A conversation with Terry Kirk, retired attorney, startup investor, and debut novelist. Terry shares her remarkable journey from being a high-powered litigation attorney to becoming an author of historical fiction novels centered on major financial events.
What happens when you lose everything you thought defined success? In this inspiring episode, Laura Rotter sits down with Terry Kirk—retired attorney, startup investor, and debut novelist—to explore how life's biggest setbacks can become catalysts for profound personal growth.
Terry shares her remarkable journey from being a high-powered litigation attorney to becoming an author of historical fiction novels centered on major financial events. Through the lens of her debut novel Pitfall, set during the 1929 stock market crash, Terry reveals the universal truth she discovered through decades of working with clients facing devastating losses: every setback contains the seeds of redemption and transformation.
This conversation is essential listening for any woman navigating midlife transitions—whether you're recovering from divorce, contemplating retirement, or reimagining what success truly means. Terry's story proves that it's never too late to pursue your passion and redefine success on your own terms.
About Terry:
Terry Kirk is a retired attorney with decades of experience in litigation, corporate law, and startup investing. After spending 13 years as a courtroom litigator and later transitioning to work with tech startups and corporate financing, Terry became a founder and CEO before retiring to pursue her childhood dream of writing. Her debut historical fiction novel Pitfall was published in 2025, with her second book Plunder set to release soon. Terry's work focuses on making finance accessible and engaging for women through compelling storytelling about pivotal financial moments in history.
💡 Every loss contains opportunity for redemption: Through her legal career working with hundreds of clients facing major setbacks, Terry discovered that those who reflect on their role in their challenges and embrace growth can find themselves eventually in a much better place.
💡 Financial security matters, but passion is what fulfills: While Terry acknowledges that financial stability is important (especially after experiencing financial insecurity during divorce), she's learned that true success comes from pursuing your passions.
💡 Discipline creates space for creativity: Writing a novel requires dedication—Terry commits to four hours of writing daily. She emphasizes the importance of having a dedicated writing space free from distractions and treating writing like the serious work it is.
💡 Childhood experiences shape our money stories differently: Despite growing up in the same "Goldilocks" middle-class family, Terry and her five siblings developed vastly different relationships with money—from pursuing wealth to living off the grid—proving that our interpretations of childhood experiences are deeply personal.
Get in touch with Terry:
Purchase Terry's book: Pitfall
Stay connected:
Connect with Laura on LinkedIn
@Rotters5 on X
Connect with Laura on Facebook
Subscribe to my YouTube channel
Get your free copy of Unlock Your Money Blocks Workbook: Your step-by-step guide to unlocking your blocks to financial freedom.
Disclaimer: Please remember that the information shared on this podcast does not constitute accounting, legal, tax, investment or financial advice. It’s for informational purposes only. You should seek appropriate professional advice for your specific information.
Laura Rotter
What happens when you lose everything you thought defines success? In this episode, I sit down with Terry Kirk, a former corporate lawyer and startup investor who spent decades helping clients navigate their messiest financial stories. After retiring from law, Terry discovered a new passion writing historical novels that demystify major financial events for women.
She shares how her character Frank loses everything in the 1929 stock market crash and must redefine success entirely a journey that mirrors what Terry learned from working with hundreds of clients through their own setbacks. Terry reminds us that every loss when we're open to it, holds an opportunity for redemption and growth.
If you've ever wondered how to rebuild after a major life transition, or if you're searching for what truly matters beyond financial security, this conversation will speak to you.
Listen in.
Narrator
Welcome to Making Change With Your Money, a podcast that highlights the stories and strategies of women who experienced a big life transition and overcame challenges as they redefined financial success for themselves.
Now here's your host, certified financial planner, Laura Rotter.
Laura Rotter
So welcome Terry to the Making Change With Your Money Podcast.
Terry Kirk
Thanks so much, Laura. It's a really lovely to be a guest on your show.
Laura Rotter
I'm looking forward to our conversation. I will start with the question, Terry, what was money like in your family growing up?
Terry Kirk
I love that question because I think it acknowledges the importance of childhood and in shaping who we ultimately are. And I think for me, I would say that Goldie, that money in our family was the Goldilocks option. It was, there was not too much and there was not too little, there really was just about right.
