces the family room. “I can watch the kids from here while I cook.” (And set the table, clear the table, and clean up after meals.)

So, why do husbands deserve a room all to themselves? Don’t wives also work, then come home and take care of the house and the kids? And those mothers who stay home with the kids all day? Where’s their private space? Where do they sprawl out, unbothered by messy toddlers, fighting grade school offspring, and sulky teens?

Maybe the wives are glad to have the husbands out of the way in man caves, rather than underfoot. Well, they’re still underfoot, in a literal way—on a completely different floor—in the basement.

My Legacy is Simply This

When new students tell me they have this inexplicable urge to write about their lives, but don’t know what to write about, I suggest they take a look at My Legacy is Simply This, a book of short essays by seniors living in various neighborhoods in Boston.

No matter what age you are, these are stories you’ll enjoy. Among my favorites is the story of his dangerous career, recounted by  William Boyle, a former fire fighter. As a young man, he helped quench the big Hotel Vendome fire, which killed nine Boston fire fighters, in 1972. Even after pulling dead coworkers out from the rubble, he still loved his work, especially because that day, he found his boyhood friend, alive in the debris.

Boyle also describes being overcome by smoke inhalation in one fire, and being asked by his wife, as he lay in the hospital, if he would consider giving up the job. But, as his work was one of the loves of his life (his wife being the other), he told her “No,” and returned to work as soon as he was able. His essay ends with the successful CPR performed on a baby.

Dorothy Parks is a woman who lives each day as if it were her last, as a result of the perils she faced in her travels, whether by train, ship, or air. Her essay is the funniest in the collection, as she recounts an absurd brush with death on an airplane with a wing on fire.

Holiday Gift Recommendation

If you’re looking for an engaging gift this holiday season, consider My Legacy is Simply This. Your gift recipient won’t be disappointed. (Note: I have no affiliation with the publishers or writers of this book.)

And if you’ve been considering writing down the stories from your own life, I hope you’ll find the following posts helpful.

• Writing Stories from Your Life
• Supercharge Your Life Story with These Ideas
• Teaching Creative Writing to Boomers and Seniors, Part 2

That's me

I Had It All Wrong

My early fantasies of the writing life bore no relation to reality, saturated as they were with a determined sentimentality. I must have gotten my ideas from photos I came across in which writers were always pensively portrayed in workspaces that overlooked meadows and streams drenched in dappled sunlight.

I envisioned these writers living in unearthly serenity, happily insulated—probably by wives. Since I wasn’t a man, nor had I a wife, I don’t know who I thought would be earning money for me or handling life’s bothersome details—which admittedly were less onerous 25 years ago—while I was gazing out on a verdant landscape from my writerly haven.

By the time I moved to Boston in my early twenties, I was penning stories and essays, which I rarely completed. I know now that that was because I knew neither how nor where to publish them. I’d had it drummed into me that it was virtually impossible to get anything in print if you lacked important contacts. Publishers, I was told, were terribly selective, and no one understood exactly how they weeded people out. But, weed me out these disapproving, deskbound gatekeepers would.

I Get Make My Start

So, I read a great deal, and I wrote all those things I didn’t complete. But now I see they were all practice. I was learning to write better and building up my confidence until one day, I offered to write brief reviews for a regional art paper. I doubt if I formally queried or got paid for those reviews, but I got my name in print.

A local feminist paper let me write my first feature article. In the end, I was dissatisfied with the piece, because it didn’t accurately reflect my views. Even the photo they took of me on a neighbor’s lawn (well, here at least was my pastoral setting) was unflattering. But the experience took me from writing for myself to writing for others, and I learned to work with editors.

My town library needed someone to promote a literary lecture, so I interviewed the Cape Cod author and submitted a feature article, which was published in the local newspaper.

All the while, I took writing classes.

I Arrive at My Goal

I produced a blog offering creative writing tips for my alma mater. I wrote, under pseudonyms, first-person columns and an article about being overworked for two national higher education papers. Then I had an essay published in a women’s paper that’s circulated in a number of cities. More Magazine online published my essay about joyfully leaving organizational life to teach creative writing.

I managed to become a writer, publishing two dozen articles and essays, even though I had no idea how to do it. As writers, we have to make our own opportunities, and now more than ever before, we can do that.

The Real (and Rewarding) Writing Life

Neither I, nor anyone else, ever foresaw the major publishing houses disappearing or morphing into something else, with even greater strictures against risk taking. Who guessed that a writer would need a strategy as sophisticated as a business plan to get published? (And I thought it was hard to get published way back when!) Who suspected that we writers would have to learn to repair our computers, sometimes moments before a deadline, and distribute our work on things called web sites, and use keywords and tags, Facebook, Twitter, digg and delicious?

But at the same time that we couldn’t imagine the Internet, we couldn’t imagine that we’d perhaps be discovered electronically by a total stranger who might be an agent or an editor. Or, we can bypass them, distribute our own work, and maybe be discovered by them after the fact.

All this has liberated writers from those unknown publishing house denizens as remote and incomprehensible as the anonymous authorities in a Kafka novel.

