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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

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