(Find out more about 3 tests I’ll use to guide the conversation in Women, Men, and Movies or just read on.)

The Story

A family struggles to live in a silence in a post-apocalyptic world where monsters hunt and kill based on noise.

Spoilers: I’ve done my best not to spoil anything major that wasn’t shown in the previews, but if you want to remain completely spoiler-free you may want to watch the movie first and come back.

Chasing Bechdel

(Does a (named) female character talk to another named female character about anything other than a man?)

We never hear any of the characters’ names, so technically A Quiet Place could never pass the Bechdel Test. Because there’s minimal spoken dialogue, though, and all five family members are named in the credits, I’ll treat each as a named character.

The family communicates mainly via sign language with subtitles. To keep it simple, unless it’s important, I haven’t split out sign language from spoken conversations. I did not count as conversations mere expressions, such as a nod or frown.

Who’s Talking To Whom

Women To Women:

The mother, Evelyn, talks to her daughter, Emily, once. They talk about:

• Marcus (Emily’s brother) being okay after Evelyn gives him medicine (1 line)

Men To Men:

The father, Lee, talks with son Marcus about:

• Lee’s relationship with daughter Emily
• Whether Lee can really protect the children
• When it’s safe to make noise or talk out loud
• Whether Marcus is safe

Lee talks to son Beau about:

• A toy rocket being too loud to keep

Women And Men:

Husband and wife Evelyn and Lee talk about:

• How Evelyn looks
• The upcoming birth of their fourth child
• The baby
• Where the children are
• Grief and guilt
• Whether they can protect their children
• The kids knowing how to survive

Children Emily and Beau talk about:

• Using a rocket to get away

Children Emily and Marcus talk about:

• Whether their dad will come and get them
• Being quiet

Evelyn (mom) and Marcus (son) talk about:

• Learning math
• That Lee (dad) will protect Marcus
• Marcus not wanting to go out fishing or outside with Lee
• Evelyn wanting Marcus  to be able to take care of himself and of her when she’s old

Lee (dad) and Emily (daughter) talk about:

• Radio parts and signals
• Emily’s hearing
• Staying out of his workshop
• Dinnertime
• Emily wanting to go with to learn survival skills
• Emily staying with and helping her mother
• Whether Emily’s safe
• That Lee loves Emily

Conclusion

A Quiet Place fails the Bechdel Test. Also, while there are few conversations at all in the movie, the least talking (verbal or non-verbal) occurs between the two female characters.

Women v. Sexy Lamps

(can a female character be replaced by a sexy lamp without affecting the plot?)

Both Evelyn (mom) and Emily (daughter) play active roles in the plot. Emily gives her littlest brother a forbidden toy in the beginning, setting the stage for much of the movie. She also takes off at a key moment, leaving her mother more vulnerable that she otherwise would be. And she later finds ways to fight the monsters.

Because Evelyn is very pregnant during most of the film, she’s sidelined for a lot of it. All the same, she teaches her children, she manages many challenging tasks in silence, and she takes actions that are pivotal to the plot.

Conclusion

A Quiet Place passes the Sexy Lamp Test.

Mako Mori

(does a female character have her own narrative arc that does not support a man’s story line?)

Evelyn:

A little after the midpoint of A Quiet Place, Evelyn tells her husband he has to protect the kids. Before that, she talks about her son Marcus needing to learn survival skills to protect and take care of her.

While she also does things to protect her children and works hard to care for her family, her dialogue seems to default to the male family members being more responsible for protection despite that the daughter, Emily, looks to be five or six years older than her brother Marcus.

At the end, Evelyn becomes more active in fighting the monsters.

Emily:

Emily starts out being engaged and active in protecting the family and surviving. She withdraws after a tragedy she partly contributes to. She reacts mostly with anger, and she fears her dad doesn’t love her.

By the end, however, she’s realized her dad does love her and rather than running away she fights.

Conclusion

I’m on the fence on whether the progression for Evelyn qualifies as a narrative arc. An arc requires growth and change.

While Evelyn is more active at the end, I’m not sure that comes from her growing and changing as a person rather than from a change in circumstance. For most of the movie she’s heavily pregnant, which limits what she can do. Also, I don’t quite believe that she sees the burden of protection as falling more on her husband and son overall, despite the screenwriters giving her lines that suggest it. We see her being very smart and capable throughout A Quiet Place, so it doesn’t feel like a significant change when she takes charge of the fight at the end.

Emily, though, changes both internally and externally. While that change relates to her dad, it is not supporting his story line but is her own arc.