It just wasn't an issue in our life, in, in, in any way. And I think my five siblings would all agree with that, but had to throw that in there. I did, and I think it's interesting because while it seemed like a very kind of benign or neutral issue in our childhood, the fact is that all five of us experienced money in our adult lives in really different ways.
So two of us, myself as the youngest. Child of my oldest brother decided we wanted more than we'd grown up with, and that became a big pursuit for us. We got a taste of luxury in early days and decided we liked all those fancy things and went about car lives. With that, not at the center by any means, but as a significant goal to to live a wealthier life than we'd grown up with.
Two of my siblings, I'd say lived about the same life and set goals to live middle class, stable lives like our parents. And one my sister, who's really only less than a year and a half older than me, she decided to go in the other direction. And really devote her life to giving to others and became very firmly grounded in a largely cashless life, living off the grid and off the land.
Laura Rotter
Wow, that's interesting.
Terry Kirk
Yeah, it is interesting and hard work, to be honest. Yeah.
Laura Rotter
Yes. And Terry. I, I love how you point out that I was about to say that you grow up in the same family and yet you come away with. Different messages, different goals. On the other hand, I'm hearing myself say that and remembering the idea that none of us grow up in the same family, right?
Terry Kirk
'cause our parents are in different places. When we're each born, they react to us differently based upon who we are as people and our different temperaments. So we actually all grow up with. Different parents in some way.
Laura Rotter
Yes, though it's interesting that you say you are the youngest and the oldest. You are both the ones who pursued more financial security or FI or however.
You define it.
Terry Kirk
Yes. I think that's right. And I think it's an also interesting part of the story that the five children were born in five years, so there wasn't, oh my God, no. Like my mom had these five children every 14 months or so. It's not as if they were generations apart or year many years. But I like your broader point that the lessons we take from our childhood are in fact very subjective.
And notwithstanding this. Commonality of all kind of living the same life in this crunch of time. We did come away with really different goals around money and really different outcomes, frankly.
Laura Rotter
Thank you for sharing that. It's always fascinating to me. Hmm. So Terry, this is a show about financial transitions in our lives, our listeners, our women who are either going through a transition themselves now or have been through one.
So I know you two have been through a number of transitions, so please share what was a catalyst for change in your life.
Terry Kirk
Yeah, I think in my personal life I had a divorce as a relatively young woman and young mother, and that did lead to a very big transition. I'm sure many of our listeners today have had that experience.
I think the data says that it's over 50% of women. That was a very big one that. Impacts every aspect of your life, your self concept, your goals, your how you live from day to day. So that was certainly a very big transition in my personal life. Professionally, I'd like to say in a more positive note, I've recently retired.
It's about, I think it'd be about two, two and a half years ago, and. Part of getting ready for retirement. I worked as a lawyer and in financial and business circles for decades, was part of getting ready for what I knew would be a very big change because as a lawyer, you workaholic basically, and it, it consumes and not only your working hours, but a lot of your sleeping hours, to be honest.
Yeah, I looked forward to retirement. I felt ready for it, but I knew I needed a new passion, something to throw myself into, and I decided to take on writing and hence, yeah. We're gonna talk a bit about my book and this fabulous stage of my life that I'm just enjoying so much. Oh.
Laura Rotter
So glad to hear it. Terry, before we go to the book, you are an attorney for many years.
I also knew you to be a startup investor. Is that true?
Terry Kirk
And yeah, so it was really as part of the beautiful thing about law, frankly, it was such a flexible degree and people take it off in very different directions. In my early years, I worked as courtroom lawyer or litigator as we often call it, or barrister as it's called in England.
But I like to say it was about listening to. People's gritty stories, almost always at the center of people's stories is some flaw, some great loss, some fraud, some problem that they bring and set heavily down on your shoulders to tackle. But I did that for 13 years, quite frankly. I found it often a bit too much responsibility while trying to parent and stay positive and just a lot of hours and a lot of big problems.
