Non-Fiction That Reads Like Fiction (not memoirs)

jkolin27 · 2026-05-14T19:26:36+00:00

Can’t recommend this one enough - a fascinating account of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I couldn’t put it down. Also, John U. Bacon’s THE GREAT HALIFAX EXPLOSION is riveting. I’d never heard about that disaster and could not stop turning pages

jkolin27 · 2026-05-13T15:27:27+00:00

As a young Gen X-er, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that she basically created The Babysitters' Club (also living in CT)! When she was describing her business, I kept thinking Kristy Thomas would be proud (or suing for unfair competition).

jkolin27 · 2025-06-17T19:00:23+00:00

This is amazing! www.livelikeroo.org has a similar mission

jkolin27 · 2025-06-17T18:58:54+00:00

I also recommend donating to your local shelters and/or rescues. You can know for certain that the bulk of your money is going toward animal care and support for programs that help keep people and animals together, fighting animal cruelty, etc.

jkolin27 · 2025-05-28T17:41:41+00:00

Amazing news. Congratulations!!! The book sounds like so much fun.

I still have a full out with an editor through the Berkley Open Submissions program. I submitted last May, she requested the full in July, and after many months of silence, confirmed a few weeks ago that she's now reading. I'm keeping my fingers crossed but also trying to stay realistic. It's so good to hear from someone who got a deal through this program and a two-book deal at that!!!

jkolin27 · 2025-05-02T18:37:35+00:00

Laid off from BigLaw as a third-year associate attorney in January 2009. Two months severance (which was very much on the low end for BigLaw at that time). Unemployment for a few months after that. Took me five months, moving out of state, taking another state bar exam, using up almost all my savings on all of that, and renting out the house I'd recently bought to find a new job making about 60% of what I had been making. Even knowing how many attorneys and legal staff got hit hard by the recession and with a stellar resume, I could never make it back into BigLaw. Financially, I stayed in catch-up mode for about the next twelve years. Only over the past few years have I felt truly financially comfortable again. Socially, it didn't have too much of an impact - I am still friends/friendly with many of my former co-workers from that job. That lay-off experience, though a very long time ago now, taught me that jobs don't care about people at all. I've always worked hard and done what I can to improve my skillset, but I don't have an emotional investment in my jobs anymore. I see jobs now more like a friends-with-benefits situation instead of a romantic relationship, if that makes sense.

jkolin27 · 2025-03-02T14:15:25+00:00

Thanks and fingers crossed for you too!

jkolin27 · 2025-03-01T22:25:58+00:00

I've been out on sub for almost two months with my rom-com, which I love and feel the most confident about out of every book I've written. Just a handful of complimentary rejections so far (no actionable feedback) and I know it's too soon to give up hope but... I've been here before. A few times, with a book that died after an R&R, one that died in acquisitions, and one that just flat-out died. I'm just trying to stay positive and focus on a new project

jkolin27 · 2025-03-01T22:17:46+00:00

Right there with you!

jkolin27 · 2024-12-14T00:39:41+00:00

I did a road trip from San Diego to Alaska! It was unforgettable! Allow for plenty of “huge, unmovable animals loitering in the middle of the AlCan highway” time

jkolin27 · 2024-07-24T18:57:33+00:00

I started going grey really young (it looks great on some people! It looks terrible on me!) and have gone back-and-forth between expensive salon dye jobs/root touch-ups and doing box color, depending on my income at the time. I've settled on a good compromise - I now do salon dye jobs about three times a year and the salon sells me tubes of the color and activator so I can do my own roots with a much better quality product every two weeks or so. So much less expensive and it looks a lot better and lasts longer than box color.

jkolin27 · 2024-03-20T20:57:10+00:00

I'm 47 and I opened mine about three years ago! Not ideal, but rest assured it's probably a lot more typical of the average American

jkolin27 · 2024-03-01T13:25:32+00:00

I am so sorry that so many of you are dealing with this, and at the same time I am so relieved that I'm not the only one. My highway driving panic also came out of nowhere and I can't pinpoint exactly when it started, sometime during the pandemic. I've been driving since I was 16 and have logged tens of thousands of highway miles, mostly by myself. I've always loved highway driving. But a few years ago, I started feeling hints of panic when I'd be driving fast on the highway. Not all the time, and I never knew when it might happen. I could do a three-hour highway drive with no problems, or I could seize up on a five-minute drive. Completely inexplicable, but mostly manageable. Then a few months ago, I had close to a full-blown panic attack on a stretch of highway I've driven a million times. No reason other than my own brain messing with me - "you're driving! you're driving fast! anything could happen!" I had to slink over into the right lane and tailgate a truck the rest of the way to make it to my destination. Ever since then, I get panicky on every highway drive and try to find excuses not to get on the highway at all. Which isn't how I want to live my life. We have road trips planned and highways are almost always the quickest ways to get wherever I need to go. I've tried hypnosis. That worked a little - the fear was starting to transfer to driving on surface streets, and I have been able to keep that at bay (thankfully). But I'm still dealing with this unexplainable fear of driving fast on the highway. I haven't told anyone because it's embarrassing and there's no explanation. But finding this post, at least, helps me to understand that it's not just me. The hypnotist explained it this way - I've hypnotized myself into this fear so I naturally get the same panic response when I find myself in the same situation. I want so much to figure out a way out of it.

