OOPS!

First, a brief word from our sponsor:

Before I forget (and I forgot yesterday), do visit my blog post here and enter the contest to win a copy of my book, Freezer Burn. Loser gets two copies – sorry, just couldn't stop that Marx Brother's moment. Seriously, write 100 words to accompany the picture of the two scary women and submit in the comments. I know you can do it. Look into their beady eyes, scan the barren scene around them, let your mind wander… Yes, Nick Valentino, I'm talking to you. Give us a quick beat-down in steampunk.

Now, on to today's topic:

Klutz is defined as either a clumsy, awkward person, or a blockhead. I'd rather think of it as clumsy, since I sometimes consider myself a klutz; unfortunately, I also read that klutz originates from the Yiddish word "klots" which means "wooden beam." Hmm. Like a block. Head.

I may be clumsy, but I'm no wooden beam.


I'm not the constant klutz. I have moments of great dexterity. I spent some time dancing, from ballet to Lindy Hop, I've got a good riding seat, and I can embroider, so I clearly have motor skills.


Sometimes not all the pistons are firing, though.


Like the day I tossed the Tide Detergent ball into the washer, where it careened off the sides of the tub and caused some kind of physical law to be enacted, whereby all of the oozing liquid in the ball shot straight up in the air, landing on my head. The lessons here were: 1) drop the ball in, don't throw it; and 2) Tide is not a good shampoo.

Today was another of those days. It began with my deodorant and without my glasses. I got my new deodorant out of the medicine cabinet and opened the lid. There was a seal on the new container.


Without my glasses, I am marginally sighted, but the arrows were clear enough, and they pointed toward an edge, so I spent five minutes and two fingernails trying to pry the plastic off the indicated end. After a bit, I looked at the seal and saw a big black line on the opposite end and something blurry in the middle. I reached toward the line; the seal was loose on this end and the whole thing pulled off like buttah.




Apparently, the arrows were directing me to pull in their direction. Who knew?

But wait, there's more. I started turning the knob to get the gel up out of the container. I turned and I turned and I turned, but nothing was happening. Have you ever gotten so involved with the process that you forgot to look at the results? I kept turning the knob and looking at the stick in the middle without watching the top. Eventually, I looked up to see a good quarter-inch of standing goo coming out, slowly bending to the side. It was clear. It was fragrant. It was way too much goo.

A smart chickie would wipe the top with a tissue and begin again. A cheap chickie would try to dab the goo at her armpits and try not to get too slimy. Guess what I tried? There is, by the way, no efficient way to apply a mound of goo to your armpit without getting slimy. The goo dried, so I'm just a little sticky now, in a residual kind of way, much the way I felt residually klutzy for the rest of the day.

It's not much of an incident, but it got me to thinking about the characters we create who are clumsy. The cliché is that they are clumsy but endearing – how many characters are clumsy and annoying? Lucy (of I Love Lucy) is the first person who pops into my head at the endearing end of the spectrum, and Inspector Clouseau is at the annoying end. In between are people like Chevy Chase in his SNL days, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton.

Who are your favorite klutzes, real or fictional? Do you like them because they're endearing, or annoying?

Where in the world is Peri Minneopa?

I thought I'd try a new tactic today and see if a trendy cultural reference might get me hits from the outside world.

Let me first talk about the protagonist in my novel, Peri Minneopa. There's a general rule about making your characters' names easy to pronounce, and I broke this rule for a reason.

My girlfriend, Robin, and I had been joking about a detective for our generation – Peri Menopause, Private Eye, who solved every case by crying, eating chocolate, and bitch-slapping people until someone confessed. I'm sure you can picture her:

"I'm having a hot flash! Tell me the truth or I'll rip your lungs from your chest and use them as balloon animals!"

When I started writing Freezer Burn, I wanted a fully-dimensional character, but I liked the joke about peri-menopause, so I found a word that could be mispronounced in a bunch of ways, including 'menopause', and made it a running joke throughout the story. As it happens, Minneopa is a Dakota word, meaning "water falling twice", and it's the name of a state park in Minnesota.

So Peri the person grew from her last name.

Peri's back story is that her family is Norwegian and moved to California from Minnesota before she was born. She's tall and blonde, and a 'salt of the earth' kind of girl. I picture her having a hearty laugh, a quick mind, and the ability to enjoy fine things without needing them. Most of the time, she does her shopping at Target, but sometimes she splurges at Macy's. I see her as a combination of Murphy Brown and I Love Lucy.

In Freezer Burn, she fits into her world fairly well, even though it doesn't always move according to her plans. Even when she has to step out of her comfort zone and deal with a rich heir living in the Hollywood hills, she can handle it because she doesn't have to fit into his world. In this story, Peri has some physical discomfort, but she is emotionally confident.

Now then – I've started my next Peri book, and I've decided to make her uncomfortable in her own skin by taking her into the country club set. I want her to have to infiltrate a group of very well-off, if not outright rich, women to find a killer and a conspiracy. Not only is this going to take Peri into new territory, it'll be an eye-opener for me as well.

Being a horsewoman, my wardrobe consists of jeans and t-shirts. I get my Aura jeans from an on-line store, and purchase my shirts from either Target or the Eddie Bauer outlet. When I need to dress up, I head to Coldwater Creek. So I need to meet some country club gals to accurately portray them.

One of the things I'm doing is hanging around the "Real Housewives" shows on Bravo. They started in Orange County, went to New York City, and just started in New Jersey. The interesting thing about these shows is that I can tune in to about 5 minutes, read the website, and pretty much know what happened in an episode. This is good, because I can't stand to be with these gals for much more than 5-minute increments.

And the New Jersey housewives scare me – they keep showing a clip of the short-haired chick saying, in her pronounced Joisey accent, "Lemme tell yew about my fammly; we ahr as thick as thieves." Honest, I wet myself a little when I see her shaking her finger at the camera.

Now, I know that in reality TV, everything is played up as drama. Otherwise, who'd watch? But what I'm trying to do is listen for the way they talk, what they talk about, how they look. I need to describe the uber-groomed, ultra-manicured, super-coifed woman who treats Nordstrom's like it's Walmart.

I'm also signing up to attend a lot of women's club events in my town, in case the wealthy show up to "lend support to a cause." If I sound like I have a little bit of the Po' Gal's Prejudice, I don't. I just know I don't travel in their circles.

See, I wanted Peri to discover a group of bored housewives who are up to no good. My writer's mind began to work… where would I find bored housewives? Not at my level, where women do their own housecleaning, cooking, and possibly work outside the home for part of the day. What's that saying about idle hands?

So my question of the day is for writers: when you're creating characters, do you stick with what you know, or do you reach into other cultures/ethnicities/socio-economic groups? How do you do your research?