A Quiet Place passes the Mako Mori Test.

Quick Results

Bechdel:  F

Sexy Lamp:    P

Mako Mori:   P

Did I Like It

At first A Quiet Place drew me in. It’s an intriguing premise: How do you survive in a world where you can’t make any noise?

The ways the characters manage their daily lives, such as using leaves to hold food rather than plates, fascinated me. Also, I pretty much think Emily Blunt is amazing in any film she’s in. And I loved the ending.

Throughout A Quiet Place, though, logic and common sense kept getting in the way of my enjoying the story.

Based on the timeline we’re given, five or six months after the apocalypse and the discovery of the monsters who hunt based on noise Evelyn gets pregnant.

All I could think was wouldn’t preventing a pregnancy in this world be absolutely top priority? You can’t stop a baby from crying. All you’d be doing is having a baby to see it get attacked and killed and probably the rest of the family with it.

While some of the suspense comes from how the family will manage this challenge, it seems their plan is only for the day of the birth and a short time after. Hard to say what they imagined they’d do for the first couple years. (Try to make a two year old be quiet by asking nicely. And silently. Go ahead. I’ll wait.)

Along the same lines, it’s established early on that living underground is safer.

It’s over a year after the apocalypse and empty buildings are everywhere, Yet the family lives mainly above ground. In an old house with creaky floors and stairs.

I understand no one wants to live below ground all the time. But it defies logic that they don’t do it most of the time, particularly with a baby on the way.

There are similar smaller issues that, for me, place the whole family solidly in the classic horror too-stupid-to-live trope, which made it hard to care what happened to them.

A Quiet Place also suffered from another common monster movie problem. Once the monsters are shown up close, they’re far less scary. After that happened, which was fairly early, my terror disappeared despite that I was watching alone in the dark.

I’m apparently in the minority, though.

After I finished watching the first time, I checked the reviews. To my surprise, most were great. On Rotten Tomatoes, A Quiet Place has a 95% score.

So, if you haven’t seen A Quiet Place and are thinking of it, you may very well enjoy it.

Coming Soon

Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

You might also like:

The Invitation: Psychological Suspense & Horror In Hollywood Hills (Women & Men in the Movies No. 1)

The post A Quiet Place: Defying Monsters and Common Sense (Women & Men in the Movies No. 8) appeared first on Lisa Lilly.

All played a part in my life when I worked full time as a lawyer. Also, all factor into the three short stories in the new paperback edition of The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror.

I finally released this paperback edition while home recovering from my broken foot–one good thing about the many weeks in the cast.

The Man In The Mirror

I’m particularly fond of this story, as it’s the first one I ever sold. (Sort of–the check bounced. But I have a contract that said I’d be paid. Really.)

It takes place during a recruiting event at an amusement park that turns deadly when the attractions develop minds of their own.

It also delves into the mind of the main character. He’s a new lawyer struggling with feeling too much like a grown up kid in his expensive suit, flailing through relationships with female coworkers, and jealous of those around him who gain success faster than he does.

The Merger

In The Merger, a woman struggles with whether to stay in her soulless job after a large corporation swallows her company. She feels her autonomy disappearing, but the money she can earn there beckons.

Many lawyers and clients I worked with struggled with this type of conflict. And many more do now as companies and firms grow larger and larger.

Of course, because this story is part of a collection of Twilight Zone-like tales, the “soulless” part may very well be literal.

The Tower Formerly Known As Sears

In my early drafts of this story, the protagonist was a partner who made life hell for the new attorneys stuck working for him. But as I saw growing pains in the law firm where I worked, I began thinking about it from the perspective of a new leader trying to persuade everyone that change is good.

In this final version, the lawyers push back against the leader. And so does the skyscraper where the firm is located, the Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower).

A few years after I published this story as part of the ebook edition, a short film of it was made under the title The Willis Tower. The film takes yet another approach, linking the horror less to the skyscraper listed in the title and more to the protagonist’s psyche.

While the story changed a bit, I loved seeing the director’s take on the narrative. And it was fun seeing actors playing the parts I’d written.

All of which is to say I’m very excited to finally be offering this short book in paperback. Readers asked for it over the years, but it seemed some other project always took priority. Now it’s finally here. This edition includes a sample first chapter from When Darkness Falls, a gothic horror novel set in Chicago’s South Loop.

Enjoy!

The post Lawyers, Stress, and Horror appeared first on Lisa Lilly.

