CBS News Anchor Talks about Bullying On-Air

This is anchorwoman Jennifer Livingston of the CBS affiliate WKBT in LA Crosse, Wisconsin. In this video she confronts a cyber-bully who sent her an email telling her she was no role model because she was "obese." The man talked only about her looks, her outward appearance, she says in this video, and not about what is inside her.  She reminds us that October is Anti-Bullying Month and she reaches out to all kids who might be bullied because of their size, sexual preference, disability, etc. She encourages them to reject their bullies' definitions of them.

I love that her approach is nether strident nor a plea for acceptance.  She is frank and honest and sharp in her words.  She does not become an "emotional female" when discussing her weight; in fact, she does not discuss her weight at all. That is exactly her point: her weight is not a topic of discussion or speculation for anyone outside her family or circle of friends. Case closed.

Another very good point she makes is that attitudes like this have a trickle down effect.  When someone in your household voices the opinion that fat people are bad (or gay people are bad or the disabled, and so on), then the members of that household internalize the opinion and take it away with them.  They might go to school and see someone who is overweight, call them fat, call them bad. She turns the tables on her cyber-bully and tells him that he is no role model if this is how he talks about other people.

Like most women, I am sensitive to weight(y) issues and I am always watching certain industries in which women's weight is particularly noted, like on-air journalism, acting, modeling, and so on. I'd like to believe my characters in FAT GIRLS IN LA would respond like Jennifer Livingston does.  She not only takes the high road with dignity but delivers her message to everyone, not just her bully.

There will be a Fat Girls book 2!

For those of you who have enjoyed ALL ABOUT VEE, which is the first title in my FAT GIRLS IN LA trilogy (and if you haven't, why not give it a try? here!), I just wanted you to know that there is a second book in the series.  It's called THE RISE OF GINNY and it will be out very soon.  Also, I'm currently working on book 3, called VIVA VAL!

If you couldn't tell, each book is about each of the Vees: Veronica, Ginny and Val.  Veronica, you know, is the actor.  Ginny is the writer and Val is the model.  Each of these books takes place sequentially so Ginny's story happens directly after Veronica's ends and Val's starts not long after Ginny's ends. And of course we get to see all of the girls in each of the books so we know how their lives continue.

I'm really having fun with Val!  I don't know what I'll do when her story is over.  More Vees, perhaps?  Who knows?  There is always (Vivian) Reed, the fourth Vee who came out to LA before Big Vee did. Might she have a story to tell? Hmmm....

Choosing character names

Ask any writer about the name of one of their characters and he or she will spend an hour talking your ear off about its genesis. It generally takes me a very long time to pick character names - sometimes I will have an idea but then I have to "vet" it:

- do I know anyone with that first or last name?
- what does the name mean in another language?
- is there a character from a more well-known book or person in popular culture that this will reference?
- and if so, is that a good or bad thing?
- how will this name fit in with the names of the character's family and friends?
- does the name begin with the same letter as any other character in the book?

That last consideration, believe it or not, is one of the most important things to me, personally.  I hate reading books in which many of the characters' names begin with the same letter and/or look similar on the page.  Even if they are pronounced very differently, names like Mary and Marie look an awful lot alike and when you're reading, your eyes may not make the distinction quickly.

When I chose to give my "Fat Girls in LA" characters names that began with the letter V, I knew that they all had to be different-looking on the page.  There's Veronica (also called Big Vee), Val, Virginia (called Ginny), and Vivian (called Reed). So Veronica is the longest name, Val the shortest and then the other two girls have nicknames that don't begin with V.  They are therefore very distinct on the page.

I also rarely choose to name characters after people I know very well (there will never be a Jay or a John or a Maurice or a Rosanne in my books unless there is a really important reason) and I rarely give someone an L name.  Inevitably, writers who name their characters something similar to their own names invite comparison to themselves.  Readers will want to know if that character is a stand-in for the writer herself.

Hint: ALL characters are stand-ins for the writer.

I recently read 2 books in which the character names were, in a word, lazy.  I could tell the writers did not put much effort into choosing the character names and as a result, I couldn't take the books seriously. Character names have to have their own backstory - you need to know what the character *is* called, what she *wants* to be called, what her nicknames might have been growing up, and so on.  All of that influences your character's personality and makes her a 3-dimensional person, someone we can believe is a real individual.

"Who does that fat girl think she is?"

That's the strange comment I've read on some reviews of my novel, ALL ABOUT VEE.  Perhaps not quite as harsh but certainly I've read comments that express that sentiment.

Why?  I always wonder.  Why would a reader be upset that my mc, Veronica May, a plus-size actress struggling in Hollywood, has confidence in herself?  Plenty of other characters in other books know they are good at something, whether it's acting or painting or sports. So what's the difference between them and Veronica?

Her size. 

There's an attitude among a lot of people that overweight women shouldn't be happy with themselves.  They should want to look thinner.  They should not like who they are.  They should feel inferior to others.  Many readers who pick up VEE expect that Veronica will be sad or have low self-esteem and that, over the course of the book, she will learn to love her body the way it is (or change it and then be happy and get the guy!). They don't expect that the problems she has in the book are ones that other people impose upon her.

