It's 3:18AM. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

If they're dumber than any novel reader would believe, they may be staying at the Residence Inn where I am currently. Let me recount the last...oh...20 minutes for you.

Phone rings. I answer, sure some horrible tragedy has occurred, and not quite certain why anyone would call on the hotel phone rather than my cell.

Prepubescent teen male voice, kind of giggling: "Code word: rugmuncher."
Me: "You have a wrong number."
Him: "No, dude..."
I hang up.

Phone rings. I answer, now certain there's no tragedy, just a whole lot of idiocy.

Him: "Dude, where's my weed?"
Me: "You have the wrong room. Whoever you think is staying here, they're not."
Him: "No, dude!" His voice is now edging into hysteria, shouting slightly. "211, dude, 211. You told me..."
Me: (in words I won't put here) "I don't care who told what, they lied to you."
I hang up.

Phone rings. Now, I am seriously pissed off. My wake-up call is in three hours. I have to haul my butt out of bed early to set up for a trade show I wasn't in the mood for in the first place.

Him: "Dude..."
Me: "The next time you call this number, I am calling the police."
I hang up.

I call the hotel operator. It's three o'clock in the morning, so it takes a while to get someone on the line. I explain the situation and ask her if she can track where the calls originated, since I am sure they are room-to-room. No, she can't. She apologizes. Actually, she "sincerely" apologizes. I explain that if the police arrive, it will be because I've called them. She is stumped by that, and apologizes again.

If I wrote this scene into a book, no one would believe it. What kind of moron gives a drug dealer money without getting the drugs then and there? Without even being sure they know what room the guy is staying in? Who calls a drug dealer "dude?"

Go ahead, use that scene in a book. I dare you. People will say your characters are "totally unrealistic."

Truth may not be stranger than fiction, but it sure is dumber.

Watching Your Weight

I've been ruminating on this for a while. It is, perhaps, a particularly touchy subject at the moment, as I try to slowly get rid of the weight I gained in 5 months on steroids (and the weight I needed to lose even before I started the steroids). But I was recently reading a book where a woman is described as 5'4" tall and 120 pounds in her mid-thirties, and it started me thinking about the numbers we see in books.

I mean, seriously, 120 pounds?? I am 5'4" tall. I once made it to 130 pounds through a combination of pathological exercise (running every day, lifting weights a couple times a week, never relaxing), watching every single thing I ate, and generally obsessing over my body to the practical exclusion of everything else. In 2001, after an extended stay in the hospital, I was 128 pounds. You could see the bones in my chest, in my face, in my arms. As soon as I started putting muscle back onto my body, I gained weight.

What's a realistic weight for my frame? 140. I can get down to 135, but it requires more maintenance than is practical. Now, I'm not a little girl. I have small hands, little wrists, but I also have broad shoulders, actual hips (even when I am too skinny and my bones stick out) and, oh horrors, a chest. I have a friend who's pretty much my height but has a much smaller frame than I do, narrow shoulders, no chest, and manages to keep her weight to 128. She's also a personal trainer, whose whole life revolves around working out. (If you need a great trainer in Westchester, NY....)

Where are authors getting these numbers? Back in the old days, women used to be told that they could find their "ideal weight" by allotting 100 pounds for their first five feet, then adding 5 pounds for every inch over. Well, that would give you the 5'4", 120 pound "ideal woman" all right. But it's been years since anyone went by that...er..scale. The "BMI calculators" you find on the 'Net have such wide ranges as to be pretty much useless. Check them out...after 8 days NPO in the hospital (nothing by mouth, just IV), I still didn't qualify for underweight. In fact, I'd have to spend several days decomposing before I got down there. I checked--I could weigh in at a mere 108 pounds and still be considered "normal." I could also weigh 145 and be "normal." What's wrong with that picture?

We all know about the horrible body image promoted by fashion magazines, etc, but I have to wonder--what about novels? What do we take away from reading books about seemingly strong, independent women who think they need to lose ten pounds when they weigh 130 pounds? And .45-toting women who weigh 120 pounds? Please. The recoil would kill them.

I don't like to give numbers in my own character descriptions because I tend to think the number is far less important than the way the character feels about the number, whether that number is size, weight, or age. I have done it on occasion because it seemed right, but when I do I do it from my own experience of various weights.

When I read about that 120 pound woman, and then consider my 150 pound heroine (who knows she needs to lose ten pounds), I wonder if the experience of that other writer is so widely different from mine. Has she (well, they--I see that number a fair amount) been 120? And readers...do they think my character is a slob for only wanting to get down to 140, for not aspiring to that 120? Should I avoid numbers at all? That doesn't seem realistic, either...after all, almost every woman I know spends a fair amount of time considering the numbers in her life. A character who didn't would stretch the bounds of credulity.

What do you folks think? As readers? As writers? As women? As men?

Can You Spitzer?

As I’m writing this, Eliot Spitzer has just announced his resignation as governor of New York State. As a private attorney, as a member of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, and then as New York State Attorney General, Spitzer went after wrongdoers with a vengeance. He broke up prostitution rings, prosecuted racketeering cases, and went after federal agencies he felt weren’t adequately protecting the consumer. Then on Monday we learned that at the same time he was doing all these good deeds, he was also spending upwards of $80,000 on high-priced call girls he was sneaking across state lines to visit when he should have been busy at work in his office.

