Welcome to Maven5Q!
Please enjoy this NEW edition of Maven 5Q and the correct biography and new photo…Somehow I totally wiffed the updated bio of Meg’s.
When I read a participant’s answers to the Maven 5Q they spark something in me. Sometimes it’s comparison and connection, other times it’s realizing a different answer to my own question.
What do you feel when you read them? I’d love to know…Would you like to do your own set? I’ll send them to you!
On to Meg! If you haven’t read her work, please do. It’s energizing, weird and engaging. I love all of those ingredients in my fiction! Links below!
Meg Oolders
Meg is the author of the Watty award-winning novel, See Dot Smile (Empress Editions, 2026), and creator of Stock Fiction (the OG newsletter), Talk Fiction (the podcast), The Romantic (the other newsletter) and the newly minted amalgam of all three, Beautiful, Daring, Stupid, a mercurial space for fiction and honesty.
Meg has a diverse resume of jobs worked, passions explored, and dreams deferred, including decades of immersive experience in the theater, music, and culinary arts.
She loves cake and flowers and can make art with both. She has big goals, small expectations, thin skin, and a rapier wit. In a duel, Meg would choose bawdy banter at sun-up, because she’s a morning person. She grew up near the ocean, and it still pulls at her. Her friendships are few, but fabulous. She really likes her family. She has a lot to say and writing helps her say it.Meg is the author of the Watty award-winning novel, See Dot Smile, and creator of Stock Fiction (the OG newsletter), Talk Fiction (the podcast), The Romantic (the other newsletter) and the newly minted amalgam of all three, Beautiful, Daring, Stupid, a mercurial space for fiction and honesty. Subscribe at megoolders.substack.com
Questions!
What is the most surprising part of being in this stage of life?
How much it feels like a second adolescence. I’m surprised to discover how much growing up I still have to do. And how little control I (feel I) have over the process.
What’s one new thing you’re trying to embrace in mid-life?
Discomfort. Whether it’s my back, my legs, my neck, my wrists, my brain, or my heart, something always hurts a little (or a lot) or just feels less awesome than I’d like most days.
If I’m not careful, even the slightest bit of discomfort can paralyze me and keep me from forging ahead on a creative project, a professional opportunity, a social engagement, or a fitness goal.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that we should feel (and look) totally amazing all the time and if we don’t something must be terribly wrong with us. But I’m trying to push back on that premise. I’m trying to listen to my discomfort more so I can understand what it’s trying to tell me.
Pain is relative, but it’s also universal. It’s something we all have in common to some degree. As my sweet Wesley once said, “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
If you could give yourself a piece of advice 20 years ago, what would it be and why?
Make mistakes. Lots of them. With confidence. It’s the best (and only) way to live/love/learn.
What’s something that our generation had access to that you’d like to bring back?
Pay phones! Everyone was more prepared for things to go awry before the age of cell phones. You had to have all your emergency contact numbers memorized. You had to carry money around (just in case) and you had to be aware enough of your surroundings to know where you could make a quick phone call to get yourself out of a jam.
Sure, if we drop our iPhone down a manhole we can always ask a random stranger to borrow theirs, but they don’t usually have our contacts saved or our bank account info handy, do they?
While I’m on the subject, I would also bring back the rotary phone … we only had one in our house growing up, but I loved to use it … there was something so deliciously tangible about that dialing experience. It took FOREVER to call someone. The alluring “zzip” of the rotary dial. The whispered pulse of the chosen numeral against your ear. The nervous winding of a kinked phone cord around your fingers. Oh, the anticipation! Bring it back! Bring it back!!!
If the next 20 years of your life had a theme, what would it be and why?
The 11 o’clock number.
In Broadway theater terms, the 11 o’clock number is the penultimate showstopper that precedes the finale. Usually placed late in the second act, the 11 o’clock number is the final turning point in the plot, the one that propels the protagonist forward, out of their dark night of the soul moment and onto the climax. As my old musical theater professor used to say, “Give ‘em a good ending and they’ll forgive you anything.”
ICYMI Maven 5Qs…
Loving all of the wonderful work and connection through
and the Empress Edition authors!!! , , Alisa, me, ….
xo
Kim
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Great interview. I miss the pay phone too! Remember the first Superman movie? Then the sequel in the 80s featured the half phone booth and Clark was frustrated.
You are the 11:00 show stopper, my friend. 🥰
This was REALLY GOOD ... and I'm not just saying that ...