Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. I loved dressing up as a kid and going trick-or-treating. As a college student and later as a young adult I loved dressing up and going to The Castro for their out-of-control street party. When I had my son I loved dressing him up and taking him to one Halloween event after another (I still love that part). But it wasn't until right after filing for divorce years ago that Halloween became a right of passage for me.
It was maybe a week before Halloween and about a month after my husband had moved out that I found myself sitting at Starbucks with my friend Brenda. I was so stressed and drained from the hell that I had been living through for the last year. I confessed to her that what I really wanted was to just go out and date and have fun again.
She just lit up. "Really!" She exclaimed. "Oh, I'm so glad to hear you say that! There's a Halloween party this Saturday and lots of single guys will be there. You're coming with me and I'm taking you to Camouflage right now to buy you a costume."
Okay, so a couple things you should know in order to appreciate the significance of this offer. One is that she wasn't just offering to help ease me back into the world of dating but she also was letting me know that she wasn't going to allow the financial mess my ex had left me with be a hindrance. The other is that Camouflage is the real store that I would later base Dena's fictional shop, Guilty Pleasures, on. Yes, Camouflage sells Halloween costumes but they are not innocent.
And considering what had been going on in my life it really was what the doctor ordered. We left Starbucks right then and there and when we walked in the door of Camouflage I spotted the owner, Joan, who happens to be a friend of my mother (my mother isn't exactly puritanical herself). She greeted me and then I explained exactly what I was doing there. "I'm going through a divorce," I said, "and this weekend I'll be attending a party as a single woman for the first time in years. I need a costume but if it requires a matching thong it's too short."
Joan actually kept the store open an extra hour for me so I could find the perfect costume that didn't require matching underwear. In the end we ended up with a nurse's costume along with a pair of white stripper-shoes. Despite its kitsch factor the dress and shoes were pretty high quality and cost Brenda well over $100. But she insisted that was the one I should wear and while stubbornly refusing to listen to my protests she bought it for me.
The next day I told my friend Shawn all about it. Shawn was elated and she insisted that she use her skills as a professional make-up artist to give me a make-over right before the party.
As it turns out the party was fantastic. For the first time in years I was the belle of the ball and I did meet someone there who I dated for several months (with the understanding that we were just having fun which was EXACTLY what I had been looking for).
But it's not the men who I met that night who made that Halloween special. It was my friends. Brenda who invested money in giving me a much needed night out, Joan, who stayed at work late just so I could get my costume, Shawn who took time out of her extremely hectic schedule to make me look fabulously-vampy, and of course my mother who offered to take my son overnight, they are the ones who I always think of when I recall that night. A few weeks later the mom's group I used to attend with my son got me a gift certificate for Victoria Secret because they knew I was broke and missed shopping there. These women were there for me in all the most important girly ways. I don't know how I would have gotten through that time without them.
So now every Halloween I put on something sexy and go out with my friends. They are the ones who have made my favorite holiday truly spectacular.
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
How Men Can Learn From Nordstrom
When I was in college I earned my living as a salesperson and then later as a manager at Nordstrom. Oddly enough I think I learned as much on the sales floor as I did in the classrooms. One thing Nordstrom teaches all of its employees is to always under-promise and over-deliver. In other words if a salesperson thinks she can probably get the alterations department to have a dress ready for a customer by Thursday she's supposed to tell the customer that she'll have it ready for her on Friday or Saturday. Not only does that give the salesperson a degree of wiggle-room but when she DOES call the customer on Thursday to tell her that the dress is ready the customer will love her for it. She may even decide to make that salesperson her personal shopper for the rest of the conceivable future.
It's a common sense strategy. So why don't men use that strategy within the dating world? As a single woman it's not uncommon that I come across men who claim to have the power to fix all my problems. Amazingly it doesn't seem to matter what the problem is. If I want to go to an event that's sold out they can get me in. If I have a problem with my career they have the skills or connections to solve it. Car problems? They know how to fix it.