Absorb and I decided to move my legal career in a less, a little less onerous direction and moved more into corporate commercial and working with companies a lot on financing. It's in business, it's mostly about money. It's about making more, losing it, and so on. I became very focused on that in a latter part of my career, including.
Helping a lot of tech startups as that marketplace opened up, investing in some of them, and ultimate ultimately becoming a founder and CEO myself, which is an amazing transition.
Laura Rotter
So I'm trying to piece together your. Your disparate skill sets, and I love how you weaved in the idea of stories when you were a litigator to, to get to what, what drew you to writing.
Terry Kirk
Yes, I think you're absolutely right. I do think. That stories are at the center of our life. And I think you do too, Laura, because you started with the story of our childhood and what it means for later parts in our stories, these middle years and and beyond. Yes. And I think in most of our lives we do see ourselves working with people as our stories unravel.
And I decided that I really wanted to tackle writing them. It didn't really feel like a really big transition to me other than you don't get paid anymore when you do, which is, which is a reality that we're all facing on this call today, is the reality of money. So yes, you don't earn money writing books until you become the top half of 1% or whatever, who earns lots of money writing books.
But I think that. Cumulative experience of working with so many, literally hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of clients as say, laid out their stories for me to get involved in and guide and, and lead them through to some positive outcomes.
Laura Rotter
Yeah, it felt easy to tackle this. And of course you do a lot of writing as a lawyer, you're.
Listening to people's stories and generally you're writing them up in litigation documents and legal contracts and lawyers letters and so on.
Terry Kirk
Yeah. It's been the culmination of all those years of experience.
Yes, and I guess I'm certainly going interested in following up on the discipline that it takes to write and as well as the specific stories you are drawn to write about.
I'm gonna segue briefly to the fact that I was an English lit major in college and I. I think I chose that by default because I thought it was a medium, right? Reading books where you're incorporating history and you're incorporating politics and there's so much that is behind anything you read in literature.
And then when I think about, then I became an investor and analyst on Wall Street. I think it, similar to what you're saying about law Terry, it's the numbers of course, are important, but to me it's really the story Yes. Behind the numbers. And when I look at then segueing to working with individuals, which in many ways is quite different from what I did as a, as a institutional investor, but.
And it's still numbers backed by a story. So I've al I have often thought about that change in my life. So back to the question I alluded to, or two questions. First of all, it takes a lot of discipline to write, right? If you're working as an attorney, you have deadlines, you have a place to be. So how did you start, even the practice of writing.
Yes. I think once again, you've said the key word discipline. There's probably the, the seminal book about writing is divides the writing community into two groups, what are called pantsers and plotters, and the pants are the, the seat of the seat of the pants people. One group cannot really imagine the other group's approach as I am a plotter.
I plot my story, so I can't imagine a seat of a pants approach. As a lawyer, you think very carefully and hard about what your goals are for your client and what success will look like, and how will I get from this? Bloody mess into a success for this particular individual. So you plot, plot in your letters and how you frame things must be very carefully deliberated.
So that's who I am. But others who've done very well as writers are seat of the pants. They seem to be able to sit down at a typewriter and the heavens open up and the Gods speak and, and they've written a novel from beginning to end. But yes, I think either way it takes a lot of discipline. Uh, I did deliver a writer's workshop the other day for a group of people who are wanting to better understand how to approach a novel, which is complex.
And my first word of advice is you need a place to write a dedicated place where you don't do anything else. I think in today's world, if you're sitting on a computer. Or with pen and paper, the phone's going, your emails are buzzing, your Facebook page is lighting up. You just simply will not get it done in that environment.
I compare it to driving a bus, which I think must be the most complex job in the world, driving a school bus. Imagine being responsible for all those children's lives and a big clunky vehicle and so on. But bus drivers all get. Behind the wheel and they have one job to do. And I think you have to approach writing your book in that way too.
Yes, and I do have several friends who have written a novel or two, and they are not Panthers, right? It's their job. This is when they're sitting down, and even if they just stare at the screen for the first hour, you have to have a certain amount of discipline.
You do For, for me, it wasn't necessarily about having to write between seven and 9:00 AM or 11.
