You Gotta Lotta ’Splainin’ To Do, Donna McDonald

I thought you’d like to know not just what I think about some other writers’ work, but also what they think back.

Donna’s a fervent ManWARrior who’s authored six iconoclastic romances. I shot her a couple of prompts and asked her to ’splain. And while it says in the title she hadda lotta ’splainin’ to do, I limited her ’splanations to two hundred words.

ManWAR is about my learning the “rules” of romance. You seem to be doing very well breaking rules. For example, your protagonists are over 40 and one of them gets pregnant by a man who’s married to another woman.

I wasn’t always a rebel. Agents and publishers rejected my stories about older characters saying they wouldn’t sell. There were sub-genre lines about the over 40 group, but one publisher said my sex scenes were too hot for older people. Boy, have I got some emails to show them. Readers write all the time to thank me.

Making the heroine older than the hero was actually an okay rule to break, but I also make them wealthier, which is supposed to make a woman less appealing. I guess if a woman has money, why does she need a man? I don’t understand the thinking. My experience says it’s not true. My heroes don’t care.

The storyline in Dating a Saint made me very nervous when I released it. For me, it was a test from the Muses to see what kind of writer I was going to be. I have more details in a Q&A blog about what inspired the risk. That story hovers on the edge of becoming some other kind of book. I kept it a romance by using loads of humor, lots of sex scenes, and the hardest, most satisfying happily-ever-after I’ve written to date.

If we’re going to talk about breaking rules, I broke the BIG one when I pulled up my big girl panties and published my work all by myself.

An article by another successful author said protagonists should never be satisfied with their bodies, but just not care what others think. Your protagonists go a step further by regarding their “body issues” not as stemming from something “wrong” with them, but from something wrong with societal attitudes.

If you ever hear a woman say she loves everything about her body, copious quantities of drugs or alcohol are involved. Females are socialized to be modest (find fault), because liking your body (not finding fault)—well, gee, that would be bragging, right?

If I created an older heroine who didn’t admit to having at least some age-related issues, readers would not find me credible. Why? Clothing ads for older women contain models that look like clones of Alexa, the hot ex-model of Dating a Cougar. Where are the 5-foot-tall models or the size 12 or larger ones? They exist, just not as role models.

I’m in the process of creating a 40-year-old, divorced, size 14 heroine whose ex had problems with her weight. In my recently published book The Right Thing, the hero’s 72-year-old father experiences E.D.

Perfection is subjective. I write about the challenges real people face. I think the author of the article you mention is right, but starting a new physical relationship can highlight body issues. It takes time to get to the point of not caring what others think.

Good stuff. And, as a bonus, she used my new all-time favorite word, "panties."


Click to find out more about or buy Donna’s books.

Keeping it fresh

I just read The Average American Male by Chad Kultgen. It’s about sex, but while sex is all any of the not-quite one-dimensional characters ever think about, it is not a romance. Erotic or otherwise.

It is an anti-romance—unless you recognize it as a satire that skewers stereotypes about how men think about women.

I love satire. There are elements of it in Fast Lane. Elements also found in Kultgen’s best-seller.

The Average American Male opens with the unnamed character in the eighteenth month of a relationship with a girlfriend who bores him. She talks too much. Likes lame music. Has a fat ass (the character’s words, not mine). Doesn’t play video games. Won’t take a supplement to enlarge her B-cup-size breasts, forcing him to sneak it into her food. Refuses to have sex often enough, which is to say, less than twice a day. Doesn’t like the sexual activities he enjoys most.

Worst of all, she starts pushing love and marriage and “tricks” him into engagement. That makes him break up and get a new girlfriend. One who talks the right amount. Likes cool music. Has an ass that is “perfect beyond belief.” Excels at video games. Volunteers to take the supplement even though he’s happy with her B-cup-size breasts (“I like her tits as they are and I’m not completely sure increasing their size would improve their overall quality”). Wants to have sex at least two times a day. Prefers the sexual activities he enjoys most.

Best of all, she’s averse to love and marriage. After witnessing a guy in knight’s armor proposing in a restaurant, she says, “What we just saw basically defines all marriages—some guy makes an ass out of himself and the girl is too overwhelmed by it to think straight enough to say no.”

Fast-forward to eighteen months later when it dawns on the guy that the new girlfriend talks too much--especially about love and marriage--and performs fellatio too little. Her breasts aren’t any bigger, but he’s sure her butt eventually will be. He sadly “realizes” that over time, every woman he’ll ever know will become just like every other women he’s already known.

Like I said—you’ve got to think of it as satire.

So how is all this in any way like Fast Lane? The claim to fame of my male lead, Clay Creighton, is The Rotation—three women who serve as his consorts. Every eighteen months, the one who’s been in The Rotation the longest has to leave to make room for someone else.

The Fast Lane philosophy is that new relationships are filled with passion. Things remain interesting for a while as two people get to know each other. In the end, though, familiarity and routine snuff out the flames. The Rotation is the ultimate bachelor fantasy—and it’s what Lara sets out to destroy.

