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Welcome! Do you love a good story? I’ve always loved hearing and telling stories. When I was a kid, I was the go-to storyteller in my friend group’s games of Light as a Feather. According to them, I told the “twistiest, turniest” tales. I loved making up all sorts of fantastical reasons for someone to become “light as a feather, stiff as a board, and hard as a rock.” Decades later, I turned the stories in my head into pages in books or scripts. And I’m not going to stop anytime soon.
(Trying to find my tarot reading page? Head here.)
I am Izolda Trakhtenberg, and I’m the author of nine books and numerous plays and screenplays. I also direct plays and movies, and I love to do it all. My stories have appeared in anthologies, magazines, and journals. In fiction, I write gritty, heartfelt, sexy mysteries and urban fantasy. I love the twists and turns of both a good story and human connection. My characters are real people even when they’re in super-real situations. They love, lust, yearn, and strive. Most often, they’re also artists of one sort or another. If you’re into that, check out the work below. In non-fiction, I write on mindful creativity and self-development.
If you ever made up an excuse for why you broke curfew, you're a storyteller. If you got away with it scot-free, you're likely a great one. 😉 We tell stories every day. They inspire us, inform us, and transform us. They shape our lives. -Izolda Trakhtenberg
Die By The Sword, is the first book in the Tarot Card Thriller series. Cassie Belmont, a professional tarot card reader, works with the police to solve crimes in Washington DC. When someone starts killing people and leaving them looking like the images in her unique tarot deck, Cassie has to catch the killer before he strikes again.
It’s a twisty who-dunnit with a little magic peppered in.
Die By The Sword ( Order it on Kobo, Nook, or in my shop as a paperback, or eBook)
The Fiddler’s Talisman: Book One of The Fairy Godmother Diaries
New York City is only a hop, skip, and Ley Line jump away from the Fairy Lands. And if anyone can make it there, it’s Fairy Godmother, Evie Songbottom.
Evie isn’t your childhood Fairy Godmother. She prefers whiskey to glitter, movies to wishes, and music to just about anything.
But she’ll need more than a bottle of Jameson and a bad attitude to guide her Charge, violin prodigy, Joanna Brennan. Born of fairy ancestors, Joanna caught her boyfriend cheating with her Juilliard roommate. Now, her magic-tinged sorrow is flooding New York with disaster.
Evie will have to navigate the treacherous landscape of Joanna’s wounded soul, and her own forbidden new love, before Joanna’s grief rips apart the fabric of all the worlds.
eBook | Barnes & Noble | iBookstore (iTunes) | Kobo
The Piano’s Key
The Piano’s Key: Book Two of The Fairy Godmother Diaries
Against all odds, Evie Songbottom and Joanna Brennan defeated the Bane Zeke Dunne and the Ramrocks. As a bonus, Evie earned her Level 4 Fairy Godparent stripes. But now, they face new challenges. While Joanna becomes a guide to her own students, Evie leaves New York and her love, Daniel, to continue her training in the Fairy Lands.
After Daniel is attacked and left for dead, Evie returns to New York to find that he has no memory of her or of their lives together. She vows to protect him while he embarks on a new life without her.
Foes, old and new, surround Evie as she tries to help Daniel and guide her new charge to his destiny. When a terrifying new danger threatens the world, bonds are destroyed, alliances are forged, and good and evil clash in an explosive battle that will decide the fate of both worlds.
Find it at your favorite retailers. Click below.
eBook | Barnes & Noble | iBookstore (iTunes) | Kobo
Works in Progress
The Gemma Blackthorne True Crime Podcaster Mysteries series. Meet Gemma Blackthorne, a true crime podcaster who solves ancient mysteries (like Jamestown, the Beale Ciphers, or the Dancing Plague of 1518), and she’s funded by a shadowy group called the Need to Know Collective. But her greatest case? That’s the one she’s determined to solve or die trying. The first part of the first novel is available here.
