Inna Swinton's Blog

#Kirkus Review for The Many Loves of Mila!

Swinton���s first novel tracks the life of Mila Simon from her first affair onward.

As a Russian, Mila believes she has a feel for the tragic, and she keenly hears the call of the void even from within her relatively happy marriage. She makes the decision to cheat with a physically unremarkable playwright and director, getting away with it for months while her investment banker husband���s long hours make it easier to hide suspicion. Though she loves her husband dearly, he wonders, due to their lackluster sex life, if she���s a lesbian. Her partner in
infidelity has no such questions or qualms, bringing out a side of her that has long lain dormant. When her betrayal is exposed, her husband���s black-and-white thinking comes to the fore, and he exiles her. Mila moves back in with her Russian Jewish parents, immigrants from Latvia, and begins a strange double life of being a broken daughter by day and a compulsive dater by night. Throughout her breakdown, Mila sees men she doesn���t care for, men who don���t care for her
and a succession of therapists to help with her mental state. Swinton���s descriptions of the thought processes of a disordered mind are spot-on, particularly when Mila spirals into depression over the end of yet another mediocre relationship. ���But I had no strength to say anything to Ezra,��� Mila thinks of a man who didn���t suit her but whose departure crushed her. ���Sadness was suffocating me. I was in Manhattan, but it may as well have been the Siberian gulag: My mind made it so. Inside the prison of my mind was a place of great suffering and hardship.��� With compassion, Swinton writes of the woman���s descent into the blackness of despair and her continuous rises and falls brought on by a string of post-divorce relationships. With the help of her mother and father, Mila keeps herself together enough to encounter a true blessing in the book���s last chapters. Swinton has an ear for dialogue and a deep understanding of mental imbalance as well as the importance of family and the quirks of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York. A riveting
read, this novel will ensnare readers in the first chapter and not let up.

A compelling story about the wrenching pain of divorce and the redemptive power of family ties.

#Kirkus Review for The Many Loves of Mila!

Swinton’s first novel tracks the life of Mila Simon from her first affair onward.

As a Russian, Mila believes she has a feel for the tragic, and she keenly hears the call of the void even from within her relatively happy marriage. She makes the decision to cheat with a physically unremarkable playwright and director, getting away with it for months while her investment banker husband’s long hours make it easier to hide suspicion. Though she loves her husband dearly, he wonders, due to their lackluster sex life, if she’s a lesbian. Her partner in
infidelity has no such questions or qualms, bringing out a side of her that has long lain dormant. When her betrayal is exposed, her husband’s black-and-white thinking comes to the fore, and he exiles her. Mila moves back in with her Russian Jewish parents, immigrants from Latvia, and begins a strange double life of being a broken daughter by day and a compulsive dater by night. Throughout her breakdown, Mila sees men she doesn’t care for, men who don’t care for her
and a succession of therapists to help with her mental state. Swinton’s descriptions of the thought processes of a disordered mind are spot-on, particularly when Mila spirals into depression over the end of yet another mediocre relationship. “But I had no strength to say anything to Ezra,” Mila thinks of a man who didn’t suit her but whose departure crushed her. “Sadness was suffocating me. I was in Manhattan, but it may as well have been the Siberian gulag: My mind made it so. Inside the prison of my mind was a place of great suffering and hardship.” With compassion, Swinton writes of the woman’s descent into the blackness of despair and her continuous rises and falls brought on by a string of post-divorce relationships. With the help of her mother and father, Mila keeps herself together enough to encounter a true blessing in the book’s last chapters. Swinton has an ear for dialogue and a deep understanding of mental imbalance as well as the importance of family and the quirks of Russian Jewish immigrants in New York. A riveting
read, this novel will ensnare readers in the first chapter and not let up.

A compelling story about the wrenching pain of divorce and the redemptive power of family ties.

Thank you to all the Goodreads members who entered my giveaway.  I am super excited to send the winners their copies of The Many Loves of Mila (Mila in America) shortly!  Please poke around Goodreads for some quiz questions about the book and quotes from the book.  Tell me what you think!



.goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555; font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; background: white; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget img { padding: 0 !important; margin: 0 !important; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget a { padding: 0 !important; margin: 0; color: #660; text-decoration: none; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget a:visted { color: #660; text-decoration: none; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget a:hover { color: #660; text-decoration: underline !important; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget p { margin: 0 0 .5em !important; padding: 0; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink { display: block; width: 150px; margin: 10px auto 0 !important; padding: 0px 5px !important; text-align: center; line-height: 1.8em; color: #222; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; border: 1px solid #6A6454; border-radius: 5px; font-family:arial,verdana,helvetica,sans-serif; background-image:url(https://www.goodreads.com/images/layo... background-repeat: repeat-x; background-color:#BBB596; outline: 0; white-space: nowrap; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink:hover { background-image:url(https://www.goodreads.com/images/layo... color: black; text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer; }
Goodreads Book Giveaway The Many Loves of Mila by Inna Swinton Giveaway ends January 27, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter to win

Testing Google Authorship.

