Not all of the more than two million American divorces this year will be contentious, acrimonious affairs. Wendy Paris, the author of Splitopia: Dispatches from Today’s Good Divorce offers tips on avoiding dueling lawyers, venom in the probate court, and how not to accumulate a fortune in legal fees.

In Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness, author, speaker and friendship expert Shasta Nelson provides the blueprint for nurturing friendships to help enhance your own inner harmony.

Conversations Live with Vicki St. Clair airs each Monday at noon Pacific on KKNW 1150AM or 94.9FM HD. Like us on Facebook and follow Vicki on Twitter for exclusive updates and contests!

After announcing her intention to split with her husband journalist and author Wendy Paris was surprised by the doom-and-gloom forecasts from some of her friends. Intent on making it an amicable process, she set out to discover the truth about today’s divorce, and to separate the myths from the facts. The resulting book, Splitopia: Dispatches from Today’s Good Divorce, challenges the negative assumptions and biased reporting about divorce. Wendy worked as a print and electronic journalist for more than 20 years, covering relationships, culture, art, dating and marriage. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Psychology Today, The New York Observer, The Guardian, Marketplace Radio, Travel & Leisure, and others.

Friendships can be complicated, and sometimes it’s hard to tell how strong your relationships with others are. That is where Shasta Nelson comes in with Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness. She covers a wide range of friendship building subjects, headlined by the frientimacy triangle: Positivity, consistency, and vulnerability as the three essentials for building intimacy in friendship. She also demonstrates the 5 major obstacles to intimacy and how to overcome them, why friendship should be the “rock” that you schedule the rest of your life around, and why sometimes when you feel like you give more than you take in a friendship, you might be surprised at how much you receive from your friends that you don’t even recognize. Shasta is an author, public speaker and shows such as Katie Couric and The Today Show have sought her out as an expert guest.

Listen to PODCAST –