The first page:
I died on a Tuesday. But I didn’t stay dead, and that’s when the trouble started. You know that white light you’re supposed to see? There wasn’t one. No tunnel. No angels singing. Nothing like that. What happened to me?
“Wake up! Wake the hell up! Open your eyes, you idiot!”
So, I did.
“Stop yelling,” I moaned to the face that swam into focus. Great eyes, good hair, broad shoulders, and gorgeous hands that were waving me off like he was the third base coach for the Mets.
“No, don’t open your eyes here, not on this side,” he slashed his fingers through his dark blond hair. “Open them on the other side.”
“What other side?” I mumbled, sat up, and fell over. I slammed my eyes shut and covered my ears with my hands.
“Ow, ow, ow,” I moaned.
“Stop yelling at her, you moron! You’ll just keep her here longer.” The acerbic voice sliced through my fog. But it couldn’t be her.
(More soon!)
Non-Fiction
Speak From Within
Engage, Inspire, and Motivate The People In Your Life
Become a great communicator!
Based on my Speak to Succeed workshop, the book helps you build the confidence to engage and inspire any audience. Then, you explore how to communicate authentically in meetings, interviews, and presentations.
Here are the supplemental materials to the book by chapter.
Find the Book at eBook (a variety of sources), Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.com.
Confident Communication
If you want to speak so you engage, inspire, and motivate people in meetings, interviews, presentations, get this book!
With it, you will become a confident and effective communicator. You will learn physical, emotional, and mental techniques to engage and persuade.
And you will learn methods to beat stress and fear so you can authentically connect with any audience.
The Functional Tarot
Learn how to gain the confidence and skills to read tarot cards.
If you’re here that means that you want to learn how to read tarot cards. You want to know how to use them to gain insight and clarity and to deepen your knowledge of yourself and your world.
If you want a practical take on how to learn the cards, discover the most insightful meanings, and come up with accurate interpretations, you’re in the right place. If you want to do it from a functional perspective, then you’re even more welcome.
This book accompanies the Functional Tarot deck, but you can use it to read with other decks. Additionally, each description contains the card’s notable symbols and a list of related cards to strengthen your intuitive reading skills.
To be a reader, you have to trust yourself, your instincts, and your intuition. This book will build your skills and empower you.
Buy the paper book. Buy the eBook.
Life Elements
Transform Your Life With Earth, Air, Fire, and Water
Forge your path to a fulfilling, bountiful, joyful life. Many of us are seeking a different way to live – one that is peaceful, mindful, open, and active. In our search, we combine ancient and modern traditions. We merge cutting-edge technology with yoga or Tai Chi. We employ ancient meditation techniques and elemental energies and reinterpret them. We move forward; we decide our path, and here we access the source for a peaceful, joyful, and productive life.
The Life Elements System presents a practical, hands-on method to change our lives. Part guidebook, part assessment tool, “Life Elements” calls us to action to transform our lives. Take the Elemental Designation Assessment Test to discover your governing Element and learn your next steps to transforming your life elementally.
Your bonus for visiting this page: The latest meditations from my first book, “Life Elements” are now up on youtube.
- Shielding: Use your own power to shield yourself from negative energy with this effective meditation.
- Credit Yourself With How Far You’ve Come – Meditation to Honor Yourself
- Into the Ocean – Meditation to access emotions and intuition
- Into the Flames – Meditation to gain energy and confidence
- Into the Clouds – Meditation to gain clarity
- Into the Earth – Excellent grounding meditation
- Meditation To Your Power Place – Fantastic confidence-builder
eBook (a variety of sources) | Barnes & Noble | Ebook at Barnes & Noble | iBookstore (iTunes) | Kobo
Midlife On Fire
This anthology I’m in reached #1 in two Amazon categories!