Let's see if I have done this correctly.  Thanks to suggestions from these sources about putting code into every blog post to connect my Google + Author page to content:

http://www.razorsocial.com/how-to-set-up-googl-author-rich-snippets-to-increase-web-traffic/

http://socialmediatoday.com/robhenryop/1630646/how-set-google-authorship

http://www.scottbuehler.com/seo/ultimate-guide-google-authorship/

Adding code here:

should be something like this as byline in HTML:
<a href=”https://plus.google.com/1092829879707...? rel=author”>Ian Cleary</a>

My address (have used the custom URL feature) - hmm - will this work with a custom URL?
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+InnaSwin...

OK - tried to have a byline that links to my profile here - and pasted proper code, etc, but - it's not working.

Question - do I not need to do this for each post of the blog in Blogger because the blog itself is already connected to my Google plus authorship page?

Sigh.  Not working.  Kids will be up very soon.  Suppose it is way too late for the above question. Time for sleep.

Inna Swinton

"Yuck! Yuck! Yuck! You and your work S--k  (rhymes with Yuck)The lady had only a first name - let's say Amy - and a picture of a Chihuahua  - and she had written an inexplicably short inscrutable one star review on a social network:  "Yuck! Nothing good to say." Or perhaps there was no exclamation point – I must have added that in my mind.
The Chihuahua Lady's words made me nauseous, instantly calling up all those small negative thoughts all of us, especially writers, have.  Well – especially this writer.  Yuck? Really? That dismissive and slightly visceral word stunned me. Nothing good to say about my entire debut novel, a novel that took me more than a few years and more than a few doubt ridden sleepless nights to produce.

I felt short of breath - as if someone punched me in the stomach and let out all the air.  Chihuahua Lady reached out from her little troll hole and spat in my face.  The time on my now glaring computer screen read 1 AM.  Darn, inspired by a lecture given by James Maas, a retired sleep professor from Cornell who now made his money warning retirees (who else had time to attend these seminars) about the dire consequences of lack of sleep – I had promised to quit looking at the computer after 10 PM.  The sleep professor had quite a burgeoning business – selling all of the following at his lectures:  his book, a sleep tracking device, and various pillows and mattresses that promised to keep your body temperature exactly right for deep slumber.  That night, at 2 AM, I bought his book Sleep for Success! Everything You Must Know About Sleep But are Too Tired to Ask and even ordered a pair of Uvex S1933X Skyper Safety Eyewear, Black Frame, SCT-Orange UV Extreme Anti-Fog Lens on Amazon.  However, none of these supplies can keep you from the Internet when a Chihuahua barks a one star review and uses a middle school insult like "Yuck!”

My first instinct was to write back.  Something similarly short and appropriately biting.  I am, after all, a writer.  Something like "Then why say anything, bitch?"  I took a deep breath - no, I would not get engaged with this lady - that would be unprofessional.  I looked through the social space’s rules of engagement and saw that the lady was well within her rights to issue a one sentence rejection of my oeuvre.  Fine, I get it.  We want honesty, even if it is not explained and perhaps hurled with slightly too much enthusiasm in someone else’s direction.  After all, I wrote a book and not a private diary under my pillow!  I looked at the clock - 1:30 AM.  Late.  Already I was giving this person too much brain space.  I was getting into that dangerous delirious jet lagged zone of the middle of the night.  Worse, the kids would start waking up in less than 4 hours, putting my sleep time left at 3 and a half hours.  What would Mr. Sleep Guru say?  Reluctantly, I shut the computer and turned off the kitchen lights.  
In the bedroom, I tripped over a book - Richard Scarry's "Please and Thank You Book."I had been reading this book to to my toddler who loved the chapter titled “Lowly Worm’s Horrid Pests” about badly behaved critters such as the “Litterbug Pest” who throws his rubbish around and “Bully Pest” who picks on small children.  These days, the book should create a section for "Anonymous Mean Chihuahua Pest” who uses the anonymity of the Internet to lash out.  I smiled at my thought.  Take that - Chihuahua Lady!