I think again, because as a lawyer you just worked all the time. I seem to be able to do it at night or do it in the day whenever I have. But I do write four hours a day every day. That's my discipline. I do allow myself some holidays like anyone else, but I think four hours is a meaningful chunk of time.
Sometimes it's two hours here and two hours there, but I try and write every day. You have to really live your story. As somebody said, if you're not in the shower with your characters, you're just not that into your book.
Laura Rotter
Yeah.
Terry, please share how the idea of your first novel came up. Did the story appear in your head? What? What was your process of discovering that you were gonna be a writer?
Terry Kirk
Yeah, I think I did really more than being the writer per se. I wanted to tell stories and I had some very specific stories in mind, and like you, Laura, there aren't as many women in finance and capital markets and so on as, as it probably should be.
Laura Rotter
I think it's still a kind of nascent field for women. You clearly were out there when, when not many, you, you have a lot of colleagues on Wall Street, female colleagues I'm sure. So I felt that had been a privilege for me as a woman to experience so much about finance and world of startups raising capital for companies, shareholder exits.
Terry Kirk
Yeah. Diversifying your. Financial basis, and I wanted to find ways to make finance and financial stories more interesting for women. I think right away people, a lot of women think math and they think tedium and boring and, and not their thing. So my goal has been to take the biggest financial events of our history and by our history, I mean maybe it's our grandparents or our parents' history.
So my first book starts in 1929. And it tells the story of the 1929 crash was something I'm sure you and I both know a bit about, but I felt I didn't know as much as I probably should know about why did the market crash? How did it crash? What happened when it crashed? Could it happen again? Was suppressing question.
And I found that even my friends who were very knowledgeable about finance really knew almost nothing about it. They talked about a grandparent who brought all their money from Poland and lost it all in the crash or their. Grandmother who was a farmer and lost the family farm or the family business went down the tube.
But so I wanted to tell that particular story, but in a way that was fun and rollicking and entertaining and helped to demystify.
Laura Rotter
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So how did you go about researching it? And I'm even, I'm sorry, but I'm like, of course, you just woke up one day, you were in the shower, you said, I wanna write about this. I'm just curious how it even came to you that you were gonna write a novel.
Terry Kirk
I think it was a childhood dream. I felt it.
Laura Rotter
Okay.
Terry Kirk
Yeah, for sure.
I, I had wanted to be a writer as a girl and was really a writer as a girl, as some people carried around their artist sketchbooks or whatever it was they were passionate about. I had my writing book and. Jotted down sentences and interesting words that I came across and love to parse words and parse sentences.
And so I had a love of grammar, which is a bit wre weird. I don't think I've ever met anybody. Love grammar, and I do, which is important in law to really understand words in their meaning very carefully as subtle nuance can make a big difference. It wasn't outta the blue. And then I feel in many ways, I did spend much of my career writing and needing to be advocates for people through my writing skills, taking their stories and how I wr them, wrote them up for them, could make the difference in winning or losing and outcomes in their lives.
So I've treasured it, and it wasn't just out of the blue, that's for sure. It was some really deliberate thinking that. A, I wasn't really fully ready to retire. I could afford to leave work and focus on new things, and I decided on two things. Frankly, tennis and writing
tennis is mean harder to be honest. Writing came easily. Tennis is a hard sport to take up in your, but I love them both and they're yin for each other's yang, intensely physical, and the other very mental. So, no, it was really a decision that I would write stories, not one story, not one novel, but write them.
And I plotted out three and I've written one, and the first is being published and the second is with my publisher now, and it's been accepted for publication, so I'm hoping that'll be out. Pitfall came out this June. And plunder is book two and it's expected to come out next June. And the third one I've now just started on is called Probe.
So Book one is a 1929 crash book two is the financing of World War ii and Book three will be about the financing of the space race and the really the Cold War race for space with lots of spies and Russians and espionage and yeah.
Laura Rotter
But Terry, how do you research, how did you go about researching your first and frankly now your second book about to be published?
Terry Kirk
Yeah, it's uh, it's a very big part of historical fiction. I think unless you love research, don't take on historical fiction and the big high selling books today, or romantic fantasy romance. And they don't require the same amount of research, but historical fiction really does. And I would say it happened in broadly two ways upfront.