Except they don't and they can't. It blows me away how many guys tell you confidently that they posses mad skills that they simply don't have. Perhaps they think the girl is going to sleep with them before she figures it out but that's not usually the way it works. Besides, it's not like they stop over-promising once they're in a relationship. Ask any woman whose husband's told her he's going to landscape the backyard and she'll pretty much back me up. For the sake of political correctness I'd like to say that both sexes engage in this behavior but that's just not the case. While it's true that a lot of high-maintenance women honestly believe they're low maintenance and will tell their significant others as much it is the very rare woman who will claim to be able to fix things that she can't fix. That's totally a guy thing.
And I can't figure out why so many guys do it. Don't they realize that they're setting themselves up for a fight and/or rejection? Women know that not every man is "handy." We're cool with that. We can hire a handyman, we don't necessarily need to date one. But we have a much harder time being "cool" with the guy who thinks he's handy but really, really isn't. Because by the time Mr. I-Think-I'm-Handy-But-I'm-Not has torn something apart in order to "fix it," the problem has grown to a (financially) cataclysmic size.
And as I indicated the problem is pervasive. It goes way beyond the guy who thinks he can fix a DVD player. A man who has been unemployed for the last two years will offer to give advice on how to write the perfect resume to the cute blonde he meets in the unemployment line. If she's really cute then he will probably "realize," that he has a connection who can get her a job in her field of choice. The irony of receiving this offer from someone who can't even get an interview for himself will be lost on him.
And what these guys don't seem to understand is that we women know they can't do everything they say they can do and when they over-promise we are in the difficult position of wanting to tell them that they don't have the capabilities needed to deliver without bashing their delicate egos.
So guys, next time you see a cute girl dealing with car problems don't offer to fix it if you don't know how to fix it. Instead give her the name of your mechanic and let her use your AAA card. If the mechanic is your brother and you know he'll give her a ten percent discount tell her you can get her a five percent discount and surprise her later with the truth. If you start under-promising and over-delivering the woman may very well find you every bit as irresistible as a sales sign hanging over the designer shoe department of their favorite Nordstrom. And that's saying something.
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
It's a common sense strategy. So why don't men use that strategy within the dating world? As a single woman it's not uncommon that I come across men who claim to have the power to fix all my problems. Amazingly it doesn't seem to matter what the problem is. If I want to go to an event that's sold out they can get me in. If I have a problem with my career they have the skills or connections to solve it. Car problems? They know how to fix it.
Except they don't and they can't. It blows me away how many guys tell you confidently that they posses mad skills that they simply don't have. Perhaps they think the girl is going to sleep with them before she figures it out but that's not usually the way it works. Besides, it's not like they stop over-promising once they're in a relationship. Ask any woman whose husband's told her he's going to landscape the backyard and she'll pretty much back me up. For the sake of political correctness I'd like to say that both sexes engage in this behavior but that's just not the case. While it's true that a lot of high-maintenance women honestly believe they're low maintenance and will tell their significant others as much it is the very rare woman who will claim to be able to fix things that she can't fix. That's totally a guy thing.
And I can't figure out why so many guys do it. Don't they realize that they're setting themselves up for a fight and/or rejection? Women know that not every man is "handy." We're cool with that. We can hire a handyman, we don't necessarily need to date one. But we have a much harder time being "cool" with the guy who thinks he's handy but really, really isn't. Because by the time Mr. I-Think-I'm-Handy-But-I'm-Not has torn something apart in order to "fix it," the problem has grown to a (financially) cataclysmic size.
And as I indicated the problem is pervasive. It goes way beyond the guy who thinks he can fix a DVD player. A man who has been unemployed for the last two years will offer to give advice on how to write the perfect resume to the cute blonde he meets in the unemployment line. If she's really cute then he will probably "realize," that he has a connection who can get her a job in her field of choice. The irony of receiving this offer from someone who can't even get an interview for himself will be lost on him.
And what these guys don't seem to understand is that we women know they can't do everything they say they can do and when they over-promise we are in the difficult position of wanting to tell them that they don't have the capabilities needed to deliver without bashing their delicate egos.
So guys, next time you see a cute girl dealing with car problems don't offer to fix it if you don't know how to fix it. Instead give her the name of your mechanic and let her use your AAA card. If the mechanic is your brother and you know he'll give her a ten percent discount tell her you can get her a five percent discount and surprise her later with the truth. If you start under-promising and over-delivering the woman may very well find you every bit as irresistible as a sales sign hanging over the designer shoe department of their favorite Nordstrom. And that's saying something.
