My Reinvention personal project is about women who reinvent themselves midlife. Becoming a photographer in my 30s completely changed my life for the better…and I want to encourage people to never feel it’s never too late…we’re only going around once!

I met Nicole through makeup and photography – we needed a makeup artist for a UConn Women’s Basketball Team shoot we were doing and Mike remembered meeting a makeup artist at pre-school drop off. Years later we’ve done many shoots together. I’m thrilled to congratulate her on her two-book deal under the pen name Addison McKnight with her first thriller, An Imperfect Plan launching May 10th!

Thank you Nicole for posing for me as I see you – tough, dark, and glamorous – cue the ravens and see our interview below.

What did it take for you to reinvent yourself into a novelist? 

The biggest thing was that I got an idea. You can’t write a book without that great idea, and once I had it, I couldn’t stop writing.

How did you get started in makeup? 

I always enjoyed writing and I went to college to study screenwriting. But at the time I found the idea of moving to LA and really making a go of it too overwhelming. I then bounced around in different jobs, writing, proofreading for a PR company and a publisher and then ended up grant writing for a nonprofit. When my kids were young, I got laid off and I took a part-time makeup job just for something fun to do to get out of the house on the weekends. I ended up loving that job and it evolved into a very full-time career, but I always missed writing. So I started my parenting blog, Lady Goo Goo Gaga, and then eventually became a beauty writer for Martha Stewart Weddings and PopSugar Beauty.

You had a very successful blog, Lady Goo Goo Ga Ga…was that just for fun or part of your writing plan?  What made you choose the thriller genre given Lady Goo Goo Ga Ga is more satirical?

The parenting blog began as an outlet for me, as I felt overwhelmed and horrified by my experience as a stay-at-home mother in West Hartford, Connecticut. Although much of what I wrote about I did in a satirical way, making fun of mothers and their kids, and the whole culture of parenting, I did so anonymously because I thought that many would not have the same sense of humor as me.

A major reason why I started the blog at the time was because I always knew I wanted to write a book some day and everything I read about getting a book published said that I would have to have a built-in following in order to get any agent or publisher to give me a chance. Well after a few years I had my built in following, people were reading across the country and at times I had up to one million readers on my most popular posts. After a while, as my kids got older, it became difficult to keep it going. I was heavily immersed in my beauty writing, at the time and I was getting tired of that too. I had been really enjoying the dark and twisty thrillers I binge-watched as well as the thrillers I read voraciously. So when I got this scary idea for a book with a friend of mine, we decided to dive in and try writing fiction.

READ MORE OF OUR INTERVIEW HERE

Has the journey been more or less challenging than you thought it would be?  What are some challenges you encountered and how did you overcome them?

Actually, writing the book was easy. I had really honed my writing skills for years writing non-fiction and my old love of fiction writing came back to me quickly. We were so passionate about the story and getting it down on paper, the writing part was fun. We then decided to try and get the book published which we learned meant we needed an agent. We got 55 rejections before we secured our agent and that was a difficult process. Once we had the agent, learning how to work with editors to make it sparkle was another trying phase. Once our agent said she thought it was ready to send out to publishers, COVID hit, so we had to wait for months until the world went back somewhat to normal. Having a partner in all of this was extremely helpful as we could bounce ideas off each other and when one of us was stressed or worried, we would lift each other up.

How did you secure a two-book deal with no fiction experience?

After 55 rejections we decided to go to a conference in NYC called Thrillerfest where the top agents looking for thrillers were available for 2 hours of live pitching. It was like speed-dating for agents. We took a chance and practiced our live pitch for weeks before going, and it was there that we finally landed our dream agent. I think “fake it till you make it� applies here, as our passion and excitement shined through and our idea was great so our agent took a chance on us.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

I love a quote by Lillian Bray, “Write like it matters and it will.� I didn’t know that a million people were going to read my blog post about “The seven moms I don’t want to see on the first day of school,� or that my post “Stop asking me for a smoky-eye� would go viral – but I just felt a need to tell those stories. If you have an idea, or you want to write about something, just do it. I think it’s hard sometimes to put your stuff out there into the world, and hope that it’s well received. Self-doubt is a major hurdle for writers, and I like to write and push away any worries about what people will think.

Did you ever have/struggle with self-doubt?  How did you keep going?

I got a lot of hate mail as a parenting and beauty writer and I thrived on it. I feel that if I have evoked enough emotion through my writing that you send me a message of any sort, I have succeeded. I am prepared to receive mixed reviews on my fiction debut as well, it’s par for the course. Everyone is not going to love everything I do and I am totally fine with that. I think the biggest struggle with self-doubt occurs during the editing process. When your editor deletes pages of work that you thought was wonderfully written, it can hurt a bit for sure. But if I am feeling weak, or unsure of my writing process or feeling like I am struggling, I check in with writing mentors, my partner or sign up for writing courses!

You are a mother of two very active teenage boys, a make-up artist, have your realtor’s license, have organized charity runs and a squash program for public school kids – when did you find time to write a novel?

My partner and I found what we call “pockets of time� during the first book. We stopped looking at social media and binge-watching. If we had 30 minutes between school pick-up and sports we would write, we would wake up a little bit earlier to finish a chapter, or we would skip a Saturday night out to crank out some pages. We loved this project so we never felt like we were forcing ourselves to do something.

What have you learned about yourself?

When I look back on this journey, I am proud of myself mostly for not giving up. I believed that this book could be successful, that people would want to read it and they would enjoy it, and so I kept pushing. I have also learned that I am NOT the best writer! There is so much that I have learned about writing fiction since we started this 2 years ago. We just kind of wrote down a story but I have learned a lot about building character development, pacing a plot, dialogue, etc. All the important pieces of a good novel. And even still, I have three books under my belt and I have a lot to learn.

How did COVID affect your reinvention?

COVID really put our whole plan on pause, like everything else. But for me, I didn’t have my other career as a makeup-artist either, and my beauty writing was based on my time in the field. Parenting writing wasn’t fun or funny because the kids were home and there was nothing to laugh about. So I basically had nothing to do. Our agent suggested we start a second book to keep us going. This turned out to be a blessing, as by the time she went to sell book one, we had our second book finished, which led to her securing us a 2-book deal with Lake Union publishing.

What are your hopes for the future?

I really hope that readers enjoy An Imperfect Plan, my debut novel. And I hope that this is just the beginning of my writing career. I recently finished my third book and have ideas floating in my mind for book four.

What do people not know about you?

I played the piano and tennis from age 6 until college. I dropped piano but still play tennis!