UNBRIDLED: A TALE OF A DIVORCE RANCH just became the Award Winner in the Fiction and Literature: Chick Lit/Women’s Lit category of the International Book Awards 2010!

UNBRIDLED: A TALE OF A DIVORCE RANCH has been named a Mainstream Fiction winner of the 17th Annual Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Book Awards 2010!

UNBRIDLED: A TALE OF A DIVORCE RANCH has been named the Award-Winner in the Fiction & Literature: Chick Lit/Women’s Lit category of the National Best Books 2009 Awards, sponsored by USA Book News!

Marilu is publicizing UNBRIDLED: A TALE OF A DIVORCE RANCH in a series of talk radio interviews nationwide!

INTERVIEW SCHEDULE

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Money Matters Radio Network with Gina Ghioldi; Nationally Syndicated to 9 Stations

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

KCBR-AM 1040; Colorado Springs CO; 9:00 a.m. MT

Monday, January 4, 2010

WOCA-AM 1370; Ocala FL; 9:00 a.m. ET

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

WDYK-FM 100.5; Cumberland MD, 11:30 a.m. ET

Airing Week of January 11, 2010 (Monday, Wednesday or Thursday)

WNTN-AM 1550; Boston MA, 6:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. ET

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

WACK-AM 1420; Rochester NY; 8:35 a.m. ET

Friday, January 15, 2010

WNAV-AM 1430; Annapolis/Baltimore MD; 9:35 a.m. ET

Airing Week of January 18, 2010

Issues Today Radio Network with Bob Gourley; Nationally Syndicated to 188 Stations

Thursday, January 21, 2010

KAHI-AM 950; Sacramento, CA; Noon-1:00 p.m. Pacific

The Dec09/Jan10 issue of BUST Magazine article, “The Six-Week Cure,” written by Priya Jain, features an interview with Marilu and information about UNBRIDLED: A TALE OF A DIVORCE RANCH!

Brief Encounter
by Marilu Norden

We live by rote and fail to see
The beauty that surrounds us
Of simple things like grass and trees,
A starlit sky, a moon that’s full
And music that astounds us,
The air we breathe, the food we eat,
A kiss, a smile, a friendly word
All Nature that abounds thus.

For all is but a brief encounter
Of life upon this sphere,
So if love comes let’s hold it close
Let’s taste its beauty clear,
And lose the rote that keeps us blind
To all love offers here.

Contemplating divorce? Check out the California Healthy Marriages Coalition!

Back in the days of vaudeville, Gypsy Rose Lee and her mom found themselves booked into a third rate theater specializing in the dubious art of stripping. This was comically dramatized in the 1962 film version where the young “Gypsy” is introduced to the inner sanctum of stripping by a trio of strippers, each insisting, in her own inimitable way, that to succeed “You Gotta Have A Gimmick.” “Gimmick” is yesterday’s word for today’s all-purpose “hook,” as in: if you want to guarantee stardom on the world stage “You Gotta Have a Hook.” But in vaudeville “hook” meant if you gave a lousy performance somebody from backstage would wield a big, long hook and reel you right off the proscenium. There went your rent money and your reputation in show business. Not so today. Have a great hook and you’re in the running for whatever the media demands.

Hooks come in all shapes and sizes, ready to solve almost any problem, need or desire known to modern man. If you as an author come up with an intriguing “hook” as a way of drawing attention to your latest writing endeavor—especially if it’s non-fiction—your publicity path will be easier for obvious reasons. You have something to sell, something the carnivorous public can’t live without, or so the advertising world and the Internet would have us believe. Your hook can tie into the current news, or the latest trends. It can tie in with famous people, religion, or popular but controversial issues. Anything from “Six Ways to Save on Your Taxes” or “How to Dance the Tango on Stilts and Still Get on ‘Dancing With the Stars’” to “How to Stay Positive in q Negative World” and “How to Have the Whitest Teeth on the Planet in One Day Flat.” With the right hook anything is possible. And you might even get to share your “hook” with Oprah on TV!

