Admittedly, I have not been actively blogging. That’s because I’ve been back to writing. It’s been a pleasure. What with building and planting and gardening, there’s been precious little “writing-headspace” in my life for a couple of years. This winter, the frenzy has diminished enough that I’ve been spending lovely days, in front of the fire, banging away on the laptop. It’s been fun. And I expect that by fall, there’ll be at least one book launch, and that’s fun, too.

Every now and again we look up from our activities and realize that this, this moment, this experience, is why we’ve done all of it, anyway. We’re here, now.

My current book project has something I’ve not done before. It has actual villains. And that’s a different kind of thread for me. But this week, I read an opinion piece in the Washington Post that set me back a bit. It was about laziness in writing about villains. The author is a woman who suffers from a facial deformity. Her complaint is that movies and books frequently use non-standard appearances–disabilities/scars/disfigurement–in a short cut to describe villains. To her, it adds insult to injury, and increases the levels of suspicion she encounters in her day to day.

Nailed. I’d been doing just that. It’s easy in a manuscript of Prohibition Era thugs to make the villain visibly different. That way, one needn’t tediously show, by his actions, just how depraved he is. And it is lazy. It reflects a “lookism” world view that I generally reject. So this week, I’ve been re-writing. My villain is still a thug, but no longer an ugly thug. I appreciate the viewpoint and it’s timely connection to my own project.

I think the comeuppance will result in a better book, one that better reflects my values.