What's a Hen Lit Writer?

This is so exciting. I feel that I'm almost ONE OF THEM.

Who is ONE OF THEM, you ask?

Oh, but the most wonderful genre of authors that is making a splash in NY and one day, I'll be ONE OF THEM.

Why?

You are being so nosy.

Okay, here's the beef. I'm a kick ass kind of girl. Only, I really can't call myself a girl at fifty years old, can I? Eek, even writing it sounds over the hill.

So, I'm an over the hill boomer chick which makes me really a hen lit writer.

There's a little teensy weensie difference between a chick lit writer and a hen lit writer and I just knew you were going to ask. It's easy, really. Instead of writing about twenty-somethings, I write about forty and fifty-somethings, sometimes even older. Why?

Dang, I'd like to get off here and work on my WIPs but o.....kay.

Well, to begin with, I'm what they call a baby boomer - born in the fifties and raised in the sixties and believe me I have stories to tell that you'll never believe. Betcha never heard of bra burning, did you? Well, we did this and more when I was growing up because - well - we just wanted to. That was the way our generation was. The "establishment" - to clarify, OUR PARENTS - didn't know beans and we did because we were more educated than them I suppose or at least thought we were. We'd been through a lot and because of this, we just thought we knew more than anyone of our parent's generation. Call us crazy, but it's true. Anyone that can get away with streaking across the gymnasium during graduation had to have the IQ of Einstein, don't you think? Yeah, we were a crazy bunch, but there was a reason for this.

We were the emerging hen lit writers of the world. If we didn't go through all that fun stuff, we'd be writing like John Grisham and Nora Roberts, but nooooo...we had to go beyond all that educated stuff and write about our lives as we know it as baby boomers.

Now don't think we can't write like the best of'em just because some people out there call our books silly. I'll give an example - Rebecca Wells. She's my idol. If I could ever come up with anything closely resembling her "YaYa" books and not get arrested for plagiarism, then ho - ney, I'm there.

So, that's my story. I'd really like to get back to my hen lit now, if that's okay. An agent has requested a partial and guess what? I have 20,000 more words to write. But that's okay. That's the kind of writer I am - a fly by the seat of my pants kind of girl. One of these days I'll learn to have a finished book before I start querying, but then that would change the whole karmic process - gotta run!