But the next morning, when I first opened my eyes, the word “Yuck”, immense and flashing as if on a Times Square billboard, stared down at me from the ceiling.  When, bleary eyed and too short with the kids about usual breakfast food picky tantrums, I revealed to my husband I had been up until 2 AM, undone by the cruel "Yuck" - he shook his head.  “Honey - what are you thinking - we have a life to lead! Get a thick skin.  There will be many one or two star reviews ahead!”  Men can be so pragmatic, so simple, and yet - so clueless.  Sure, I knew I needed a thicker skin, but I didn’t care to develop one yet.  First I wanted some more time processing this calamity, some venting to a sympathetic ear or two or three.

One girlfriend listened patiently, in between several business calls and meetings. Another friend luckily escaped my whining by the fortuitous arrival of her daughter on the school pick up line.  I reached out to my former writing teacher and friend - Charles Salzberg, author of the Swann mystery series and also of the true crime thriller Devil in the Hole .  Charles empathized.  He told me he got a two star review from a former student - a review that really hurt.  Charles said that in his opinion, the people who write truly mean reviews have their own issues and, in the anonymous world of the internet, many gain power by making others feel bad.  He also said that, of course, it is the negative reviews that he always feels are true whereas all the positive reviews feel like complete lies.  


This thought struck a chord with me.  I too found it easy to immediately dismiss anything positive anyone said to me about my writing or my book but could quote verbatim any negative reactions.  In her excellent book, "Daring Greatly," Brene Brown speaks of the power of shame – of those long ago voices that made us feel small - being reactivated by the biting remarks or actions of others in the present.  And the author emphasizes how much we as creators of content should value the courage to be vulnerable and putting yourself out there over the actual success or failure of a given effort.  And so, I transformed the voice in my head.  Whenever the destructive "Yuck" rudely barged into my mind - I would change the hurtful word to "Pluck" as in courage.  And so, "Yuck. Nothing good to say" has become "Pluck – it takes courage to have your say!" So far, I think this is working well for me.  I even laugh a bit when I see the review (as I inevitably do when I look at my profile and my book in this space) and yell back at it in my head: “Pluck Pluck Pluck!!!”

How have you handled toxic or not so toxic criticism? Please share your story here.  I would love to learn from you!
By Inna Swinton

I am honored and excited to host this event for the Prakhin Foundation! Please join me at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in NYC on Sunday October 26 at 10:30 AM. Post by Prakhin Foundation.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fun book that you can pick up and put down at your leisure and still enjoy a lot. Perfect for reading on the subway! Also - I learned a lot about habits of creative people - both good and bad. Most loved coffee and had hours during which they cannot be disturbed by family members (if they worked from home). Most importantly - you can feel inspired because so many very effective authors wrote for only 2 - yes, that's two hours a day! Yes, they spent other time on business - correspondence, etc. Seems that the prime hours for work are 9-11 in the AM and if you can be persistent, that book will get finished. Plus, there is a People Mag aspect to this, after all, you are getting some fun insights into the lives of celebrities - from Balzac to Hugo to Dickens to Joyce to Plath. There could be more women artists covered, yes, and I personally wish Mason Currey would write an update focusing more on the creative endeavors of modern working mothers who must supervise piano practice in the AM, do school runs, work during the day, and fill out PTA paperwork in the evenings after 9 PM. Not sure even 2 hours are possible on some days! Perhaps Mr. Currey can team up with Sheryl Sandberg :-)

View all my reviews

That was my review on Goodreads of this excellent and fun book.  On Sunday, I listened to an interview with Mason Currey on CBC - the show Spark.  Canadian Broadcasting Station - we love Canadian radio on our Satellite radio as my husband is a Canada-loving Canadian (aren't they all?) Seriously - it is a great country.  Bud I am digressing....

The Spark blog describes Mason's own takeaway - after all his research - on what works best for writers and for him:

Summary -

Routine/Ritual - this enlists the force of ritual and also habit.  There have been interesting studies on the power of ritual lately and how ritual makes people remember things better.Best Time Slot - Identify your own best time of day and try to be true to this.  For many, morning is best.One Hour Walk Daily I love this one and think that this can help with so many things in general.  
By the way, when asked by Nora Young about the differences for men and women - mainly, Nora picked up on the same theme from the book:  Men seem to be able to find blocks of time whereas women are picking up scraps of time here and there - Mason responded by giving an example of Jane Austen.  Jane lived in a big house with her mother and sister and wrote whenever she could, usually sitting by a creaking door so that she could tell if someone was going to walk in.  I thought this was a fine example, but still, the prodigiously talented Jane was not tugged on by three pairs of little hands - that's six hands total - at all times of the day.

How do you work best?