I've often told readers how I came up with my story about Veronica and her friends, Val and Ginny, the original 800 page book that was called FAT GIRLS IN LA. I had been walking on my lunch hour in Beverly Hills and saw a lovely young woman waiting to cross the street.  The neighborhood was filled with agencies for film and TV and this girl was overweight.  I wondered if she was an actress looking for an agent - or maybe she was a model or a writer. I thought about who she might be, where she might have come from.

And I thought about being a fat girl in LA.  You can never be too thin in this town, no matter what your profession. Even if you're a writer and you're attractive and thin, they can promote you better than if you're not.  Everyone, it seems, wants to be thin here.  But what if you came from a town where no one cared?  What if you were really good at what you did but you also happened to be overweight?  Why should that matter?

Behold, the Vees were born.  Three plus-size gals from Arizona who were best friends and who wanted to make their lives more exciting so they moved to Hollywood.  Veronica was the actress and she got all the best roles in her small town - why shouldn't she be positive about her talent?  Why shouldn't she assume she could get roles here in LA? Ginny was the writer and Val was the model. They all suffered discrimination here.  Their friendship was tested.  Their self-confidence was challenged.

I think a lot of readers who have problems with Veronica's positive self-esteem have struggled with it themselves. They may want her to feel as they do and are disappointed that she likes herself the way she is.  They may have had people in their lives tell them they need to lose weight in order to be hired - or loved.  Make no mistake: Vee does not think she's the best at everything, that she's beautiful, that she should get every guy she meets.  That's the assumption readers place on her just because she's a good actress. She struggles too.  She just doesn't struggle with what you expect her to.

She's just like you.

Things I've Learned During Self-publishing (so far!)

1. First of all, the cool kids call it "indie" publishing and as we all know, when you stick the word "indie" in front of anything, its cachet is magnified a thousandfold.

2. Apparently, there was no Chapter 13 in my published novel, ALL ABOUT VEE.  Yes, it's true!  There's a Chapter 12 and a Chapter 14 but no 13.  This was due solely to human error (many humans' errors), not a superstition, although if it had been a superstition, that would have been pretty neat.

As we reformat the book to publish it as FAT GIRLS IN LA, I'm making changes, adding a little material here and there that I always wanted kept in.  So there will be a Chapter 13 in the new edition.

3. I only used one ellipsis in the entire novel of ALL ABOUT VEE.  Weird, huh?  An ellipsis is "..." Which I use all the time in my normal daily writing so it's truly bizarre there's only one in nearly 300 pages of text.

4. LOVE, MEG in Hungarian? Maybe!  When you're getting ready to re-launch, you need to regain control over all the material you own that's out there. Ninja Webmaster and I are always on the lookout for websites that have my ebooks listed so we can get them removed so we are constantly Googling, etc. But according to Goodreads, there was (or might have been) a Hungarian language version of MEG as an ebook and as a paperback.  They have ISBN numbers and everything!

New cover reveal: Vee's back!

...and she's bringing her friends!

Finally, we've got a little action going here on the blog.  It's been a long time percolating but we've got a brand new cover for the re-release of ALL ABOUT VEE, now titled FAT GIRLS IN LA, as I originally wanted it to be.  Check it out (thanks Ninja Webmaster for the redesign!):

We're all Fat Girls in LA - even the boys.

Vee will be released this month followed by...!  Nope!  Not gonna reveal that title yet!  You'll have to wait til December. Keep up to date with Vee and her friends on her Facebook page or her Twitter page and be one of the girls!

Upcoming books?

10, 9, 8, 7...

We're getting ready to launch.  Re-launch, that is.  My intrepid Ninja Webmaster is designing a brand new website and new book covers for the re-launch of 2 of my books plus several absolutely, never-seen-before new ones, including two sequels in my Fat Girls trilogy. Currently we are tweaking images and such - plus lots of technical stuff I don't know anything about.  We'll go to Amazon and other e-tailers online first but will hopefully have the books available for print as well. 

6, 5, 4...

And why am I doing this?  Well, first of all, I always felt like my novels, LOVE, MEG and ALL ABOUT VEE weren't given the opportunity to reach a wide audience.  Part of that was due to the very small marketing budget those books had- not my fault, not the books' faults, not the editor's or agent's fault. It's just the way traditional publishing works: only a select few books get the money spent on them. They are usually the ones whose authors received large advances so the publishers need to spend even more money on them to recoup that original outlay.  Those books are the ones which are expected to rake in the big bucks. 

Then there are "small" books like mine - "quiet" books that don't have big high-concept hooks - that don't receive big advances, big marketing budgets and are expected to do nothing.  Publishers throw these books into the mix and let them flounder on their own. If they make any money, hurrah!  If not, they go out-of-print.  Well, how many do you think fall into the former category?  Not many is right.  Mine fell into the latter and they went OOP and now, I have the rights back.

Another reason why I'm putting my e-books out online is that the market has changed an awful lot since I first got published.  The books I wrote after MEG and VEE were also "quiet" without high concept hooks and since MEG and VEE did not flourish, no one wanted these.  I disagree - I think readers want them.  I think people are hungry for good stories, regardless of whether they have a hook or not.  As a reader myself, I enjoy good characters and solid stories that entertain me. I have a Kindle and I want to load it up with books.  I think there are a lot of people out there like me.  And my books are for them.

Sure, I'm also writing books that do have "concepts" that I hope traditional publishing will want to put out but if not, I am creating an avenue directly to readers and I'll get them out there one way or another.

3, 2, 1...