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Today's Shocker: There's Sugar In Your Cereal!
Has anyone heard about the controversy over the "Smart Choice" food labels? The FDA and a few nutrition-conscious-consumer-rights groups are freaking out because Kellogg's put a "Smart Choice" food label on their boxes of Fruit Loops. Apparently Fruit Loops aren't healthy. Who knew?
Well everybody knew, obviously. I seriously doubt there are a lot of people in the world who decided to make their New Year's Resolution: To be healthy by eating more Fruit Loops. So I suppose in the interest of preserving our very loosely enforced laws in regards to false advertising we should probably make Kellogg's and other producers of high sugar foods take the Smart Choice label off. But the FDA and the before mentioned advocacy groups want to take it a step further. They are considering a uniformed labeling system for which corporate participation might possibly be voluntary but could conceivably be mandatory. This labeling system would have certain colored dots or circles for foods high in sugar, another color for foods high in fat and so on.
I'm assuming that all these dots will have words inside them saying things like "high sugar," and "high fat," because if I have to remember that blue stands for corn syrup I'm pretty much sunk.
But wait! I don't have to remember anything! All I have to do is look at the nutritional information panel THAT IS ALREADY THERE and read what the sugar content is! How lucky is that!
As you've probably noticed, I'm being a bit sarcastic but I really think that this food labeling thing the FDA is being pushed to adopt will not be useful and be rather difficult to enforce. I don't think people eat Cocoa Puffs because they think they're healthy or because they are stupid enough to think they're low in sugar. I think they eat them because they taste good and they want to treat themselves. Now it's true that some people like to treat themselves all the time but I don't think a blue dot is going to change that. It might not be a bad idea to make nutrition a required class for kids in school and perhaps the schools those kids attend could send leaflets home with the parents a few times a year talking about what foods might help their children focus and help them avoid health problems. I can't even argue with the way some of the chain restaurants now have calorie counts next to every menu option. Yes, it drives me nuts when I go out to enjoy a decadent meal and then find myself staring at my menu only to discover that the dish I was planning on eating contains 1000 calories but it does make me rethink ordering it. However the difference between a restaurant and a product that you buy in the supermarket is that unless somebody lists the nutritional information about the dishes you might be ordering at a restaurant you don't know what it is but if you buy a comparable frozen dinner at Safeway all you have to do is turn over the box and it's all there.
I know that the FDA and the consumer groups mean well but I just don't believe this so-called "obesity epidemic," is rooted in the extreme stupidity of the American populace and I find this call for a color coded circle system to be as silly as Coca Cola's CEO's apparent fear that Michelle Obama's call for children to consume less sugar is going to negatively affect his company's sales.
I do believe in encouraging accountability but at some point we just have to allow people to make their own mistakes. Now tonight I'm going to stop at See's Candy and get myself a dark chocolate Butterchew and if anyone tells me how many calories are in it I will hunt them down and shoot them.
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
Well everybody knew, obviously. I seriously doubt there are a lot of people in the world who decided to make their New Year's Resolution: To be healthy by eating more Fruit Loops. So I suppose in the interest of preserving our very loosely enforced laws in regards to false advertising we should probably make Kellogg's and other producers of high sugar foods take the Smart Choice label off. But the FDA and the before mentioned advocacy groups want to take it a step further. They are considering a uniformed labeling system for which corporate participation might possibly be voluntary but could conceivably be mandatory. This labeling system would have certain colored dots or circles for foods high in sugar, another color for foods high in fat and so on.
I'm assuming that all these dots will have words inside them saying things like "high sugar," and "high fat," because if I have to remember that blue stands for corn syrup I'm pretty much sunk.
But wait! I don't have to remember anything! All I have to do is look at the nutritional information panel THAT IS ALREADY THERE and read what the sugar content is! How lucky is that!
