hen lit?

OK, so my character is almost 40 (and I'm even older :-)...does that mean I'm actually writing in the genre of "hen lit," which I only recently heard about?

I've never heard of that! I'm in the same boat, then.

But I've read a fair about of "chick lit" that had MCs over 40.

I do prefer the name chick lit to hen lit. but that's just me

Yeah, hen lit does sound a little...dumpy...

I've heard of hen lit. It's usually about women 35+, especially if they have kids or are divorced. It doesn't have to be frumpy or dumpy. I've read some hen lit that was really good. You might want to try, for example, Jane Fallon's "The Ugly Sister", which is hen lit. Barbara Samuels' "Madama Mirabou's School of Love" is another good title to try.

Most hen lit is about a smothered dream that the main character can now realize since she is no longer married or her children have finally gotten old enough that they don't "need" her all the time.

Chick lit is pretty demeaning, too. Do we call books geared toward men dude's lit? Or old coot's lit?

Admittedly, I've read some books described by the book-press as chick-lit with MCs that fall into the too-dumb-to-live category. They put the chick in chick lit.

I prefer the more general category of women's lit, but it's not a NaNo option. Thus, I have to decide whether my story is driven more by finding a good man (romance) or psychological road trip that may or may not include finding a good man (chick lit, for lack of the right option.) The guy element is important, but not the driving force, so it's chick lit.

But when I wrote a previous story involving my MC's mother, it was hen lit.

Debbie Macomber is the queen of Hen Lit. However, if you read some of Trisha Ashley's stuff, you'll find that the older characters just had a kind of arrested development, and are battling younger women's demons around age 40 (like dropping their married boyfriends, getting pregnant for the first time, finally surrendering to love).

Yes, it's a frumpy name. It's a subgenre of Chick Lit. In the literary world, Chick Lit is usually women's novels with an upbeat ending and a pastel cover. Women's fiction is really the same thing, only sometimes that's used for higher-level writing.

I like Chick Lit, and I use it to reclaim the name, like when "homosexual Americans" proudly call themselves Queer to take the charge out of it, and to prohibit outsiders from using the word against them. Jennifer Weiner, ladies and gentlemen, is not a fluffy, poor romance writer. She's often called Chick Lit, but there is depth and skill.