Last night I punked out on my critique group and went to a
book signing by Diana
Wagman, a novelist who lives in Los Angeles. I have sat in on two panel
discussions at the Los Angeles Times Festival of
Books in which Diana was a
panel member and enjoyed both of them. Her latest novel, The
Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets, came out in the last month or so and has
received some good reviews (click
here and here).
I have been to book signings before, both times for authors that I enjoy reading. They were both disappointing. The authors signed books and that was it. This is the first time the author did a reading and took questions from the audience. It was well worth the time, and I feel only a little guilty about the critique group.
A member of the audience asked Diana why she gave the villain in her latest novel a pet iguana. She answered, in part, that it was a way of humanizing him. This piqued my interest because I have been unable to add some human aspect to my own villain in Rules for Giving. I want to give her some sort of redeeming trait so that she doesn’t come off as a total bitch. I followed up with another question about humanizing villains and she encouraged me to look a little deeper.
Then, as I was watching Diana sign copies of her novel, it occurred to me. My villain is a hard-nosed businesswoman. She is not above using anything at her disposal—ethics be damned—to get what she wants. I am going to give her the handwriting of a teenage girl, kind of loopy, with little hearts to dot her Is. I might even give her a propensity for using girlie pens with feathers or designs.
At first I thought it was out of character, but I know a woman who is a horse trainer (actually it is more like she trains the riders) and most of her time is spent wearing pointed boots and a cowboy hat. She drives a big-ass pickup truck to haul her horse trailer. She is a real hayseed. When she is away from the stables, though, she wears little girlie golf hats adorned with sequins. She has a collection of them. She explains that it is her way of reclaiming her femininity.
Diana’s comment about her villains often being in over their head game me some other things to think about in relation to bad guys. We’ll discuss it tomorrow.
See ya’ later.
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