Writing about those women was pretty easy because I had a strong picture of each of them as I began the first book. More challenging for me was the part of Book 1 that was more grounded in real life.

Specifically, how Tara’s friends, boyfriend, and family would react to her news that she was pregnant, but had never had sex and didn’t know how it had happened.

Being true to those characters was important to me.

My favorite occult and horror stories are the ones where in the beginning it’s unclear whether something truly supernatural is happening or whether the characters are misunderstanding the situation or being Gaslighted by someone.

Also, I wanted the ways Tara’s friends and family reacted to be realistic.

After all, if your college-aged daughter, sister, or girlfriend claimed she was pregnant but never had sexual intercourse, your first thought wouldn’t be “Oh, obviously she has a supernatural pregnancy.”

Like Tara’s friends and family, most of us would feel we at least needed to consider that the young woman might be repressing something, lying because she didn’t want to identify the father or for some other reason, or had become delusional. Our first thought would not be that she had a supernatural pregnancy.

Life Is Hard

Writing fiction is all about making life hard for your main character.

One way I did that was to create Tara as a character who is not religious. She doesn’t believe in any sort of god.

Her stepdad (whom she has always thought of as her dad), though, is very religious. His daughter’s virgin pregnancy seriously challenges his faith.

In one way, he knows he ought to be open to the idea because he believes that a virgin pregnancy occurred in the past and that Jesus might return. Yet logic tells him that such a thing is impossible, and if it were possible, the virgin mother would not be an atheist.

Tara and her mom, too, have a lot of tension even before the pregnancy. Like many mothers with oldest daughters, the two clash over Tara’s choices and aspirations as Tara becomes an adult.

Tara’s mother also fears that Tara is seeking attention because her littlest sister is very ill, and Tara stepped in to help parent the other kids.

A lot of Tara’s mother’s anger towards Tara is actually fear that she has failed her daughter and caused her to have some sort emotional or mental illness.

The Boyfriend And The Best Friend

At the beginning of Book 1 Tara plans to marry her boyfriend when she finishes college and before she starts medical school. Knowing how hard it is to be a parent, though, she’s very concerned about not getting pregnant, so she refrains from intercourse.

Minor Spoiler Below:

Her boyfriend is not too happy about that decision and his reaction to her pregnancy reflects that. While the way he treats her is less than ideal, I felt it was realistic that he wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that her pregnancy was supernatural. At that point, Tara herself didn’t believe that and was still seeking medical answers.

To make life harder for Tara, her best friend is also the boyfriend’s sister.

Tara and her friend also have a sibling -like relationship. Tara’s friend feels like she has always been the one who has messed up while Tara has been super-responsible. So it’s hard for her to process what Tara is telling her and easy for her to assume that Tara is just having a hard time accepting responsibility for her actions now that she’s done something others might see as a mistake.

Reflections

Tara’s friends’ and family members’ feelings about Tara’s predicament reflect more about themselves than about her.

Her dad, deeply religious, plunges headlong into a crisis of faith.

Her boyfriend assumes she’s behaved in a way that reflects his own life choices.

The one person who totally supports Tara from Day One is her littlest brother. Due to his age and personality he is open to and excited about the world. He sees odd and wondrous things in it all the time, and so easily believes Tara has a supernatural pregnancy.

Overall, I hope I showed realistic conflict between Tara and her friends and family rather than simply giving her friends and family who were unpleasant people (though, OK, maybe her boyfriend falls into that category).

That’s all for today. See you again next Wednesday when I’ll talk about why so many women loved The Da Vinci Code and how that inspired me.

Lisa

The post Mean Characters Or Reality? appeared first on Lisa Lilly.

The Willis Tower, one setting for my urban horror.

As an attorney, I’ve never, ever, been bored. I learn new things every day—about my clients’ businesses, changes in the law, new courtroom technology. My first year as a lawyer also was the first time I can remember not being worried about money. That was a really great thing. I also remember feeling happy to have a professional title and a certain amount of respect.(I discovered this respect in a roundabout way. When I worked as a paralegal and told people I was writing novels, they usually rolled their eyes and joked about my pie-in-the-sky aspirations. As soon as I became a lawyer, others assumed I’d sell all my novels and asked if when that happened I’d continue practicing law. (Yes, I would.)). At the same time, the transition to large firm lawyer carried new stresses. Juggling matters for multiple clients, dealing with a vast range of personalities and work styles among coworkers, superiors, and opponents, and always being “on” and switching tasks so I could respond quickly to anything that came my way.