New York State of Crime
Anthology from Sisters In Crime (Tri-State, New York Chapter)
The sixth anthology from the New York/New Jersey, Connecticut chapter of Sisters in Crime was a Derringer Award finalist and is available for purchase on Amazon.
In a New York Minute
The first anthology of micro-fiction from the Vegan Writers of NYC, the book was released on February 21, 2023.
How do you write a story that’s exciting, meaningful, and profound in just ten minutes? Can you write one with great characters and exciting plots that will leave readers wanting more? The Vegan Writers of NYC decided to put these questions to the test.
With word prompts providing inspiration, they wrote stories that speak of the human experience. Step inside and perhaps some of those prompts will inspire you to write your own tale.
Playwriting
Listen! is my first full-length play. What do you do when you have to make a life-changing decision? You listen. Learn more.
See my other plays.
Playwright and Screenwriter
I’ve written numerous plays and films as you can see below. You might not know about my scriptwriting for NASA. Yep, I wrote and edited movies for NASA!
Here’s Breathable: A Story About Air Quality. I wrote the script, composed the music, edited and directed the film for a NASA’s Aura satellite mission. (See more of my movies below.)
My play A Slice of Democracy premiered at the “A Polling Place” Theatre Festival by the Nomad Players.
Expiration Date was a semi-finalist in the Off Broad Street Play Festival.
Perhaps, Maybe? debuted at the Gi60 International Play Festival in Houston, TX.
My other plays are:
- Irreparable Damage
- In Irreparable Damage, Dr. Caroline MacArthur turns to holograms to relive the lovers she’s lost, only to find that while technology can replay heartbreak with dazzling clarity, it can’t give her the closure her heart still craves.
- Rock Bottom
- In Rock Bottom, Jen confronts the wreckage of her past in the cold dawn, discovering that when you’ve hit the lowest point, the only way forward is to rise—sometimes by burying what broke you and reclaiming the strength that silence once stole.
- Is That Freedom?
- Set in 1975, this tender, sharp-witted play follows a Soviet Jewish immigrant family as young Bella navigates the clash between old traditions and new expectations, while her adult self reflects on how fear, resilience, and the fight to belong shaped both her identity and her voice.
- Saving the Grand
- In Saving the Grand, a band of artists and activists turns their fight to protect a beloved neighborhood theater into a living performance of song, story, and solidarity, proving with humor and heart that saving art means saving the soul of a community.
- Listen!
- In Listen!, Chorus, a celebrated observer of life’s unguarded moments, returns to her favorite New York coffee shop to confront a life-changing choice, uncovering the humor, heartbreak, and surprising wisdom that speaks when no one else is listening.
Editorial Services
I provide editorial services for books, short stories, and articles. Please contact me for more information.
“Ms. Trakhtenberg improved my screenplay with suggestions as large as major plot points to as small as improved word choice. I feel lucky to have had her help.”
-Jacob Davenport, Screenwriter
Let’s Get Creative
I also facilitate workshops on teaching others to spark their own creativity. We can all use that creative spark for self-expression and our truth.
Learn more about my books.
A Little About Me
Through my workshops, I help people, companies, and organizations build their own creative genius and innovation skills. My “Work in Harmony®” and “Tell Your Story Better” workshops have garnered rave reviews at conferences, company meetings, schools, and other events.
The Your Creative Mind Podcast
Your Weekly Dose of Inspiration
Looking for a way to stay inspired and keep your creative energy flowing? Tune into the Your Creative Mind Podcast for weekly insights, strategies, and real-world tactics to help you achieve your goals without burnout. Each episode dives deep into practical tools for problem-solving, mindfulness, and intuitive thinking—so you can bring more joy, creativity, and peace into your daily life. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, artist, or simply someone looking for a fresh perspective, this podcast will help you thrive.
Listen now. Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Podbean | MyTuner | iHeart Radio | TuneIn | Deezer | Overcast | PodChaser | Listen Notes | Player FM | Podcast Addict | Podcast Republic |