If you are writing fiction, your “hook” itself may be a harder sell. You may have to rack your brain to come up with a hook scintilating and exciting enough to entice the over-stimulated public to want to buy your book. What I’ve come up with for my first novel, UNBRIDLED: A TALE OF A DIVORCE RANCH, was that, at 83, I am part of what I am sure is a fast-dwindling group of survivors of divorce ranch days. Of course, some are younger than myself since some divorce ranches were in business up into the 1960s. My own stay at such a ranch took place in 1951 when I was a rather naïve young woman of 25 and mother of two little children, the youngest a newborn. Many people today have never heard of divorce ranches, which is why I felt sharing my story would not only be educational but would reveal an important piece of our nation’s history. I’ve been working on the writing of it, off and on, for 14 years, using fictional characters in some of the settings endemic to the story with which I was familiar at that difficult time in my life. Creating characters has not been hard for me as I have written for the stage in the form of variety shows and entertainments, also acting, directing, and performing over the years.

In the 1950s, a “quickie divorce” could be had by going to Reno, Nevada. Divorces by other methods in most states could mean a wait of over a year, so a preponderance of women, and some men, took advantage of Nevada’s six week divorce law, running to Reno to get “Reno-vated” (a term coined by Walter Winchell) or “to take the six-week cure.” Six weeks was the length of stay in the state necessary to obtain a publicity-free divorce behind closed doors in Reno’s Washoe County Courthouse where all records were sealed at the completion of the hearing.

It was in 1931 that Nevada passed their six-week divorce law to correspond with a wide-open gambling law, providing a lucrative boom for the state’s coffers and a flourishing business for dude ranchers who offered a six-week stay for anyone who could afford it. Prior to the 1931 six-week law, the Nevada residence requirement for a divorce degree was for a stay of six months. So the reduction in time to six weeks popularized the “quickie divorce,” with Reno, the “Divorce Capital of the World,” fast becoming the place to go through the ‘30s and ‘40s on up to the late 1960s. With no-fault divorce in most states now, divorce ranches are a thing of the past. However, I think it is important for people (especially today’s younger women) to realize how difficult it was to get a divorce in the 1950s in most states in this country and how a lot of young married women were not as knowledgeable about their rights as they are today, NOR as free to exercise them. Divorces are easier to get today but that is not necessarily a good thing. It is actually rather sad, considering the recent U S. Census Bureau’s report that 50 per cent of all marriages entered into today will end in divorce. It is even possible now to divorce online!

Divorce ranches represented a colorful period in our nation’s history, sometimes shown in movies such as Clare Booth Luce’s “The Women,” or Arthur Miller’s “The Misfits” (starring his then wife Marilyn Monroe with Clark Gable in his “last hurrah” in films). Both Miller and Gable were familiar with the divorce ranch aspect, having stayed the six weeks at two different ranches. There were no film celebrities at the ranch I went to, but it was rife with interesting characters, some who worked there and some who were guests. In UNBRIDLED, I’ve tried to capture some of their personalities, fictionalized of course, some based on real people and some totally contrived for purposes of story-telling. There were wranglers of wild horses, cow-hands, socialites, a world personage in disguise, kids, moms, dads, waitresses, bartenders, ranch owners and foremen, even a detective and some Indians. I’m glad I wrote it even though it has taken this long to get it published.

So how do you write a novel at 83 … or even 13? As most of you already know, age has nothing to do with it. You feel you have a good idea and you run with it—right to your writing machine (I started on an electric typewriter and graduated to a Mac)—and start getting it down. If you’re thirteen, you’ll be writing about different things than you will when you’re older, but it all boils down to planting your seat in a chair. You just grab a pen or pad  OR start pounding some keys on a keyboard for as long a time as it takes to paint the picture in your head, heart and soul, sometimes driven by memory, sometimes by raw emotions begging to be expressed. Then, when you get that first draft down, it takes much more time and effort, as you all know, to polish the thing into some kind of tangible, appetizing result suitable for publishing.

