From Deadline Hollywood, the announcement that ABC is, in fact, hopefully developing MFHL into a sitcom. There was also a blurb in the Hollywood Reporter. “In development” means, well, folks are psyched on it and maybe there will be a pilot to look at. Fingers crossed, but very, very cool! The husband-and-wife writing team who are cranking away, Jon Hoberg and Kat Likkel, and the director set to work on it, Julie Anne Robinson, so thoroughly get the poignant plight of the Formerly that I feel confident that we’ll be well represented.

So I need a favor.

When I was undergoing IVF, some 9 years ago, I pulled out all the stops to make sure those hard-won embryo blobs stayed up in my uterus where they had been so carefully placed by a team of reproductive medical professionals, implanted, and grew to be the sweet, funny, eye-rolling and Wii obsessed little girls who are right now sleeping on IKEA beds in the next room.

I took drugs, I got acupuncture, I had giant syringes of syrup-like progesterone shot in the muscle of my ass and “faced the fear in my uterus” with the help of a New Age practitioner. I also enlisted everyone I knew to pray for me, even though I am an atheist, because I read a study about devout Christians in Australia and North America praying for women undergoing IVF in Korea doubling their success rates. I have no idea what worked for me, but something sure did.

Just in case it was the prayer, do me the favor of sending some positive thoughts to whomever you pray about My Formerly Hot Life going to pilot. I’m not asking for twins–just one good go at this thing.

Val and Carla after my reading at Barnes & Noble Wednesday

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 20 or so years of writing for women’s magazines is that if you’re going through something, odds are terrific that millions of other women are having that same experience, which means you’re not insane. Or it means we’re all insane, in which case it doesn’t really matter, does it? We can all just sit around having a coffee and getting mani-pedis and validate one another’s insanity so that it essentially becomes normative and we feel a bit better about being nuts. What are friends for?

Anyway, I started this blog because felt like I was losing my marbles just a little bit a couple of years ago. Everything was fine, I was happy, and yet I didn’t feel like myself and couldn’t put my finger on why. (You can read more about that here.) Once I figured out what was going on–that I was a Formerly–my self definition could catch up with what the world saw when it looked at me: a no-longer-young woman with a hugely satisfying life that she’d built for herself, but who was also noticing (and sometimes not exactly loving) the way certain things had changed.

My preferred methods of dealing with the fact that we’re all getting older? To laugh about it and to write about it, because what the hell else are you going to do? It’s so classically masochistic of us (more…)

What us Formerlies still call WPIX!

Stephanie Dolgoff

In the car–and, sadly, nowhere else–I am Mixmistress Steph, DJ extraordinaire, and as such, I give my husband and kids an unparalleled musical education for which I know they are deeply grateful, even if they don’t show it. The sound track to every car ride that’s long enough for me to find my iPod in the bottom of my gigantic mom purse consists of random hits from the AM radio days of my youth, the few current uberpopular songs (mostly by Lady Gaga) that even I, a harried 43-year-old working mother of twins couldn’t help but absorb, and, of course, ’80s music.

The ’80s were when I was in high school and college, when, like every raw and angsty adolescent, I felt on some level that Simon LeBon and Natalie Merchant and even Ozzy Osbourne were living inside my head, shouting out all the raw and angsty things I wish I could express, and would have if I had talent and a recording contract. READ THE REST AT HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

It’s Thegreatfitnessexperiment.blogspot.com, and no, not just because she likes my book. It’s really well-written, and especially interesting to anyone who has had issues with food or exercise  but is nonetheless trying to be healthy in an emotionally healthier way. Ahem, yours truly but I’m sure many other FH readers.

Anyway, here’s her post on MFHL.

Geez, the word “aging” sounds so, well, old. But it is what it is, right? Doesn’t make sense to call it aging only when you’re really old and moving into extremely, surprised-you-made-it-this-long old. None of us is immune so why the hell not enjoy the good stuff about it as best you can? That’s how I’ve decided to handle the whole matter. And then I put my feet up and have a glass of wine. So far it’s working really well for me.

Here are the other SELF.com posts I did to go along with the excerpt they published in August. They’ve got some cool stuff on their site so take the time to poke around and of course enter to win a FREE copy of My Formerly Hot Life, out August 17.

How to Get that No-Makeup Look by Wearing Tons of Makeup

What Smart Stars do to Look and Feel Hot as they Age

The 5 Very Best Things About Getting Older

The 4 Weirdest Anti-Aging Tricks that Totally Don’t Work

And it doesn’t suck! In fact, it’s good. Whew. Here it is:

Funny and moving book from Stephanie Dolgoff.

courtsey of Ballantine Books

My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches From Just The Other Side of Young is both a lighthearted and profoundly revealing offering from author, editor and sometime television personality, Stephanie Dolgoff. A memoir of a woman who has come to the realization that she is no longer considered young or hip, the book offers humor filled insights into what Dolgoff calls the “adult tween” years.

Dolgoff is editor-at-large at Parenting Magazine and blogs on a weekly basis for both more.com and parenting.com. With a literary pedigree that includes editorships in many forms for the likes of Real Simple, SELF and Glamour, Dolgoff knows well the topics on which she writes.

“…When men stop making lecherous cat-call and Spanx finds a home in your lingerie drawer, when marketeers start targeting you for Activia instead of trendy music, when you are “ma’amed” outside of the deep South, and when you have to start wearing makeup to have that “I’m not wearing any makeup glow”, it will dawn on you that somehow, someway, you have crossed the line into adult “tweenship”, that middle place between party-all-night youth and the turn-that-racket-down stage of middle age…” READ LARA DIPAOLA’S WHOLE REVIEW HERE

My friends at Self Magazine are so lovely as to help get the word out about My Formerly Hot Life. Here’s what they’re doing–incredibly cool:

• There will be an excerpt from My Formerly Hot Life in the August Issue, on  newsstands in a couple of days
• I will be blogging about your favorite topic and mine on SELF.com
• Plus, there will be a bunch of giveaways, the first of which is…THIS! Click on the link, register, and be entered to win a free copy of the book! Just as cool, you’ll get all kinds of motivating information about how to be the happiest, healthiest YOU that you can be, no matter how old you are.

Enjoy!