Minerva Koenig

OK, enough mystery. My plus-sized protag is ‘just fat’ (option #3 in the poll).  That is, it’s not something she spends a lot of time gnashing her teeth about, publicly or privately.

Someone asked me why I made her so, and here’s how it happened:

One of my beefs with current crime literature/film/TV is the ass-kicking dame who weighs less than a bale of hay. She can disarm a seasoned cage fighter twice her size with a single blow. Versmilitude? Pah. So, I wanted to make my protag big and strong enough that the reader doesn’t blow a lobe trying to suspend their disbelief when she pops a guy in the face and he hits the floor. Then I realized that most of the women I know who meet that criteria are classified as ‘fat’ by people who do that sort of thing, and, having a personal interest in the issue, I decided it was high time to write a book with a character who was ‘just fat’ — a character whose size isn’t shorthand for all the demeaning things that the word ‘fat’ has come to mean in modern culture.

When you get right down to it, though, the answer to the question of ‘why?’ is ‘why not?’ The average adult American white chick is 5′-4″ and weighs 163 pounds, but she’s regularly reading books about women who are 5′-9″ (or more) and 120 pounds (or less). I realize that fiction is in many ways a form of wish-fulfillment for readers, a way to vicariously engage in life experiences we’ll never have in reality, but when I read, I’m looking for experiences slightly more meaty (no pun intended) than the fantasy of fitting into smaller clothes.

Finally, here is an embarassing truth: I originally conceived of the book as a sort of ‘fat’-girl revenge fantasy. My personal vicarious reading experience was starting to suffer demonstrably from the frustration of not finding books with average-sized (i.e., ‘fat’) characters who weren’t slobs, idiots, psychologically damaged, morally depraved, derisively comical, or otherwise inferior to their uncommonly thin co-characters — so I decided to write one myself, serving the central theme of a ‘fat’ (i.e., average) person winning out at the end. That lasted about a draft and a half, at which point I realized that not only was I just moving the same damned pieces around on the same damned chess board, it was boring. Julia (my protag) kept wanting to do more interesting things. So I let her, and the book turned — thankfully — into something else.

I just discovered how to do a poll here!

If you’ve read my bio, you know that I’m a proponent of the Health at Every Size philosophy. Partially because of this, the protagonist in my mystery series, Julia Ninemann, is a woman of larger-than-average size.* I’ve already gone a couple of rounds with myself regarding how I want to treat the issue, but I’m curious what other people think. Your opinion, please!

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I’ll reveal which of the three options I’ve decided on after the poll closes. For those of you who already know, please don’t spoil it!

*Many fat-acceptance advocates frown on descriptions such as this, in favor of using and ‘decriminalizing’ the word ‘fat’ to describe plus-size people. I don’t mind the term ‘fat,’ but as a writer, I shy away from it because it’s imprecise. All human bodies contain fat; describing a person as ‘fat,’ in my grammar-nazi brain, is equivalent to desribing them as ‘blood’ or ‘connective tissue.’ If anybody wants to know my deeper thoughts on the matter, let me know and I’ll post about it.

Just for the hell of it, I looked up the types of mystery novels, and as far as I can tell, there is no universally accepted list of types. Here is a partial list of the genres I found described in various places:

• Traditional / cozy
• Hardboiled / noir
• Police procedural
• Spy / espionage
• Literary / psychological
• Thriller
• Historical
• Comic / caper

I feel a little better about The Book going into the first category — ‘traditional’ feels way more acceptable to me than ‘cozy.’ I think it must be the word ‘cozy’ that I object to — it makes me think of ‘tea cozy’ and the clichéd fiction that seems to often go along with such an object. ‘Traditional,’ on the other hand, I can live with, and really, much as my ego would like to put it there, The Book is just not in the same category with the ‘literary’ mysteries I’ve read. Nor is it a hardboiled / noir, though it definitely has elements. I’ve decided to classify it as a ‘hard-edged traditional mystery.’

I did see a category designated ’soft-boiled’ (as opposed to hardboiled), which I guess I wouldn’t object to except for the mental picture of my manuscript covered in half-cooked egg.

I think I may have to make a rule not to read other mystery writers while I’m working on The Book. It seems like every time I read someone else, I go into this spiral of thinking how much I suck and that I could write for the rest of my damned life and never get as good as [insert writer's name here].

The latest read has me thinking that not only do I suck, I’m also a coward, because I don’t have the guts to kill off Julia’s love interest halfway through the story, as the hard-boiled canon would have it. I don’t want to write cozies, but I don’t know if I’ve got the emotional chops to write anything else. I’m a fucking lightweight, if I’d just admit it to myself. I could probably write a damned good cozy, if I’d just own up to my own lameness and work with it — why do I have to have these aspirations to something more ‘literary?’

