Colleen Oakley, novelist/freelance writer

Finally, a female guest, and it’s a good one. Colleen Oakley is a novelist, former editor for Marie Claire and freelance writer who’s penned pieces for the New York Times and Ladies Home Journal. We’re trying something a little different today. Since Oakley is at the beginning of the process for writing her third novel (and hopefully the second to be published), we’re going to check back in with her occasionally during the next year or so as she describes the highs and lows of writing 100,000 words that might or might not be publishable one day.

In the first installment of the Colleen series, she introduces herself, and we chat about why she’s comfortable writing about her sex life, whether she tries to be funny in her prose, what it’s like to write for women’s magazines and how she reacted to receiving a death threat. Plus, why does she write so damn much about eating pancakes and why she does she geek out so hard about perfect analogies?

If you have interest in how somebody writes a novel, Oakley is the one who can answer that query.

For those who want to read Oakley’s work – and some of what we talk about in the podcast – here’s her New York Times piece on An Agnostics Guide to Marriage and her Marie Claire feature on participating in a 30-day sex detox.

Here’s some of what we talked about (and some we didn’t).