Post. No. 1 of 2:
Midnight.  Working.  My next novel must again fight for prime energy time.  I hope in 2014 - The Year of the Horse, I can use more dedicated daylight hours for writing.  See toy horse on top of the computer ;-)


A visual representation.  Advice?

December 31. New Year's Eve.  Location:  Hair Salon in NYC.

Today, I was chatting to a woman at a salon in Tribeca.  She was excited because she just started dating a guy she met on Match. She is very pretty, thirty-something, has a job, in short, a typical great New York City woman. "I don't normally do that kind of thing, but this guy is cool," she confided cautiously. "Smart. Very handsome, good job. I am excited, didn't expect to be..." etc. etc.

However, as we kept on talking, it turned out that a few things had struck her as a bit off. First, he lied about his age. She said she did some pre-date investigative googling, and was sure, based on his medical school graduation date, that the guy was definitely thirty-seven. He had told her thirty-three. But, after getting a few opportunities to tell her the truth, Mr. Handsome/Great Job guy did not fess up to his rightful age - which, is hello, not so old! Strike one.

Next, they had plans for a Saturday night. That afternoon, he said his mother had a bad case of bronchitis, and he had to visit her out on Long Island exactly on that Saturday night. Hmmmm. When the woman texted the guy, he said he was very busy with his mother and just couldn't answer. Strike two.

Third, she said that he hadn't tried to kiss her after several dates. What? Oddly quaint, but let's face it, also plain ODD. In this busy city, who has got four dates to see if there is any chemistry?! Strike three.

But, the piece-de-resistance: the two of them had been discussing New Year's Even and he asked her out for the night BEFORE rather than the big night. So, she went out with him on Date 4 yesterday, December 30th. "Ah, let's see, I think that's a deal breaker," I said, kindly, lest I burst her bubble. "Really? You truly think so?" she asked, looking briefly sad but also relieved at having suddenly arrived at the inevitable sad conclusion. The truth, after all, sets us free.

"Read my new novel, The Many Loves of Mila. Please," I said. And it's true. The character Mila goes out on a date with a Mr. Handsome/Great Job type guy the night BEFORE New Year's Eve and guess what, it ends.... , well, I won't say, because I don't want to give the story away!

So, please, check out my book for the juicy story!  And, enter my Goodreads giveaway contest for a chance at a free copy - live through January 27th.  And, Happy New Year friends!  May the year bring you all health and joy and prosperity and many invitations that are mindful of your rightful self-respecting status in the universe!! Most of all - a wish for peace and good fortune for us all in 2014.

What do you think about going on a date on the night BEFORE?
.goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555; font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; background: white; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget img { padding: 0 !important; margin: 0 !important; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget a { padding: 0 !important; margin: 0; color: #660; text-decoration: none; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget a:visted { color: #660; text-decoration: none; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget a:hover { color: #660; text-decoration: underline !important; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget p { margin: 0 0 .5em !important; padding: 0; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink { display: block; width: 150px; margin: 10px auto 0 !important; padding: 0px 5px !important; text-align: center; line-height: 1.8em; color: #222; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; border: 1px solid #6A6454; border-radius: 5px; font-family:arial,verdana,helvetica,sans-serif; background-image:url(https://www.goodreads.com/images/layo... background-repeat: repeat-x; background-color:#BBB596; outline: 0; white-space: nowrap; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink:hover { background-image:url(https://www.goodreads.com/images/layo... color: black; text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer; }
Goodreads Book Giveaway The Many Loves of Mila by Inna Swinton Giveaway ends January 27, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads. Enter to win

Hello friends.  A busy month and I do have a product to show for it:  the paperback of my debut novel is now first available to those in the know.  I am giving away a few copies on Goodreads:


.goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555; font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; background: white; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget img { padding: 0 !important; margin: 0 !important; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget a { padding: 0 !important; margin: 0; color: #660; text-decoration: none; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget a:visted { color: #660; text-decoration: none; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget a:hover { color: #660; text-decoration: underline !important; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidget p { margin: 0 0 .5em !important; padding: 0; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink { display: block; width: 150px; margin: 10px auto 0 !important; padding: 0px 5px !important; text-align: center; line-height: 1.8em; color: #222; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; border: 1px solid #6A6454; border-radius: 5px; font-family:arial,verdana,helvetica,sans-serif; background-image:url(https://www.goodreads.com/images/layo... background-repeat: repeat-x; background-color:#BBB596; outline: 0; white-space: nowrap; } .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink:hover { background-image:url(https://www.goodreads.com/images/layo... color: black; text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer; } Goodreads Book Giveaway The Many Loves of Mila by Inna Swinton

Giveaway ends January 27, 2014.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win Happy Holidays!!!