I learned a lot about myself at that ranch and needed to get it down and share it. It was one of the turning points of my life, and, like most of us, I’ve had a few more since then. Those six weeks at the ranch helped me realize I was a person in my own right, something I needed desperately to learn. Up to that time, I was just a reflection of somebody my then husband thought I was. This I show in the character of Lara, the heroine in my novel. Like me, she finally feels free to face with confidence her new life as a single, working mother with two youngsters. Her story ends, but mine continued to include a happy marriage of almost fifty years and three more children, all grown now of course. I am widowed now, and if my novel UNBRIDLED: A TALE OF A DIVORCE RANCH brings back similar memories and opens a door for someone, like any work of art, all the time taken to create it will have been worth it.

And, at 83 … or 13 (although one usually has more time ahead of oneself at 13) … it is important to “keep on keeping on,” keep growing. So I am now working on the second draft of a second novel entitled MIXED MEDIA, set in Santa Fe, New Mexico (where I spent some happy years) and hope to finish it, ready for publication soon. It is a supernatural tale of a deceased Santa Fe artist who, despairing that she was not able to complete her final masterpiece, steals the living soul of a young, talented artist to accomplish the task for her. As a professional artist myself, this was a subject I felt I could tackle with some finesse and understanding. For, don’t the experts endlessly tell us “write what you know?” Of course, I had to do research for the supernatural parts of the novel, all about shamans and psychics and such. But doing research enlarges your world, helping you grow as an author and as a person. And Google makes research so much easier!

Edith Wharton, the first female recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel THE AGE OF INNOCENCE said: “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle, or the mirror that reflects it.” I hope I’ve spread some light on how to write a novel at 83, 13, 43 or one hundred and three. Don’t laugh. I had an uncle who lived to be almost one hundred and four and he was still sharp as the pencils he used to check his meal requests. He wrote several books in his time, was a preacher of distinction, and at the age of 91, organized, single-handededly, a huge family reunion at his alma mater in Ohio at which, on entertainment night, he got up and recited from memory a ten minute dramatic sketch, acting out all the parts, complete with accents. His hook, his “gimmick” was a love of life, hanging in there and spreading his light for as long as he could.

We all have a hook, or “gimmick” we can share with the world in our writing.

What’s yours?

(I’ve been busy working on my second novel, MIXED MEDIA, a paranormal thriller set in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The following is an excerpt in which the heroine — a New York artist — attends her first Santa Fe art opening.)

The level of chatter at the Cross of the Martyrs Gallery was rapidly rising. Too many bodies in too small a space, thought she, as she surveyed the crowded room while holding a small plastic glass in one hand and balancing some kind of tiny black-olive-cream-cheese-on-puff-pastry-thingamajig in the other. Never had she seen such a conglomeration of costume “get-ups” in one place without the occasion being Halloween. Nor had she seen so many females running the gamut of southwestern fashion choices. There was everything from Indian-style velvet broomstick skirts in rich colors of ruby-red, aqua, gold, and green, all topped off with high-necked or off-the-shoulder satin blouses, a preponderance of silver-and-turquoise jewelry, and fancy cowboy boots. Some flaunted their slim figures with sexy, skin-tight jeans, fringed sueded vests, and cowboy hats, along with the usual Indian jewelry. The men were no less flamboyant in their Western-style shirts, jeans with silver-buckled belts, high-heeled, alligator-skin boots, ostentatious hunks of turquoise-and-silver bolo ties, and the obsequiousness of the occasional Stetson. What a show, she thought. As for the main event, because of the crowd, Angelina hadn’t been able to get close enough to view the paintings hanging on the white-washed walls since she’d arrived.

Taking a bite of the puff pastry “thingamajig,” then swallowing, she felt herself immediately start coughing uncontrollably. At the same time she felt a strong tapping on her back, accompanied by the sound of a deep voice saying, “It’s okay. Here. This should help”, as the voice’s owner handed her a half-filled glass. “It’s the same as you were drinking. Chardonnay. It’s my glass. Yours just landed on the saltillo. Have a sip. Don’t worry. I’m healthy.”