I teach writers the tricks of our trade, so that these teens, parents, engineers, business owners, and military veterans don’t have to spend decades, as I did, figuring out how to publish the work they’ve waited a lifetime to see in print.

And there’s another benefit of being a writer today: if we post our work on sites we control, then realize we haven’t said what we meant, we can correct or replace it altogether. That’s professional freedom.

That's me—on a cool day

Sitting across from each other in her large, disordered office and wearing almost matching sleeveless dresses, the library director and I ignore the fact that my dress is clinging to my chest and my skin is glazed with perspiration. It’s a breezeless August day, and the air conditioning is on the fritz.

Moisture emerges from my hairline and meanders across my upper lip. The skin on my face is prickly, as if covered by a strange damp stubble. But I continue asking questions and the director answers them, for an article I’m writing for the local newspaper. We both act as if nothing untoward is happening. Actually, for me, this is not remarkable. By my calculations, I’m experiencing my fifteen thousandth hot flash.

Years earlier, when I first reported these steamy soakings to my doctor, she had peered over her glasses at me, then squinted at her computer.

“I promise they won’t remain beyond a few months,” she said in her slightly Slavic accent.

But my almost hourly drenchings persisted for four years, as I became increasingly frustrated by my body’s refusal to conform to the medical timetable.

Should I Take Drugs?
I held off requesting the medication that had freed so many women from this awful upper body heat because it seemed absurd to need drugs to regulate something as ordinary as body temperature.

But, my hot flashes had no intention of leaving without a fight. Eventually, sick of removing and donning my clothes a dozen times a day to cool off, I began hormone replacement therapy—“HRT” to those in the know.

Then medical researchers with nothing better to do than dash the hopes of middle-aged women discovered that the miracle drug could have dangerous effects. So, I stopped taking the meds two and a half years ago. My hot flashes returned, as frequent and intense as they were before I went on HRT.

“Dress in layers,” my husband said.

The difference between the perceived ambient temperature when I’m having a hot flash can feel like 40 or 50 degrees. I have stood hatless in blizzards, snow stinging my face, my down coat wide open, reveling in relief. I have lingered on my back porch in a thin tank top, when the thermostat beside me read 26 degrees. I’d probably be famous by now had I not had to interrupt my writing to strip off my clothes a dozen times a day.

If you’re a hot flash sufferer (or the husband of one), see What Keeps Me From Writing? The Fire Within, Part 2. Feel free to complain about your hot flashes.

Leave a comment about anything interferes with your writing to win a free download of Polish and Publish: The Indispensable Toolkit for Creative Writers.

I have tried all the known methods for minimizing hot flashes. I take deep breaths to calm myself while grasping an icy beverage when a hot flash threatens. I eat tofu, lentils, and garbanzo beans, drizzle flaxseed on my food, and drink one cup of coffee in the morning. I never drink alcohol, since a mere sip makes me feel as if I’ve been on a 3-day bender.

I sleep in skimpy nightgowns with the bedroom window open all winter long. In the summer, an air conditioner and a fan blow all night.

Each of my fifteen thousand hot flashes has its own characteristics.

There are those that alert me to their slow, mild arrival, so that just moving into a cooler part of the house prevents them from developing into full-fledged heat events.

Then there are those that show up by stealth. When I notice them, my upper body is already saturated in sweat.

I’m talking about the many times in the past two and a half years that I’ve changed direction.

My false starts are the results of exploring how I want to spend my time, earn money, and fulfill my creative urges and talents. If a  project doesn’t work out, I have to file away the remnants of my failure, grieve and regroup, then start all over on something else. These wasted efforts cost time, money, and patience—besides the fact that they’re pretty exhausting.

When I left my full-time job as a marketing communications director in 2008, I took on freelance work related to that profession. But I quickly realized it didn’t interest me anymore.

I love and collect art, so I decided to teach others how they could own affordable original art. I visited museums and galleries, and contacted artists to feature their work on the blog I began on the subject. I put out money, but couldn’t figure out how to bring in money at this work. (I considered becoming an art consultant, but realized I wouldn’t relish working with indecisive clients nervous about spending money on art, and on my services.)

There might have been another effort after that, but fortunately for my self-esteem, I can’t remember what it was.

Then, I had an idea. I would teach writing. I would write a book on writing. I did both, and then began coaching other writers and editing their work. This all feels right, thank goodness, because I couldn’t stomach the need to start all over again.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like What Keeps Me From Writing? My Furniture, and What Keeps Me From Writing? Gourmet Food.

Leave a comment about what interferes with your writing—or about your false starts—to win a free download of Polish and Publish: The Indispensable Toolkit for Creative Writers.

Writer, editor, writing coach, Lynette Benton

Leave a comment about what interferes with your writing to win a free download of Polish and Publish: The Indispensable Toolkit for Creative Writers.

This time last week I was arguing with a salmon. The Whole Foods butcher had boned it nicely, but left some unappealing tan flesh attached to its underside. I was struggling to scrape that off before chopping the fish into chunks for a soup I was making.

I had already cleaned the sand from between the layers of the leeks. Fresh spinach was draining in a colander before being cut into strips to add to the soup at the last minute.