Unlike the guy in The Average American Male, though, Clay—and Lara—learn a lot about love, romance, relationships and each other. They arc in ways I’m confident you’ll like.

Because, really, you don’t have to be all that romantic to believe that, sooner or later, you’ll meet The One who stands out from all the others. Now. Eighteen months from now. And even after that.

Lament of the triple-X goddess

“There is no beautiful thought a man can have about a woman that isn’t followed by an absolutely disgusting thought about the same woman. We can’t help it. It’s what we do.”

I lead with this quote from comedian Louis C.K. because it was the first thing uttered from my DVR when I got back from vacation—and my annual bacchanal of reading the Biblical Archaeology Review.

You read that right. BAR is the only magazine I subscribe to, but I never find time to read it except during the one week when I can spend mornings catching up on a year’s worth of issues while sunning on an empty beach on a northwoods lake.

I’m fascinated with how discoveries of potsherds and old bones lend new insight into stories that sound so familiar, yet seem so odd. Like Sodom and Gomorrah: “No, you may not have relations with my sons, you perverts! Here, take my virgin daughters instead.” Tragedy averted.

Hmmmm.

This year I read an issue in which BAR dug up fodder for a more modern controversy. Namely the staid magazine’s penchant for running pictures of bent-over, scantily clad, twenty-something archeological babes.

Father Bruce Perron, an Orthodox priest, complained in 1990 that such pictures made him wonder if, rather than scholarship, ars mores dissoluti—love among the ruins—was the publication’s focus.

Donna Canalizo, the T-shirt and shorts-clad object of Perron’s rage, responded by saying his “interpretation was a result of projecting his own thoughts onto the image. The object in the image to be focused on is not my body, but rather the hypocaust tiles, one of the most spectacular finds in my grid last season.”

She also wondered why the priest did not object to a picture of a shirtless man in the same spread.

A male reader subsequently thanked Perron for “reminding me to look at the picture again. Praise be God who has made such a work of beauty.”

The issue still had legs fifteen years later, when a woman noticed her octogenarian husband, who, she said, “still appreciated female pulchritude,” studying the magazine. “It’s an unusual cover,” he said. She followed with, “You don’t think an Iron Age clay bead is an appropriate subject?” And he said, “What bead?”

As Doris Day sang, a guy is a guy.

Three years after that, a middle-school Sunday school teacher decried the magazine’s use of a photo of a millennia-old figurine of the Canaanite goddess Asherah with her hands cupped beneath her breasts. “How can one teach young boys that purchasing pornographic books is wrong?”

Proof of Louis C.K.’s assertion? Maybe. But the person who wrote that last letter’s name was Barbara.

So maybe thinking about women is problematic for everyone. But what we’re talking about here, scholars say, is “a characteristic expression of Judahite piety.”

And, really, the only thought anyone should have when looking at this picture is how amazing it is that someone could turn nothing but a bunch of mud into a thing of beauty.

A character comes alive

The other day I was in a restaurant in Chicago, a hundred miles from home, when in walked someone I know: Sushma Vishnuveda. She was half a continent—and a whole world—from home.

Sushma, you see, is a character in Fast Lane.

So now you’re going, “What the—?”

It’s not new for me, this experience of having a character skip dimensions. The first time was when an MRI machine gave me visions of Dani Stahl, the lead character in my screenplay Terminal Sex. Unfortunately, they weren’t happy visions.

I saw Dani in my office, the very place where I created her, but she was lost. I felt like I was responsible for her sadness. And then someone reminded me that Dani was a reflection of myself.

Why was Dani sad? She'd had her day in the sun. Two days, in fact. The first was when she snagged me representation from a player agency in Hollywood that sent Terminal Sex to about two dozen producers. The result was lots of compliments, but no sale.

Dani’s second shot at fame came when a writing team that had penned a highly successful movie-of-the-week took Terminal Sex to one of the Big Three TV networks. Everyone there loved it. Except the president of the network’s movie division.

The next time a character of mine became real was when I discovered a garage band called The Mydols. These working-class moms from Detroit embodied Anna Petrovic, the housewife who joins a hard-rock band otherwise composed of scraggly teens in my screenplay Metal Mom. Anna, too, had a couple shots at the big time. She even had Michelle Phillips signed up to play her.

Michelle Phillips! I hadn’t conceived of Anna as a babe, but moms can be pretty sexy.

Fast-forward to Monday, when Sushma walked in.

She was actually a young woman I’d only previously seen in this excerpt in Chapter Four of Fast Lane:

Sushma wasn’t what you’d call an imposing woman. She stood barely five feet tall, but with her fully fleshed-out curves, there was a whole lot of sexy packed onto her frame. She had dark olive skin and a heart-shaped face dominated by round eyes with long lashes that made her look like Bambi when she blinked.

I’m such a doofus. If I had had one of my official Fast Lane book marks with me, I could have given it to her and hoped she would become a ManWARrior and a reader. Who knows? Maybe she still will.

Anyway, seeing her made my day. Well, the Paul McCartney concert at Wrigley Field that started an hour later was pretty good, too.

But I didn’t make up Paul McCartney.