Fitfully coughing, Angelina raised her tear-streaked face to squint at the man confronting her. “Oh, God,” she said in a choked wheeze. “Thanks.” She rummaged in her shoulder bag for a tissue. Darn. Where?

The man, tall, blondish, grinned at her as he handed her a Kleenex from a packet he pulled from his gray-suede Members Only jacket. She accepted, noting the black turtleneck he wore under the jacket, along with dark jeans. Ah, what a relief. No crazy competing for this fellow with the rest of the Southwest fashionistas.

“Guess you can tell I’m not used to the hot stuff they serve at openings here.” She smiled up at him, sipping the drink he’d handed her while dabbing at her dampened eyes with the Kleenex. “You came along just in time. I could’ve died coughing and they’d have to ship me back to New York in a box.”

“Over my dead body”, he joked with a straight face. Brightening, with a twinkle, he added, “Have you seen the paintings? Aside from you, they’re the best thing in the room.”

High up a winding road in the hills of Hollywood on a summer day in 1956, I drove my little gray ‘49 Pontiac, trying to ignore the tannish ribbon of smog obscuring the view of the city spread out below me. Finding the address I’d been given, I parked, then mounted steep stone steps to the wood-carved front door of a white stucco, Spanish-style house. I rang the bell and was greeted by a slim, blonde man who smilingly beckoned me to follow him down a few Mexican-tiled steps into a sunken sala, heavy with oriental rugs and wrought-iron and leather furniture.

“Hi. I’m Leighton,” said the man. “Have trouble finding the place? Brando likes his privacy so the place is somewhat hidden.”

Brando!? “Oh, no. Thank you.” I stood, smiling nervously, my portfolio of music held tightly to my chest. “My agent gave me good directions.”

“I get lost myself sometimes,” he said with a grin. “I’m just renting here while Marlon is away on a film.” He sat down in a brocaded chair and fiddled with some knobs on a reel-to-reel tape recorder on a table beside him. “You’re very pretty and petite. I like that. What are you singing for me today?”

Okay, I thought. Looks like I’ll be singing a capella. Won’t be the first time. I set my music down on an over-stuffed chair, stepped back a few feet and faced him, my heart beating like a castanet.

“Just a few bars. A ballad maybe. ‘Foggy Day’?” He pushed a button on the recorder and gave me a start-up signal with a wave of his band-leader hand.

So, thought I, this is the great Leighton Noble. Not the biggest band in the business, but well-known and respected, so if he likes me … I kept what I hoped was the right tempo, warbling, “But the age of miracles hadn’t passed/ ‘Til suddenly I saw you right there/ And in foggy London town the sun was shining … “

“Good! Good! How about a jump tune?” He tweaked a dial or two on the tape recorder.

I managed to bop through part of “Sunny Side Of The Street”. “The age of miracles hadn’t passed” ‘cause the sun DID shine! I got the job on the spot on that Smoggy Day in Tinsel Town. A week later, I fronted a full orchestra, resplendent and glamorous in blue tule and taffeta, singing my heart out at the Screenwriter’s Ball in the huge ballroom of Los Angeles’s Biltmore Hotel as Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh danced by smiling up at me. A few more gigs like that, plus an AFTRA card, not only put bread on the table for me and my two dear young children but gave me proud membership in the League Of Big Band Singers ‘way back in the 50s!

Thanks to Mr. Brando and his talented tenant Mr. Noble, I’ve been happily singing ever since!

Publicity Shots, Hollywood 1956:

A video has been put up on YouTube of “Sunsets, Show Tunes and More,” an art opening of mixed media paintings by Marilu Norden at the Long Gallery of The Academy Village, Tucson, Arizona on Friday, December 5, 2008, combined with a book signing of Marilu Norden’s new novel, UNBRIDLED: A TALE OF A DIVORCE RANCH. Click on this link to view the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vErQ7lzwOcs