Thanks to all who participated and popped in for yesterday’s live chat. Regrettably, we had some technical snafus and many of Emira Mears’s posts were lost (we’re working diligently on recovering them). However, in the interim, feel free to read her responses to your queries and stick around Emira’s Boss Lady site for vital tips and advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur.

Meredith Hall’s moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her. Hall learns that he grew up in gritty poverty with an abusive father—in her own father’s hometown. Their reunion is tender, turbulent, and ultimately redemptive. Hall’s parents never ask for her forgiveness, yet as they age, she offers them her love. What sets Without a Map apart is the way in which loss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion into wisdom.

About the Author: At the age of forty-four, Meredith Hall graduated from Bowdoin College. She wrote her first essay, “Killing Chickens,” in 2002. Two years later, she won the $50,000 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation, which gave her the financial freedom to devote time to Without a Map, her first book. Her other honors include a Pushcart Prize and notable essay recognition in Best American Essays; she was also a finalist for the Rona Jaffe Award. Hall’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, The Southern Review, Five Points, Prairie Schooner, and several anthologies. She teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Maine.

Read an excerpt from Without a Map
Reading Group Guide
Boston Globe Review

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Meredith Hall will stop by the website after her live to chat to field questions in the comments field. Leave your question here and you will be eiligible to win a *free* copy of Without a Map

WR gets name-checked in the Los Angeles Times!

Want to leave the cubicle behind? Want to learn how to concept and execute a sound business plan? Want to venture on a new career path but don’t know where to begin? Want to learn how to earn a living doing what you’re most passionate about? This Sunday, July 29, four successful female entrepreneurs: Alex Beauchamp, Emira Mears, Lauren Bacon and Michelle Goodman will deliver practical career advice on for women who want to escape the cube.

All three authors will be chatting in the comments space on this post on Sunday, 7pm EST/4pm PST. They will be available to answer all questions posted in the comments field (you can post questions anytime prior the live chat until 8pm EST/5pm PST, when the chat concludes). Since our comments field doesn’t automatically refresh, please hit REFRESH on your browser to see responses and latest comments! Feel free to stop by, chat, share your stories and ask your questions of these women who have forged successful careers as entrepreneurs!

Related Posts
Emira & Lauren: Do You Need a Business Plan?
Michelle Goodman’s Advice for How to Get Your Ducks in a Row Before You Quit
Michelle Goodman’s How do you Survive Work as a Short Timer?
7.29.07 Writers Revealed Live Chat: Boss Lady (pt 1: Meet Our Guests!)

Alex Beauchamp will be available via live chat to give advice on how you can be a successful entrepreneur. Live chat: 7.29.07 at 7pm EST, here on Writers Revealed.

Money is a funny thing - so many people want it, few seem to have it and even fewer want to talk about it. I’m not sure why so many people are so tightly lipped about money but I think being quiet contributes so much to why people don’t understand it, are afraid of it or simply don’t have it. I think people should be taught fiscal management in schools instead of about the French revolution (and I’m half French) and I think people should really talk about money so they can learn whether or not they should be self-employed.

How I financially survive is probably the second most common question I’m asked. I do not have a sugar daddy (you wouldn’t believe how many people think this!), I do not have a trust fund, I do not have parents, and I don’t have lotto winnings. So how do I survive financially?

Here it goes:
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Emira Mears & Lauren Bacon will be available via live chat to give advice on how you can be a successful entrepreneur. Live chat: 7.29.07 at 7pm EST, here on Writers Revealed.

When we first decided to go solo and start out own design studio I cringed everytime someone mentioned writing a business plan. I had so much else to think about, why did I need to write this weighty tome that no one would look at but me? As images of late night paper writing from university days gone-by haunted my head, I knew this was one task that as a newly minted entrepeneur I was most likely to procrastinate on. Then a miracle happened: I realized I didn’t need a big formal fancy business plan. I was off the hook.

How did I get off so easy? Well, I had already done the important parts of the business plan process (details in a second here) and I really didn’t need to bother putting it all together into a formal document, because no one else was ever going to see it. We didn’t need a bank loan or any outside investment to start our business, and I dind’t need to prove anything to
anyone but me and my business partner. As such, our scribbled on the back of a napkin brainstorm about how we were going to find clients could in fact serve as our marketing plan. There was no need to polish it up into something slick and convincing for anyone else.
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Michelle Goodman will be available via live chat to give advice on how you can be a successful entrepreneur. Live chat: 7.29.07 at 7pm EST, here on Writers Revealed.

People often ask me what I would do differently if I could go back in time and leave my steady paycheck all over again. As I say in The Anti 9-to-5 Guide, I would wait a bit longer before fleeing the cube. Instead, I would build up my freelance business on the side while keeping my paycheck. I left the workforce (when I was 24) before I had any steady clients, contacts, savings, business sense, or networking savvy. I’m not saying you need to put in your time on the cube farm for a set number of years before flying solo, but you do need to get your ducks in a row before you turn in that letter of resignation.
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Michelle Goodman will be available via live chat to give advice on how you can be a successful entrepreneur. Live chat: 7.29.07 at 7pm EST, here on Writers Revealed.

How do you survive work as a short timer?
Some of my blog readers have asked about surviving that limbo period when you’ve decided to make the leap from day job to dream job but you’re stuck in the day job for another few months or so. Maybe you’re waiting to make your move until you’ve stockpiled enough money or clients, or maybe you’re interviewing for a choice new day gig. Either way, your heart’s not in your current position. So how do you make it Monday through Friday without your
soul shriveling up?

I write about surviving as a short timer throughout The Anti 9-to-5 Guide, especially in Chapter 3 and the Temp Survival Guide at the back of the book. Some things I did at my last onerous, year-long temp gig (which I took for the resume and bank account boost) to help me make it through each week when, believe me, I thought
about jumping off a bridge on more than one occasion:
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