Best Staged Plans
Page 22
Q: What came next?
A: For me, a huge part of the fun of being a novelist is that I get to live other lives vicariously. And I know my readers often get ideas for their own lives from my novels. So I started thinking about what would be an interesting job to explore. Professional home staging seemed like the perfect midlife career—it’s creative and flexible, life experience is an asset, and it’s a growing field. And from there I thought, what if the heroine was a home stager who was struggling to sell her own house? Her husband was dragging his feet, and her borderline-adult son had moved home and was living in the basement bat cave . . .
Q: Now that you’re an expert, what advice would you give to people who want to hire a home stager—or even to become one?
A: Ha! I did lots of research, and there’s plenty of solid staging advice in Best Staged Plans, but I’m hardly an expert. In fact, I keep telling everyone to ask me questions about things like de-cluttering and paint colors fast, before I move on to my next novel and forget everything I’ve learned! If you’d like to find a real, as opposed to a fictional, professional home stager, or look into becoming one yourself, a great place to start is the Real Estate Staging Association (www.realestatestagingassociation.com), a member-governed trade association for home stagers. On the RESA Web site you’ll find a list of accredited home stagers, a consumer’s guide to home staging, information about training and accreditation, and lots more.
Q: Do you and Sandy Sullivan, the narrator of Best Staged Plans, have anything in common?
A: Absolutely. We even live in an almost identical 1890s Victorian—it’s such a cool house that I kept most of the details. And, like Sandy, I’m facing the choices and adventures that come with the empty-nest stage of life.
The comment I hear most often from readers is, “OMG, you’re writing my story!” Well, that’s because I’m living it, too! But even though this novel cuts close to some aspects of my own life, as with all of my novels I use bits and pieces of real details from my life, the lives of everyone who’s brave enough to be friends with a novelist, things I’ve read or overheard at the gym or from the next table at a restaurant, and things I imagine. Then, it’s as if I put them into an imaginary paper bag, shake them all up, and pull out all the pieces in a new order. I guess you could call it my Shake’n Bake method for writing a novel!
Q: What is Readers for Readers, and how did it come about?
A: With every novel, I look for opportunities to give back. I’ve spoken and signed books at thematically linked fund-raisers, and I’ve taught lots of free writing and reinvention workshops. When a thread about homelessness found its way into Best Staged Plans, I was completely surprised to find out, along with my heroine, that not having inexpensive, nonprescription reading glasses is the biggest obstacle to disadvantaged people over forty reentering the workplace. Every midlife woman I know has a handful of outgrown reading glasses, so I decided to set up a Readers for Readers page on my Web site, where I’ll list the mailing addresses of women’s shelters that would be happy to accept donations of reading glasses. I’m also planning to collect them at my book tour events and get them into the hands of local shelters.
Q: What’s your best advice for women struggling to find their own next chapters?
A: Stop listening to the naysayers. Try things. Make mistakes. Get your computer skills up to speed. Work harder than everybody else. Help other women along the way, remembering that, as one of my characters once said, karma is a boomerang. And, of course, check out my reinvention page at ClaireCook.com.
About the Author
Claire Cook wrote her first book in her minivan outside her daughter’s swim practice and is now the bestselling author of Seven Year Switch, The Wildwater Walking Club, Summer Blowout, Life’s a Beach, Multiple Choice, Must Love Dogs, and Ready to Fall. She lives in Scituate, Massachusetts, often called the Irish Riviera, with her family, and shares tips about writing and reinvention on her Web site, ClaireCook.com.
To learn more about Claire Cook, or to buy her books, go here.
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Claire Cook
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the print book as follows:
Cook, Claire
Best staged plans / Claire Cook. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-4013-4117-6
1. Middle-aged women—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Home staging—Fiction. 4. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.055317B47 2011
813’.54—dc22
2010041839
eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-4269-2
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Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph by Yumiko Kinoshita / plainpicture
First eBook Edition
Original hardcover edition printed in the United States of America.
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