Without getting into the political or legal implications of everything that’s been coming out this week, can you do this? Can you Spitzer?

What I mean by this is, Can you separate your personal beliefs or true personality from what you need to do for your job? Can you be one person in private and another for your career? In many professions, it’s required; if you can’t Spitzer, you’d better find another job.

Acting is one of those careers, and Jim Carrey is a prime example of an actor who Spitzers well. As Carrey told Matt Lauer on Monday on the Today Show, in 2000 he played the Ultimate Bad Guy, the Grinch, in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and now he’s supplying the voice of the Ultimate Good Guy, Horton, in a movie made from another Dr. Seuss classic, Horton Hears a Who. He pulled off each one convincingly, and he had a blast doing it. Is Carrey, as a person, an especially good or bad guy? No, of course not. Few people are. He’s just an average guy who can put on the “face” that’s required by his job.

When I first graduated from college with a BA in journalism, I became a newspaper reporter. As almost everyone who knew me back then can testify, I was shy. No, not shy, but SHY. Make that SHY!! I had trouble even speaking to myself in the mirror. But when I had to cover a story, when I had to—horrors!—interview someone, I did okay. Why? Because I was Elaine the Reporter, not Elaine the Private Person. Elaine the Reporter wasn’t shy. On the job, she could talk to people without a problem. She could sit at strangers’ kitchen tables and ask them about their frightening or unusual experiences. She could confront seedy or unfriendly people on the street or in their offices and try to weasel “the truth” out of them. But Elaine the Private Person had trouble crawling out from under her bed to answer the telephone on her nightstand.

I’m not a reporter anymore, but I continue to Spitzer today, especially when I’m working on one of my mysteries. To write any type of fiction well, a writer needs to be able to “become” his or her characters. With crime fiction, that means the writer needs to be able to identify not only with the sleuth, but also with the villain—to feel and understand the villain’s anger and hate, to think of and carry out (on paper) evil deeds, to lie and scheme and maim and kill.

I sometimes get worried by how easily I can do this. I sometimes outright scare my family. But I know the person who’s identifying with the unsavory characters and figuring out how torture the innocent is Elaine the Mystery Writer, not Elaine the Private Person, so I feel a little better about it. Heck, who’s kidding whom? I get totally into it! I enjoy it!

How about you? Can you Spitzer? If you’re a writer, you most likely can. How do you feel about it?

Leap Day Felicitations and Exaggerations

This old postcard cracked me up. Beyond Sadie Hawkins dances, the legend is that in leap years, a woman could propose to a man, and he could not refuse without offering compensation. The February 29th version of bagging your own buck. And of course, the whole plot of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance concerns an ill-fated birthday boy, bound to serve the not-quite-competent Pirate King until his 21st birthday, when he'll be in his eighties.

By contrast, the modern take on the date is way less dramatic and more sensible. Feh! The Telegraph says you might cook a seasonal vegetable or give your hair a treatment masque, though Laura will appreciate their suggestion to close your Facebook account if only for the day. Well, pardon me, but hasn't that gone a little too prosaic? Certainly, for an every four year occurrence, writers can come up with something that's got more oopmh than organizing a closet.

Today, I am helping yellow-eyed lemurs start a driving school. Tonight, I will drink champagne from a pith helmet, jitterbug with actuaries, beat Yogi Bear at arm-wrestling without wrinkling my taffeta, and stay up until 9:15!

As befits such a rare occasion, the most outrageous lies are not only encouraged, they will be believed hook, line, and sinker. So, what will you be doing?

Assassinations and Writing

I grew up in the Age of Assassination. JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., RFK, Malcolm X. To stick up for a cause meant to stick your head above the crowd - be an easy target. It killed my desire to attack evil forces on a broad platform. I chose teaching and subversively worked to raise consciousness about things of great import.

When I started feeling bold again, the fatwa hit Salman Rushdie. The good news is: he outlived the Ayatollah.

And now Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated. Will this lunacy never end? The Age of Aquarius was not supposed to end up with the world still full of hatred and violence. I was hoping for a resurgence of the Age of Enlightenment.

Will this become known as the Age of Terrorism?

What role does this have in shaping my writing world and yours? We are, after all, people who target a wide audience (you should pardon the expression). We try to capture reality in a way that is both gripping and rewarding. We try to make sense out of the senselessness of violence, or at least put a muzzle on it.

Hmmm. Out of chaos comes a myriad of possibilities. Timing is everything. And writers have been known to rally the troops. Wasn't it some southern lady whom Lincoln credited with starting the Civil War? How will this latest assault on democracy be translated into our writings? Will it have no impact at all?

I don't believe that our internal life force vaporizes with death. Our verve is not eternally gone from the universe. At the very least, our voices linger in the minds of others. We continue to influence the world we leave behind, just not so directly. All of us carry bits and pieces of others - both good and not-so-good - in our souls. We are living legacies. As mystery writers we are tied into the emotional soul of our audience. Sorting out impossible puzzles is part of our daily fare.

Do the spirits of Benazir, the victims of 9-11, and all of the other assassinated heroes have an impact in fictional worlds? Do they whisper in the ears of writers, and inspire our fingers with words of encouragement and hope for a better tomorrow? Will our stories in some way keep their hopes alive?

How do you deal with the world of reality in your world of fiction? I'd like to know.

Write On!