April 2007 Archives

I do Google myself at times to get a feel what readers are saying, and I’ve learned that many of you appreciated the afterword I wrote for THE BORGIA BRIDE. (When I wrote early scenes in that novel, I thought, “Everyone’s going to think that I came up with the unbelievable, gruesome notion that Sancha’s grandfather kept a ‘museum’ of his mummified enemies.” Also, the Borgias’ behavior often strained credibility, so I wanted my readers to know that the more fantastic parts of the novel weren’t just the result of a histrionic imagination.)

Quite honestly, I was late delivering I, MONA LISA and didn’t have time to write an afterword again. So here’s a bit of “insider information,” if you will, about the way I put the story together.

So anyway, in 1981 I learned that I had sold my first book, an original STAR TREK novel (called MINDSHADOW – is it just me, or do most first novels contain the word “shadow” somewhere in the title?).

I immediately sat down and wrote another, DEMONS, and sold that one, too, then a TREK take-off on vampires, BLOODTHIRST (you may notice a bit of a dark streak in my fiction). The STAR TREK career took off pretty quickly, and by 1988, I was writing the novelizations for the movies.

So what does this have to do with Mary Sue?

I never planned to write historical fiction; it just happened.

In fact, the whole writing thing just happened. Sort of. But maybe there were hints in the fact that as a kid, I wrote my own Supergirl and Wonder Woman comic books, and lots of stories featuring characters from popular TV series. Of course, the real hero of my adolescent stories was always, always a feisty young girl who made the older (male) protagonist look like a schmuck. (Example: There are probably a handful of decrepit fellow Boomers out there who remember the Raymond Burr TV series IRONSIDE about a wheelchair-bound detective. I wrote a story in which Ironside can’t quite keep up with a spunky, also wheelchair-bound twelve-year-old girl who just happens to be better at solving crimes. He goes to her hospital bed to cheer her up --“It’s okay, little girl, life isn’t so awful without the use of legs” – and as thanks, she solves a case that’s been tormenting him for years.)