DEAR READER,
I don’t know where you are in this retirement experience – enjoying it, dreading it, denying you’re in it, can’t wait for it? But if you’re like me you definitely find it puzzling. Which is what I’ll be writing about from time to time in My So-Called Retirement. I hope you weigh in because as always, when it comes to change and challenge, we need each other’s help.

I used to sympathize with my friends who didn’t work but stayed home and raised kids and who dreaded the “What do you do?” question at parties. Their answer “I’m a mom,” would get them little but a polite smile from others who would then turn to scan the crowd for someone more interesting.

I could argue on behalf of those women that anyone who didn’t respect the hard job of being a mother wasn’t worth talking to. I, too, was a mother, and I was on their side.

But I was on the other side, too. I didn’t have to avoid the question at parties. I, in fact, looked forward to it. I had a better answer. And did that make me feel a little bit superior? Sure.

“I’m a newspaper reporter,” I said and later, down the road, I could add the even sexier, “I’m a columnist.” That usually got their attention. If a person recognized my name they might try to be flattering and mention something I’d written. Or they might become a little antagonistic, like the guy who said he liked my writing except for when I sounded like a feminist. Sometimes a person would use me as their chance to rant about the media. But they never just turned away.

I was advised by a friend to never answer “retired” when asked what I did.

When I first left my regular newspaper job more than a year ago, I was advised by a friend to never answer “retired” when asked what I did. “Tell them you do something,” she said. “It makes you seem young.”

That’s part of it, isn’t it? To say you’re retired creates an image attached to an age (old), a lifestyle (sedentary) and value (past). People envy retired people their time, but not their standing.

My generation of women (the Boomer vanguard) was the first to swarm into the workplace in a big way. We were educated women, trained for careers that came with a business card and status. Then, after 30 or 40 years of it, we stopped doing it. Maybe we had no choice because someone said it’s time to go. Or maybe, like for me, we chose to go. The newspaper business was in a downward dive when I left. It had stopped being fun, and to tell you the truth I wanted to exit before someone decided to take away my column and force me to write cops and robbers or spend weekends covering some NASCAR race.

When people ask me what I do now, I say “writer.” And if they say, “I thought you retired,” I start explaining that just because I no longer go into a newsroom every day and just because I get a pension doesn’t mean I’m actually retired. At least not in the classic sense. I’m doing it my way and I’ll tell them more once I figure it out.

People envy retired people their time, but not their standing.

I was at the beach with my dog and spotted a woman I had once interviewed for the paper. She had been a college instructor and I asked her how it was going and she said she’s never been happier since retiring. And what, I inquired, does she answer when people ask what she’s doing now. “I say I’m just being,” she said.

Now, this woman is at a point where I am not. She looked regal, her long silver blonde hair twisting in the sea breeze, a black poncho wrapped around her tall lean frame. When she and her elegant dog trotted off down the beach I pulled my dog off a rotting seagull and thought, well, there’s a role model. I never thought about “just being.”

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol, Ca. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com

Nobody used to care if an author was telegenic, or photogenic for that matter. You didn’t need to be a hottie or a hustler to be a writer. Just tell a good story, get it published, do a few author readings and hope for it to hit the best-seller list.

Except for blockbuster authors who achieved star status, the book business was more about getting attention for the writing than the writer. Most authors stayed somewhat hidden. You saw their photos on the back of their books, friendly faces in what looked like vacation pix taken by a relative, but you wouldn’t recognize them if they walked past you in the airport.

That was before authors were expected to be marketing experts. The author job requirements today are more than to be imaginative, ironic and understand metaphors. It’s way beyond the writing. An author needs to get out there and sell herself. She needs to create a fan page on Facebook, gather Twitter followers and update her website with new photos showing her at important well-attended events. She needs to blog regularly to niche audiences. And that’s only the virtual book tour.

In terms of face-to-face promotion, you still have your traditional book readings at book stores but also your author events with food and wine and theme party book launches.