“George Halligan snipped the end off a large Cohiba, ran it under his nose and sniffed. It made a scrabbling sound as it chafed against his mustache, like a small animal trapped behind drywall. I thought of ramming the cigar up his nose. It would pass the time, but it wouldn’t help to crack the case.”

Declan Hughes, The Wrong Kind of Blood

So a couple of months ago I read Black Out by Lisa Unger, one of my recent finds. While she’s no Isak Dinesen, I’d place her squarely in the ‘lush writer’ camp — she uses lots of description and psychological material in her books, and does it well.

Shortly after I finished Black Out, I gave in to an urge to try and add more ‘texture’ to The Book. I went in and added bits about my protag’s past, and played up some of her backstory and psychological characteristics.

Cutting to the chase (pun alert!), I’m now having to go back and take all that out. I am not a lush writer. I think my writing is much better when I stick to bare bones. I don’t know why — I feel a sort of fatigue set in when I try to write rich, evocative scenes — it just doesn’t seem to be in my writerly character. I like the way The Book reads so much better when I keep it lean.

I wish I could remember where I read this advice: “Don’t try and write a mystery. Just tell the story.”

I’ve discovered quite a bit of writer’s lore since I started up this blog, and one bit in particular I find quite puzzling. Several agents/publishers/writers whose opinions I find generally respectable say that one’s first novel is rarely the first published. It’s more often the third.

How does this work, for mystery writers who write in series? Did Janet Evanovich sell Three to get Deadly before One for the Money? If so, how? What about Sue Grafton? I don’t think C is for Corpse could exist without A is for Alibi and B is for Burglar. Et cetera.

I mean, I know that most series mysteries can also stand alone, but the point of writing a series is to start at the beginning and build history. How can a mystery writer do this if her first book — the foundation of the series — won’t get published?

I rarely post items of a personal-opinion nature on this blog, because, when I become Rich and Famous, I don’t want any of that shit coming back to bite me in the ass. However, I am so pissed off about the murder of Dr. George Tiller that I simply can’t not write about it. And frankly, if this comes back to bite me in the ass someday, I’ll bend over proudly and let it chew.

To whoever killed Dr. Tiller, and the people who defend that person:

You are not Christians. You’re not even Fundamentalists.

The first commandment in the Bible, which, if you were Fundamentalists, you would follow to the letter,  is ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill.” There is no asterisk. There is no exception. There is no small-print paragraph that lists the conditions under which you can safely disregard the commandment. It is absolute, and the first word is THOU.

I don’t care if Dr. Tiller single-handedly wiped out an entire country with a pick-axe. YOU ARE NOT GOD. You don’t get to decide punishments and mete out executions. You live in a society of laws, one that was founded to escape things like what you just did. If you don’t like our laws, get the fuck out.

And just in case you think this event will somehow advance your cause, I just made a large donation to Planned Parenthood in Dr. Tiller’s name, and I will actively encourage everybody I meet to do the same. I wasn’t doing that before, so thanks for the push.

I’ve spent the week-plus since my back throwage alternately trying to keep my workload from turning into a merciless behemoth crushing me beneath it’s hoary hooves, and looking for a chair. By ‘chair’ I mean something to sit upon while working at my computer (which I do for the majority of hours of most days), without said chair causing the throwage to get worse and/or recur. I’d narrowed down my choices sufficiently to go out and shop, which I did today, and I’m happy to report that we have a winner:

It’s called the Swopper. It’s bouncy and sway-y, and it makes you sit with your back straight and your legs at approximately 135° to your torso, like so:

Now, I have a little experience with a variant of this posture, from sitting on a meditation cushion in a previous life, and I was sort of skeptical that it would be comfy for any length of time, but then I went and sat on one of these babies, in the flesh.

Sold.

Well, almost. They cost $600 (USD) retail. A small price to pay to keep my spine from disintegrating, but ouch. So I thought I’d surf around and see if I could find a screaming internet deal. The final price I’ll end up paying lies somewhere near the intersection of my back pain and my parsimony. Stay tuned…

A few days ago I did what I think is commonly called ‘throwing one’s back out’ amongst the geezetariat — I bent down to feed the cats and something just above my ass went ‘ouch’ and hasn’t stopped. So, since lying down doesn’t hurt, I’ve been working in bed with my laptop. Actually, I lie: I’m sitting at the desk right now, after a couple of days of lying down on the job – LYING DOWN ON THE JOB! get it? get it? I slay myself.

As for The Book, I seem to be stuck in getting the beginning ‘absolutely perfect,’ probably to avoid getting into the belly of the beast, which needs the most work. Plus, The Job ™ is still busy as hell, and I’ve had a few bouts of wondering if I’m ever really, finally, for real going to finish the fucking Book. Like, before I bend over one day and can’t stand back up, FOREVER. The thought of some future anthropologist finding my mummified corpse next to an unfinished manuscript fills me with dread.

Mortality sucks.