As you've probably noticed, I'm being a bit sarcastic but I really think that this food labeling thing the FDA is being pushed to adopt will not be useful and be rather difficult to enforce. I don't think people eat Cocoa Puffs because they think they're healthy or because they are stupid enough to think they're low in sugar. I think they eat them because they taste good and they want to treat themselves. Now it's true that some people like to treat themselves all the time but I don't think a blue dot is going to change that. It might not be a bad idea to make nutrition a required class for kids in school and perhaps the schools those kids attend could send leaflets home with the parents a few times a year talking about what foods might help their children focus and help them avoid health problems. I can't even argue with the way some of the chain restaurants now have calorie counts next to every menu option. Yes, it drives me nuts when I go out to enjoy a decadent meal and then find myself staring at my menu only to discover that the dish I was planning on eating contains 1000 calories but it does make me rethink ordering it. However the difference between a restaurant and a product that you buy in the supermarket is that unless somebody lists the nutritional information about the dishes you might be ordering at a restaurant you don't know what it is but if you buy a comparable frozen dinner at Safeway all you have to do is turn over the box and it's all there.
I know that the FDA and the consumer groups mean well but I just don't believe this so-called "obesity epidemic," is rooted in the extreme stupidity of the American populace and I find this call for a color coded circle system to be as silly as Coca Cola's CEO's apparent fear that Michelle Obama's call for children to consume less sugar is going to negatively affect his company's sales.
I do believe in encouraging accountability but at some point we just have to allow people to make their own mistakes. Now tonight I'm going to stop at See's Candy and get myself a dark chocolate Butterchew and if anyone tells me how many calories are in it I will hunt them down and shoot them.
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Wild Things Might Need Prozac
I saw the Where The Wild Things Are with my son this weekend. I'm not sure I would recommend that other parents bring their children to it. It's dark and splenetic but very rarely joyful or whimsical. In the book, Max, the little boy in the center of it all, is a typical moody six-year old (with an abnormally fabulous imagination) who misbehaves. In the movie Max is a 9 year old who has Issues (the capital I is intentional). There is no doubt in my mind that if the cinematic version of Max existed his doctors would want him medicated. And that's why the movie made me uncomfortable. My son isn't really like Max although there were aspects of him that were too intimately familiar. The somewhat manic energy, the impulse control issue, the neediness, even the amazingly unique way he used his imagination felt familiar. Fortunately for me my son hasn't exhibited the kind of anger that this Max exhibited in the home although he came close at times in the classroom.
I'm fairly sure that ALL parents of special needs children, particularly parents of a children with behavioral issues, will find themselves squirming in their seats as the movie plays out. Single mothers in particular will relate to how difficult dating can be when you have a family with these kinds of challenges. Again, I'm fortunate in that my son has never had an problem with the prospect of a stepfather. In fact he wishes I'd hurry up and provide him with one. Still, the scene that causes Max to run away (yes, run away, none of this harmless go-to-your-room stuff from the book) was disconcerting and upsetting. You feel the mother's pain as acutely as you feel the child's.
When Max gets to his magical world of monsters things don't really get better. Each monster seems to represent either an aspect of Max's personality or a figure from his real life. Nobody is happy. Carol is the destructive, angry, frightened, lonely monster that Max relates to best. Max recognizes that Carol's behavior is wrong and perhaps more importantly WHY it's wrong. He even understands that Carol's anger and destructiveness stems from fear. Yet while it feels clear (at least to me) that Max sees the obvious parallels between Carol's issues and his own I'm not at all sure that Max is more able to control his violent impulses better by the end of the movie than he was at the beginning.
I can't knock the movie. It's interesting and thought provoking but it's not fun and that's why I sort of wish the director Spike Jonze had found a different vehicle for the story he wanted to tell. There's no denying that the Max from the book of my childhood is mischievous but he is also always fun and the story is charming. The very fact that I (and many professional critics) are saying that this is not a movie geared for kids is a problem. It's bad enough that they're making superhero movies that are so dark that taking a Batman-obsessed 8 year-old to see them is akin to child abuse. But Where The Wild Things Are is a book for preschoolers! It's like if they adapted And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street and made it a movie about a child who suffers from psychotic delusions.
So if the movie had a different title I might have loved it. But as it is...
