By S.L. Woeppel
What is it about turning 40 that flips the switch in a woman’s brain where we come to the realization that we just don’t give a blip about what other people think – we are just going to do our own thing! I wish someone could have flipped that switch 25 years earlier. I could have avoided one hell of a lot of unwarranted embarrassment.
For me, it took turning 40 to publish my first book. While I’d been writing for many years and had several novels sitting on my shelf ready for an editor to tear into, I’d let them gather dust. I did nothing with them. In fact, writing became a secret, something I never talked about, because speaking it aloud would mean that I’d have to succeed at it. Keeping it close meant I could fail over and over. I could fail by not trying.
Remember the movie, ‘Mean Girls’? Of course you do. Now think of any movie or tv show in the 90s. Think of the trauma all those girls inflicted on each other. ‘Pretty in pink’, ‘90210’, everything on the CW. These girls, TV teenagers in general really, were evil to each other! I think I was programmed to fear my peers, believe that they would tear me apart at the slightest sign of weakness. As I aged, I became aware that this wasn’t necessarily the case, but subconsciously I was always afraid of that bucket of blood crashing down on me as soon as I put myself out there.
As a youngster, I coped with this by having a pretty active imagination where I had superpowers, or would run away to join the staff of National Geographic at the age of 16. I would imagine I was a famous writer or woke up with a magical singing voice, or maybe Brain VanBloom would ask me to prom, and I’d suddenly be popular, accepted. I always imagined being special. But as I grew, I quickly learned that special isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. Nothing is, it seems.
That is the life of a young woman though, trauma from day one. Sometimes it’s about simply navigating a world that wasn’t set up to encourage ambition or expression in girls. I wish it were only that. Too often, it’s so much more.
This is how I came to be a writer and a tiny insight into why I write what I write. I like to call my genre upmarket magical realism with thrillstery and/or romcom vibes. Yes, it is a mouthful. Like many authors, my novels span genres but hold core themes.
- First: I write about women – that to be a woman is to know trauma, to keep secrets, our own secrets or those thrust upon us. I write about women reconciling who they are with who they need to be while fighting to stay afloat in a world where expectations and reality are far apart.
- Second: I incorporate elements of magical realism into my writing because I adore how it offers readers a chance to relate to a story and its themes, while also providing an escape from situations that are too close to reality. Every mind has a unique capacity for and method of dealing with trauma, so this is an avenue with endless options for storytelling.
- Third: There’s always a love story. While I only have one novel, my first, that is centered around the process of falling in love, there is always a love story in there somewhere. For escapism readers, nothing beats a love story.
- Lastly: I write about duality in humans and the scales of morality. In fiction, as in real life, perfect people are boring, yet so are evil people. The most engrossing characters to write are those that explore the spectrum of morality, who are capable of very right and very wrong, who often operate in the grey zones.
My first novel, ‘Flipping the Birdie’, is a romcom about a woman with superpowers that must reconcile the manifestation of her traditionally masculine powers with her own femininity, all while in the process of falling in love. It’s a light-hearted story, told with lots of humor, satire, and snark- but it’s also a comment about the expectations of women and what we give up to be mothers, professionals, to be powerful. It’s about how to embrace identity at any stage. Lastly, it’s about female friendship and found family.
‘The Butcher and The Liar’, my second novel, is a dual timeline story about Daisy, a woman raised by a serial killer, made to believe she is his accomplice, and haunted by the ghost of her father’s victim. As an adult, Daisy must untangle the web of lies she created to keep her father’s legacy a secret and face her own nature as a result of it. This twisty psychological thriller is about the trauma women are forced to endure, about how we cope, and about the secrets that we keep that were never ours in the first place. It’s about familial legacy, human duality, and redemption.
My work-in-progress is a story about the experiencing of growing old, about the pain we inflict upon each other, and about forgiveness. Again, I use magical realism to explore more deeply the human experience and the nature of past trauma.
I’ll write about women in whatever format their story requires, whether romcom, thriller, mystery, upmarket or literary. Historical fiction next? Maybe a book set in the 1990s, an alternate reality where those “I don’t give a f*&^” switches are all switched to the ON position. What a world that would be.
S.L. Woeppel is a Booklife Prize Finalist for her debut novel ‘Flipping the Birdie’. Her second novel ‘The Butcher and The Liar’ will be released in September. She’s lived all over the US, loves to travel and her greatest inspiration in writing is an atmospheric setting. Follow her on Instagram.
ABOUT THE BOOK: Many people pick up the same profession as their parents, but what if one of your parents was skilled in murder? In ‘The Butcher and the Liar’ (Sept 16, 2025), a young woman grapples with the childhood trauma of being an accomplice to her father’s murders. Haunted by the ghost of her father’s victim, Daisy tries to build a life for herself as a butcher in a new town. But when a body is found next door, Daisy is thrown back to her childhood watching her father dismember his victims, embroiling her into a life she never asked for.