So before I began writing or really thinking about how my story would unfold, I just read a lot of books about the era I probably read. And by read them, I don't mean them. Read them from cover to cover. I'd scan within and find parts that were interesting or chapters that I thought were relevant.
Because the 1929 crash is a very big subject, so you're gonna narrow it. Some aspects that are fabulous as it's Chicago, my book is sitting in Chicago, which was the height of the stock market and agricultural markets, which were the equivalent of our. Fast-paced tech market today, 1929. Chicago was a fabulous place to write about.
It was the era of Al Capone and jazz age, Chicago and gangs and mobs and crime and prohibition. So there was a lot to write about. I read books about all those things, probably about 12, to be honest, before I really started, before I really started plotting. But that frankly was the easy part of the research.
The more tricky part was I would say. Honestly that I don't think I wrote a single sentence, complete sentence that didn't require some research. Just the simplest little things like Frank calls. Home. How did you call home from the Canadian program where he ultimately found himself back to Chicago? Did he, could you call cross border in 1929?
Laura Rotter
Was there a payphone? Was it at the general store? Did any families have. Phones in their home. Did he put in a quarter or a nickel or a penny? Did he reach the long distance operator? All those things are important. He, Frank, started his car. How did you start a car in 1929? Was there all those kinds of details?
Terry Kirk
Took a lot of research. Yeah.
Laura Rotter
That's fascinating. Could you say there was a favorite part of writing? Is there something you can identify?
Terry Kirk
Yeah. I would say for me it's the engagement of the left brain and the right brain, and by that really one's creative side and one's more rational side. And I like to think of them because you and I would've both embraced a lot of technology to do the work that we did do.
And so I use two tools for my writing. I use Excel and Word, and I like to think of Excel as managing that rational or that. Plotter process of formulating a novel. I love the tabs and the little squares. And right away your mind gets very small, right detail and you're thinking little picky, little thoughts and it's a wonderful place.
And I probably had 70 or 80 tabs by the time I finish Pitfalls. You maybe start with your act one and plotting out your act one, and then you're plotting out your character. Frank's wife is Katrina. I'm thinking carefully about. What do I have to share with my reader about Katrina? They wanna know what color is her hair?
Is she, is she French origin? Is she Caribbean? Is she black? Is she white? Who is this? Katrina? What does she think? How does she vote? So you're jotting all down all those. Details and, and then translating them, going over to that creative side of your brain and you have this Word document, which is literally a tablet Raza.
It's a big blank white page, and you have to, your brain shifts from that narrow particular into this kind of sweeping, creative, open-minded field where you get to now just, yeah, be more of a musician or artist.
Laura Rotter
Thank you so much for sharing. That is really fascinating. I'm curious, Terry, how long did it take you to write the book?
Terry Kirk
I had the privilege of working on it full-time, as I say, about four hours a day, which is pretty full-time. 'cause when you're not. Spending your four hours at your, your special writer space, as I've mentioned, you are thinking about it, you're talking to your friends about it. You're asking, in my case, my husband or my daughter, what do you think about?
Or will you listen to this section? So I would say it was full-time. Now that's a really privileged position for a writer. Mostly writers are starting at an earlier age and they've got jobs and careers and kids and families. And personally, I can't really imagine having the head space. I certainly don't feel I could have done it while practicing law.
I didn't have an inch of extra head space, so working full time, it was about two and a half years. Yeah. And did you belong to a writer's group? Was there I do that, Laura. A lot of people do, and I'm now giving a lot of workshops for writers groups on different parts of it. I have a friend who's writing a book and she has been writing it for 10 years now, and she participates three times a week and their writer's group, and they get together and share their stories and so on.
So. I frankly felt that my decades of experience in professional life had been my writer's group. I've been writing since I was a girl and writing professionally as a lawyer and where words really matter for people, uh, you're earning your livelihood from it. So I, I felt I had more than enough experience, frankly, here.
Laura Rotter
So is, were there some life lessons or are there some life lessons, Terry, that you feel like you've taken away from this new chapter in your life that you feel would be helpful to share?