It’s all about doing whatever you need to do to help keep your book and the book industry alive. Just as publishers and book store owners struggle to stay relevant in the electronic communication age so must authors. This means using all the tools to create your own buzz, including getting your teeth whitened and taking improv classes so you’ll be ready for primetime.

This is a new demanding world for the average writer, often a quiet, cerebral type, a happy loner content to spend days on end in a small room with a closed door, drinking cold coffee and dreaming up great characters and memorable dialogue. Authors do not normally aspire to be rock stars. On the glamour gauge they are of the scuffed shoes and comfy jeans style, somewhere near classical musicians and college teachers. They tend to look intense and act frazzled, perhaps from thinking so hard. Your average writer is not skilled at selling herself.

If she got the dream call from Oprah, she would be both thrilled and sick to her stomach.

But you have to do what you have to do. So before you even start writing the book you work on a press release. You take a special marketing class for authors where you learn it is not enough to produce a book, you need a brand. You learn what to wear on TV. No black shirts, no white pants, no sandals. And you support each others’ author gigs.

One I will be supporting this Saturday, Sept. 19, is the Sonoma County Book Festival which celebrates the local literary community and happens for the 10th year at Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square and inside the main library. (Details at www.socobookfest.org)
It’s where authors, mostly from the Bay Area, get to do it the old fashioned way – read from their latest works and talk about writing with people who love books. (Disclosure: I’m not one of the authors but will be cheering on friends and my daughter and their new books.)

The book festival is a day of no hustle. Just people who write and people who read, the two most important ingredients for a book. It’s tradition and it’s free. And if you go and discover a great writer, feel free to tweet Oprah.

I started watching Rachel Maddow during the presidential campaign after “The Nation” reported on a new, novel TV personality who was a Rhodes Scholar and an AIDS activist. She was also a much-welcomed political ally last fall and not nearly as noisy and smirking as some of her MSNBC colleagues.

However, I didn’t expect her to become a regular in our living room. More of an occasional after-dinner treat, like a bowl of mint chip. But now we indulge almost nightly. I still require the more green veggie type of news served up by the reliable Jim Lehrer and his troupe on PBS. I particularly like it when Judy Woodruff is there reporting on politics or filling in as anchor.

A really good night for me is to get Judy first and then Rachel. It’s not the same as having a woman elected president in your lifetime, but if you can remember those years of catfights over who will be the new pretty blonde head sharing the podium with a silver-haired newsman, it’s still thrilling to watch a woman get to the top of her field because of brains and talent. As President Obama noted, in creating his White House panel on women’s and girls’ issues, the fight for gender quality is not over. And while I’m not sure we can say that that this particular glass ceiling has been thoroughly cracked, at least it’s widened enough to allow us to look forward to more Judys and Rachels.

They don’t have to cross their legs in short skirts to fill the camera.

Of different styles, Judy’s the big sister in terms of gravitas, and Rachel’s the brazen newcomer. But I can see them going out to dinner, laughing it up and getting into what they really think of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers.

Rachel often says she has the best job in the entire universe, and I bet Judy feels the same. “Very cool stuff,” Judy exclaimed one night after what I remember as a complicated debate on climate change. Rachel gets to pop off in a more colorful way, recently commenting on the “junior high whining” of a former president.

The other thing about these women is they don’t have to cross their legs and wear short skirts to fill up the camera. That doesn’t mean their looks aren’t part of their appeal. Rachel, often in Johnny Cash black, favors an unadorned tailored jacket over modest tank top. She’s called herself “not a typical news babe.”

But neither is Judy, even though she’s a former Georgia beauty queen. Judy looks like she put on whatever just came back from the dry cleaners and spent the last 30 minutes before show time going over GM’s annual report rather than getting a comb-out.

But we notice when she does. The other night my husband looked over and said, “Hey, Judy got a haircut.”