Well, I guess it comes down to this: At no point has anyone READ Where The Wild Things Are and then said, "Wow, that was a deep and disturbing depiction of a troubled childhood." That's not a claim the movie will be able to make.
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
I'm fairly sure that ALL parents of special needs children, particularly parents of a children with behavioral issues, will find themselves squirming in their seats as the movie plays out. Single mothers in particular will relate to how difficult dating can be when you have a family with these kinds of challenges. Again, I'm fortunate in that my son has never had an problem with the prospect of a stepfather. In fact he wishes I'd hurry up and provide him with one. Still, the scene that causes Max to run away (yes, run away, none of this harmless go-to-your-room stuff from the book) was disconcerting and upsetting. You feel the mother's pain as acutely as you feel the child's.
When Max gets to his magical world of monsters things don't really get better. Each monster seems to represent either an aspect of Max's personality or a figure from his real life. Nobody is happy. Carol is the destructive, angry, frightened, lonely monster that Max relates to best. Max recognizes that Carol's behavior is wrong and perhaps more importantly WHY it's wrong. He even understands that Carol's anger and destructiveness stems from fear. Yet while it feels clear (at least to me) that Max sees the obvious parallels between Carol's issues and his own I'm not at all sure that Max is more able to control his violent impulses better by the end of the movie than he was at the beginning.
I can't knock the movie. It's interesting and thought provoking but it's not fun and that's why I sort of wish the director Spike Jonze had found a different vehicle for the story he wanted to tell. There's no denying that the Max from the book of my childhood is mischievous but he is also always fun and the story is charming. The very fact that I (and many professional critics) are saying that this is not a movie geared for kids is a problem. It's bad enough that they're making superhero movies that are so dark that taking a Batman-obsessed 8 year-old to see them is akin to child abuse. But Where The Wild Things Are is a book for preschoolers! It's like if they adapted And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street and made it a movie about a child who suffers from psychotic delusions.
So if the movie had a different title I might have loved it. But as it is...
Well, I guess it comes down to this: At no point has anyone READ Where The Wild Things Are and then said, "Wow, that was a deep and disturbing depiction of a troubled childhood." That's not a claim the movie will be able to make.
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
Thursday, October 15, 2009
So What's Next?
So now that my latest round of edits are done I can come back to the land of the living. I now have a whole host of career decisions to make. My publisher has expressed interest in yet another Sophie book and have asked if in addition to that I'd be interested in writing a young adult novel (YA) and/or a romantic suspense. I'll be honest, the YA sounds the most interesting to me. I've never written a real romance and I'm not sure if I could pull it off in a manner that would appeal to the typical romance-readership. But YA...
The original request was for me to write a YA version of Sophie but I turned that down. I just feel like writing Sophie in two different time periods at the same time would be too complicated and it would ruin the back story for the current series. But I could do a Sophie-like YA series where the characters are in high school. Of course at the moment the entire YA market is almost entirely devoted to paranormal fiction. I have always wanted to write a fantasy but I sort of feel like the complete saturation of the market may mean the death of it in the near future. How many vampire books can a teen read? Of course I say this knowing that I'll be tapping into HBO on demand this weekend so I can watch another episode of True Blood.
Anyway, if I did write a fantasy I wouldn't make it about vampires. There's simply nothing left to be said on that subject that thousands of other authors haven't said before. But perhaps a YA Sophiesque series that is similar to Lust, Loathing And A Little Lip Gloss? In other words I could write a mystery with just the slightest hint of paranormal stuff. What do you guys think? If I were to write a YA what would you hope to find in it? And would you even want a romantic suspense from me? Keep in mind that my writing tends to be somewhat irreverent in tone. On the other hand it would give me the opportunity to write a lot moresex scenes. That's always a good thing ; )
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
The original request was for me to write a YA version of Sophie but I turned that down. I just feel like writing Sophie in two different time periods at the same time would be too complicated and it would ruin the back story for the current series. But I could do a Sophie-like YA series where the characters are in high school. Of course at the moment the entire YA market is almost entirely devoted to paranormal fiction. I have always wanted to write a fantasy but I sort of feel like the complete saturation of the market may mean the death of it in the near future. How many vampire books can a teen read? Of course I say this knowing that I'll be tapping into HBO on demand this weekend so I can watch another episode of True Blood.