Terry Kirk
Yes. I think that, I think that the life lesson I learned from doing things other than writing and the life lesson that my book is about are one and the same.
So that's hardly a coincidence. I love it. And I think what I really learned from working with people in law who, as I said earlier, universally really bring problems, complexities in their life. Their lawyers are really last resorts for people when they've tried to solve things in other ways. The thing I really learned is that if you're open to it, there.
Every loss and setback is an opportunity for a redemption and for growth. It's a bit of a cliche, I understand that, but living it every day with people, it's just really rewarding. Not so much to have helped them through it, but if you see them on the street or run into them two years later, and I think it often was and is about two years, for people to work through a really major life setback that overwhelmingly they were not.
Way better place. They really had, I mean, there are some, there's no doubt about it, who just flip through and don't take the time and they find themselves in the same old marriage with a different person over and over, or losing their job over and so on, and they get into a cycle that's really hard to pull themselves out of.
But I think for those who really. Reflect on what did I bring to that marriage that caused that upset? Or why did I lose my job? Yes, my employer was a jerk, or my husband was a jerk. What was it that I could do, have done better? Then there is opportunity for a lot of growth and positive change from these big setbacks.
And that's what my character experiences and that's ultimately what Pitfall is about. Frank is a very successful person. It's a kind of riches to rag stories. A very successful person as people were in the twenties, it was called the Roaring Twenties for a reason, the stock market was roaring as. See in my book it was churning out millionaires like Tom Kat, siren, kittens.
Laura Rotter
Great metaphor.
Terry Kirk
Oh, thank you. Was, it was an exciting time and, and really was a factor in the crash. The market got so overheated and normal everyday folks started investing in stock markets for the first time ever, and it got overheated and inflated and it crashed and Frank. Saw everything he thought he'd valued, evaporate in about one and a half hours when trading opened at 10 o'clock and, and the trading floor, the pit as it was called, and hence the name of the book, pitfall.
Frank has lost his entire fortune and mo more. You'll understand when I say traded on margin. That just means he borrowed from his trading account to finance his debts and often double or triple what he had available to him to. Put on at risk. And so he not only lost everything, as many did, he wasn't a stupid man.
He was a smart and clever trader. But the fact is the biggest trading houses in the world lost billions in, in, in, in those days, late October, 1929. So Frank saw that he lost everything. So it was massive loss for him. He didn't handle his loss well. He compounded his losses. My poor behavior, which I think is again, something I saw with people in my law practice that a big loss will often trigger some very bad behaviors and compound losses.
So ultimately though, and I'm not gonna share how the story works, Frank does take the time and. His journey is both an external one of fleeing these losses and physically trying to get back to his life and back to some wealth and back to his ability to support his family. But it was also a metaphorical and internal journey as I think we need to on.
With these losses is to be reflective and ask how can I change? And for him, everything he'd known as a broker and a stock market success was no longer applicable. There were no jobs. 30% of all banks closed in the next two years. 9,000 banks in America, loan closer doors. Wow. Yeah, so he needed to find new skills and a new way of being, and I think that serves as a bit of a recipe for all of us in pulling ourselves out of these rabbit holes.
Laura Rotter
Yeah. So that, I guess that leads me to a question I do always like to ask, which is, Terry, with changes in your life, how is your. Definition of success shifted. It sounds like certainly for your main character, we can be privileged to read about how his definition shifted.
Terry Kirk
Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think, as I said, in response to your first wonderful question, I came away from a secure middle class childhood with experiences where I saw how other people lived with cottages and skiing and golfing.
Dining rooms and I just thought that was all pretty cool and I would put Ener energy into trying to pursue that and getting a law degree and becoming a lawyer and working hard and so on. I don't wanna be smug about any of that because. It. Life is better if you are financially secure. There's no doubt about it.
And when I went through my divorce, I was very financially insecure for a period of time and a single parent, and I know how much better it is to not have to worry about money than it is to worry about it every single day. Every minute of every day, let's say. But. Assuming that you have a kind of baseline level where you're not really hungry and not really worrying.