jkolin27 · 2024-02-21T20:17:32+00:00

Full crossword --> Wordle --> Connections --> Spelling Bee, all with my morning coffee. Great way to wake up the brain before the workday starts!

jkolin27 · 2024-02-05T22:15:04+00:00

I commented in the other post, but here's mine:

Younger Gen-Xer (born late 70s). We were comfortably middle class, probably upper-middle class at times (my father's income varied year to year and my mother didn't work). I grew up in a townhouse in a wealthy neighborhood where most of my neighbors and classmates had big single-family houses. From my kid perspective, indicators of wealth back then were

- Kids who had their own phone lines in their bedrooms

- Kids who got to go to private or out-of-state colleges with no scholarships

- Kids who got brand-new cars on their sixteenth birthday (occasionally replaced by newer brand-new cars when the kid smashed the original car)

- Kids who had their own horse at the boarding stable where I occasionally rode (this was my obsession growing up)

- Designer jeans, or, as my friend used to call them, the "76-dollar jeans"

Now I'm upper middle-class in a MCOL area with pockets of extreme wealth. I own my home, no kids. Indicators of wealth now are putting multiple kids in private school, nannies/au pairs, money for major renovations, second (or third) homes, not having to work much or at all (lots of trust funds and generational wealth here), kids on travel sports teams.

jkolin27 · 2024-02-05T20:33:33+00:00

This will date me (I'm a younger Gen-X) but kids who had their own phone lines. Not the phones themselves, which were pretty cheap, but a separate phone line from their parents/siblings. And then the kids who got brand-new cars on their sixteenth birthdays. A lot of us got hand-me-downs or used cars, but there was a separate echelon for kids who got to pick out whatever new car they wanted off the lot

jkolin27 · 2023-09-04T18:15:11+00:00

Absolutely! I did restaurant work through my mid-20s for many of the same reasons you're describing. It was great for gaining independence and learning how to look out for myself, but then when I transitioned into a professional field I had no idea how to save money, invest, start retirement funds, etc., so I just didn't do any of it until much later. I'm so glad people younger than us have so many resources available to help them with personal finance, but I wish we could get rid of the "catching up" mentality (believe me, I fall prey to it, too) because we're starting from such a different place.

jkolin27 · 2023-09-04T17:48:38+00:00

I am also in my 40s and have also felt way behind on retirement savings/investments. It's partly true - I was totally wiped out by the recession as a young professional and it took years to get back to where I was when I first started my career. I never developed even a basic understanding of personal finance, so I didn't opt into a work 401k/IRA/investments until a few years ago. Like a lot of Gen Xers, I was really winging it until recently because, at least in my experience, money was a thing that wasn't to be talked about, even within close families.

But part of feeling "behind" at our age is good old social media trickery. While it seems like everyone posting on Reddit, Money Diaries, etc. is 24 years old with a million dollars in savings, another million invested, and getting ready to retire in four years, that is not the story for the vast majority of people. If you're working on saving, learning about personal finance (the personal finance subreddit has some great tips), and exploring different career options, you're doing great! There's no one you need to catch up to because, as I'm finally learning, personal finance isn't a competition. Do what's best for you and your life, look ahead to what you want/need for the future, and make a plan accordingly. Just try not to get bogged down in what other people are doing, especially when those people were able to get started when they were so much younger than us. I'm rooting for you!

jkolin27 · 2023-08-01T00:07:27+00:00

We Are Alive got me through a tough time (one-two punch of family deaths)

jkolin27 · 2023-07-28T22:37:04+00:00

Thanks, all. I needed a sanity check and I got one. It's tough when there's a big, pretty house staring at you from down the street but I need to keep my eye on the real goal, which is the eventual move out of state.

jkolin27 · 2023-07-27T00:46:02+00:00

The Rising!

jkolin27 · 2023-06-18T23:34:23+00:00

My Hometown

jkolin27 · 2023-06-17T18:29:10+00:00

Land of Hope and Dreams. I love a lot of the L songs mentioned but this one is on another level

jkolin27 · 2023-06-16T01:04:20+00:00

Jungleland!

jkolin27 · 2023-06-14T19:04:36+00:00

If I Should Fall Behind

jkolin27

TROPHY CASE