Anyway, if I did write a fantasy I wouldn't make it about vampires. There's simply nothing left to be said on that subject that thousands of other authors haven't said before. But perhaps a YA Sophiesque series that is similar to Lust, Loathing And A Little Lip Gloss? In other words I could write a mystery with just the slightest hint of paranormal stuff. What do you guys think? If I were to write a YA what would you hope to find in it? And would you even want a romantic suspense from me? Keep in mind that my writing tends to be somewhat irreverent in tone. On the other hand it would give me the opportunity to write a lot moresex scenes. That's always a good thing ; )
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
My Secret Fashion Faux Pas
So for those of you who don't know, the next Sophie book is titled Vows, Vendettas & A Little Black Dress. It's a fun, kicky title that is in keeping with all my other Sophie titles, including the last release, Lust, Loathing And A Little Lip Gloss.
The difference is that while I have at least 8 different shades of lip gloss in my make-up bag I don't have a single LBD.
I know. It's shameful. Every woman who can afford food and indoor plumbing practically has an obligation to have a LBD hanging in her closet even if it's the only half-way decent thing in there. But the last little black dress I had was a maternity dress...and my son's ten years old. I didn't intentionally give up on the must-have-garment although I admit that my love of black suffered a few knocks when I was going to college in New York. I distinctly remember sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of winter with another woman from California during my last few months as resident of the city that never sleeps. I was gazing out the window when I finally said what I had been thinking for over a month, "The sky is gray, the buildings are gray and everybody's wearing black. There's no color! This city can be so depressing!" My friend nodded and scooted forward. "It's true," she agreed, "but you can't think about it. You won't be able to make it here if you think about it."
Well I didn't make it in New York. I need my pastel Victorians and salmon colored store fronts. I need evergreens and people who don't always hide under black overcoats. Of course I love New York in the Fall and Spring (I'll skip the humidity of the summer, thank you) but I can't stand New York in the winter and for the last few months of that winter, which ended up being my last winter there, I wore pinks and purples and violent orange shades just so I could be the one bright spot among my black and gray-clad New York friends.
But now that I'm in California what's my excuse? I don't have one. And I'm planning on going on a book tour to promote this next novel and it seems appropriate that I wear a LBD. So after I'm done with my most recent round of edits I'll be hitting the stores. I may buy one black dress or I may buy five but I'll be damned if Sophie is going to get a LBD before me. It's the principal of the thing.
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
The difference is that while I have at least 8 different shades of lip gloss in my make-up bag I don't have a single LBD.
I know. It's shameful. Every woman who can afford food and indoor plumbing practically has an obligation to have a LBD hanging in her closet even if it's the only half-way decent thing in there. But the last little black dress I had was a maternity dress...and my son's ten years old. I didn't intentionally give up on the must-have-garment although I admit that my love of black suffered a few knocks when I was going to college in New York. I distinctly remember sitting in a coffee shop in the middle of winter with another woman from California during my last few months as resident of the city that never sleeps. I was gazing out the window when I finally said what I had been thinking for over a month, "The sky is gray, the buildings are gray and everybody's wearing black. There's no color! This city can be so depressing!" My friend nodded and scooted forward. "It's true," she agreed, "but you can't think about it. You won't be able to make it here if you think about it."
Well I didn't make it in New York. I need my pastel Victorians and salmon colored store fronts. I need evergreens and people who don't always hide under black overcoats. Of course I love New York in the Fall and Spring (I'll skip the humidity of the summer, thank you) but I can't stand New York in the winter and for the last few months of that winter, which ended up being my last winter there, I wore pinks and purples and violent orange shades just so I could be the one bright spot among my black and gray-clad New York friends.
But now that I'm in California what's my excuse? I don't have one. And I'm planning on going on a book tour to promote this next novel and it seems appropriate that I wear a LBD. So after I'm done with my most recent round of edits I'll be hitting the stores. I may buy one black dress or I may buy five but I'll be damned if Sophie is going to get a LBD before me. It's the principal of the thing.
Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Murder Mystery Series,
and
SO MUCH FOR MY HAPPY ENDING
Order LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS on Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com today!
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