I think the thing that we learn as we get older in life is that. It's not really those things that matter very much. I would like to summarize what matters as passion. Having a passion for, it might be a child, it might be your partner. It might be for painting or walking in the woods or birds. My girlfriend is loves birds listening app and listens to every Twitter and chirp and gets a very excited, she travels around the world looking for wow.
Yeah, for, and so these are the things I think that matter, and that's really was Frank's journey too. Frank, as my character was realizing that all that focus on money hadn't really brought him success in a broader sense. In fact, it had brought him abject failure at that moment in time, and he sought to define his goals more broadly.
Laura Rotter
And it sounds like you found your passion in being an author of historical novels of times that really speak to you and then telling a story that you hope will touch and teach others. I hope you'll tell me if you don't have time for, but I promise to limit it to a minute, and I might just read you a paragraph or two. Would you be like that?
Terry Kirk
No, I would love that. Okay, then. Okay. This is a story about the pit and that's the trading pit, and let's remember that our lead character is Frank and it's 1929, so here we go. Frank stood at the back of the pit. Waiting for the opening gong across the front of the room. Ran the board a giant slab of slate covering the entire height and width of that towering wall.
A labyrinth of metal scaffolding stood between the traitors and the board, and a dozen clerks scurred along the catwalk, scaling the ladder, scribbling the bids and answer prices, and sending chalk debris falling like fairy dust from the sky. The room was a wash with brony athletic men, wearing the white unstructured jackets worn by traders in the pit.
Many had wrestled their way through college. And some sported noses that looked like they had been reshaped by an illegal right hook. When prices rose, half the room roared in victory and the other half wailed in pain. Almost no one lasted more than a few months. The few who succeeded knew how to out yell their colleagues and elbow their way to the front of the room.
The stench of their sweat and adrenaline filled the pitch during trading hours and lingered long after markets closed.
Laura Rotter
I love it. So if we wanna read the rest of this story, please share, Terry, how we can order your books and find out more.
Terry Kirk
Wonderful. Thank you so much. I'm glad you like it. It's, I think it's, it's that left brain, right brain at work of capturing a lot of details and turning to your open page and trying to make them add a little bit.
Poetry and, and, and make the facts come alive. Pitfalls for sale. Now I'm pleased to say in independent bookstores I really try and support the independent bookstores. So in many, for example, I'm going to speak at take cover in Peter Bar, Ontario on Thursday only independent bookstore left in that city.
Wow. Also on the big platform. So Amazon and Indigo on both amazon.ca and the.com. And I'm pleased to say. It's now available in Kindle and Cobo, the e-readers, as well as the hard copy.
Laura Rotter
Great. I will certainly have a link. Unfortunately, I guess my link will be to Amazon. Sure.
Terry Kirk
It sells books. Believe me, there's, there's no better bigger bookstore out there than Amazon.
Laura Rotter
So good on you.
Terry Kirk
Yes, and I love how you put us in the moment. Like we could smell it. We can hear it, which is what a good writer. Does and and also develops a compelling character. So I'm sure that we'll all be interested in finding out what happens to Frank Clause his way back to a new definition of success.
Is there something else you wanna be sure you share before we end our conversation? Terry?
Terry Kirk
I would just say that you and I have shared a lot of positive energy and positive passion for our where we're at in life these days, and not everybody, I'm sure among your listeners, is feeling quite that way. So for those who are struggling through a loss, my heart goes out to you and I would just.
Share my life lessons from working with so many and one I've tried to share through my story, which is out of loss can come great personal growth, and the rewards are there for working hard at it. And I pretty much bet that within a year or two, whoever is in those circumstances will find themselves in much better circumstances.
Laura Rotter
Thank you so much, Terry, for being my guest.
Terry Kirk
Thank you, Laura, for all that you do. For so many
Narrator
Thanks for listening to Making Change with your Money Certified Financial planner, Laura Rodder specializes in helping people just like you organized, clarify, and invest their money in order to support a life of purpose and meaning.
Go to www.trueabundanceadvisors.com/workbook for a free resource to help you on your journey. Disclaimer, please remember that the information shared by this podcast does not constitute accounting, legal, tax, investment, or financial advice. It's for information purposes only. You should seek appropriate professional advice for your specific information.