Once that was all simmering nicely, I started on the Spanish—or was it Cuban?—pork stew.

My husband, a vegetarian, mashed up a few of those delicious Garnet sweet potatoes, ladled sauteed mushrooms over them, then topped them with crispy oven “fried” kale. Somewhere along the line, he also peeled steaming yellow beets, a job I dislike.

We are accidental members of the “slow food” movement. Never having had fast food while growing up, neither my husband nor I eat it now. Since we eat almost no processed foods, dislike banal food, and eat many times in the course of each day, we’re driven to cook a lot.

This time of year, my landscaper husband (who used to be a professional cook), is available to do good deal of meal preparation, so cooking interferes with my writing less than during warm weather. When I’m on my own again from April through half of December my writing time will contract accordingly.

I just finished making a roux for a root vegetable “mac ‘n cheese” casserole, a whole lot better than last week’s fight with the fish. So, I’m out of excuses . . . gotta get back to working on my memoir.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like “What Keeps Me From Writing? My Furniture.”

Leave a comment about what interferes with your writing to win a free download of Polish and Publish: The Indispensable Toolkit for Creative Writers.

Twitter: @lynettebenton

Dining Rm Table w/ Back of Morris Chair

Leave a comment about what interferes with your writing. Add your email address (which I won’t share) to win a free download of Polish and Publish: The Indispensable Toolkit for Creative Writers.

No, not my home office furniture. That would keep me from writing, but my dear friend Ava just gave me her husband’s ergonomic office chair.

It was a conversation with Ava that made me aware that, although I’m not a “neat freak” by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, housecleaning takes up a lot of my (writing) time. It was just before Christmas when we spoke, and I was deep into the kind of cleaning you only undertake before company’s coming and you think everyone will be judging you. It wasn’t the once or twice a week type of cleaning you do just to prevent a gradual slide into squalor.

My problem is that my husband and I own antiques and heirlooms. Here’s a mere sample of their demands.

Our lamps incorporate complicated curlicues and fretwork (which, in some cases are hidden by the shades). To dust them, I have to painstakingly slip the point of a rag through each tiny opening and make sawing motions. The early 20th century dining room chandelier from my childhood home in New York is too fragile to swipe with the vacuum cleaner. Preventing dust from hanging from it like fuzzy grey icicles requires my mounting a wobbly, 100-year-old oak chair and executing a precarious balletic stretch over the dining room table, duster gently flailing.

We use an old-fashioned Duncan Fyfe affair as our kitchen table. That wonderful reference book, What’s What, describes it as supported by swinging gates, turnings, stretchers, and even knees. Those knees are attached to as many legs as a spider has and I take trips to the floor on my hands and knees to clean them. The dining room table has only two legs, but they are giant pedestals that can only be reached by easing myself under the table, stretching my arms, and waving my cloth around, hoping it hits dust.

A friend was moving to London and offered his antiques for sale. For $35, we bought an authentic Morris chair with slender balusters on the sides and horizontal spindles in back; a Victorian “lady’s” chair with wooden thingies I won’t even try to describe, but which, like the lamps, have to have a rag poked through them, and an old library lamp with green glass shades mounted in the fragile brass necks. Caught up in a rare bargain hunter’s euphoria, I didn’t consider what all these would take to maintain.

Unlike modern furniture that has the sense to be manufactured to look polished, our blond oak chest with designs etched on its doors, the large Victorian bishop’s chair, and all the rest of the stuff has to be occasionally, but actually, polished.

In my booklet, Polish and Publish, I offer tips for finding time to write. I can’t believe I forgot to include: “If you own fussy furniture, exchange it for sleek modern.”

Leave a comment about what interferes with your writing .

And check back for the next in this series of excuses, I mean reasons, for what interferes with my writing.

Twitter: @lynettebenton

Since publishers seldom give their reasons for rejecting our work, we writers have made an (unpaid) industry out of trying to discover the reasons for ourselves.

In my post, Rejected Writing, I shared a piece I wrote that More Magazine online had rejected. I promised to let you know what I felt were the reasons behind the rejection.

Publishers take a pass on most writing because the work is poor. I don’t think that’s why mine was unacceptable. I know how to write—and More online published a different essay I wrote, “After Burnout, a New Career Helping Writers.”

Although the More editors might disagree with me, here are the reasons I think the piece was (justifiably) rejected.

Reasons for Rejection
• More Magazine is all about reinvention. My “Hot Flashes and the Fashionable Woman” wasn’t. It’s not a story of how I went from being one way to how I became another way. And those are the types of stories More is renowned for.
• My piece is not an essay. It’s an article—or more accurately, a “service piece.” (A service piece is an article that provides practical advice and resources for living.)
• More has published lots of articles about managing hot flashes. Mine was just another one. Why would they need it?

Takeaways for Writers
If this reasoning is correct, there’s a simple lesson in this rejection. It’s that we must analyze the publications we want to see our work in and target our writing accordingly.

Please leave a comment to share what you learned from a publisher’s (or agent’s) rejection. Thanks!

Twitter: @lynettebenton