And so I wrote horror stories. Mostly about law. In The Mirror, an attorney who desperately wants to advance at his firm attends a summer recruiting event at an evil amusement park. His envy of people who succeed where he fails and his frustration at how others see him are reflected in the frightening things that occur as the park’s attractions spin out of control. In The Red Stone, a lawyer on the brink of partnership struggles with his ambivalence over how many hoops he’ll jump through to prove himself. His travails include battling a boss/mentor who becomes an actual monster while wining and dining a hard-to-please client. And The Tower Formerly Known As Sears addresses the inevitability of change in the locked world of attorneys trapped within the former Sears Tower during a tornado.

When I wrote these stories—which you can find in The Tower Formally Known As Sears And Two Other Tales Of Urban Horror for Kindle and Kindle apps (free January 12-14, 2016)—I didn’t see them as personal. None of the characters are me in disguise. All the protagonists are men, and none of the plots reflect my personal experiences except watching from the inside of a large firm as it went through growing pains to become global. More personal to me, at least in that I share the main character’s gender, is Ninevah, a short story published exclusively for my email list subscribers, where a woman executive struggles with whether to stay or go when her company is swallowed up by a larger corporation. While I never climbed the ladder in a corporation, Joan Voichek’s fears and desires strike a chord with how I felt when contemplating transitions—first, when deciding whether to break away from a large law firm to start my own practice, and years later, when I decided to shift away from a busy practice to focus on fiction writing. While Joan frames the questions in her mind in terms of finances, her real fear is the loss of her true self if she goes along with the corporate program. Of course, because it’s a horror story, staying is much more dangerous than she ever imagines.

Looking at these plots together, it hit me how much they reflect the ambivalence I felt as my law practice grew busier and busier over the years. I was grateful there was a strong demand for my work, and I kept growing as a person and a lawyer. I enjoyed and did well at arguing in court, giving presentations, and interacting with other attorneys and clients, things I might not have known had I followed my earlier inclinations to close myself in a room and write and read fiction. But working 55+ hours a week at law didn’t leave me enough time to recharge by reading, writing, meditating, or doing yoga. I often felt disconnected from what I thought of as my true self, the one that, in the years immediately after college, worked for a few weeks at a time, then took off 1-2 weeks to write. That self was financially pretty broke, not surprisingly, but far more peaceful and content.

Now, as I wrote about in the Beauty Of Being Fifty, I feel I’ve reached a wonderful place in my work life. I’m happy for the many years of intense hours practicing law, and I’m happy for the chance to let that be a smaller part of my professional life while I write. Perhaps that’s why my work shifted over the last few years to my Awakening series, which fits better into the supernatural thriller genre than horror, and why my next series idea is a more traditional mystery/detective one. Then again, who knows, after another five years of writing full-time I may be writing horror stories about that.

If you’re curious about what’s frightening in the world of work, you can get The Tower Formally Known As Sears And Two Other Tales Of Urban Horror free for the Kindle or Kindle app from Wednesday, 1/12/16, through Friday, 1/14/16, or for $0.99 after that, and it’s always free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. Also, once a month, I send a monthly MOST newsletter with book and film or television reviews in the Mystery, Occult, Suspense, and Thriller genres, and an occasional email about my new releases or appearances. If you join here, you will receive Ninevah, which was published exclusively for MOST subscribers.

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Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you’d like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies, click here to join her email list and receive free a short horror story, Ninevah, published exclusively to M.O.S.T. subscribers.

The post The Frightening World Of Work appeared first on Lisa Lilly.

Karma offers a sense of fairness to life. It is an attempt to explain why some people’s circumstances are so different from others’. In some countries, those differences include into what caste a person is born. In the United States, too, there are vast differences in how much wealth people have, how happy they are, and how much good fortune or misfortune comes their way. These differences seem random and inequitable.

My statue of Quan Yin, the goddess of compassion.

For instance, one of my friends is an attorney who started his career as a cop, and his wife is a teacher. They have three adult children. One is an attorney, one is a detective, and one is a teacher. On the flipside, in his criminal defense practice, that same friend often represents more than one generation of a family. He gets referrals from clients he defended of their children, brothers, and cousins when they are arrested. Certainly some of the differences between his grown children and those of some of his clients are due to choices all the people involved made. But it’s hard to imagine that it had nothing to do with the families into which those people happened to be born. My friend’s experience, both personal and professional, is not unique. According to a recent New York Times analysis reported by The Atlantic, sons of senators are about “8,500 times more likely to become senators than the average American man.” Also, while the United States is wonderful country for many reasons, including that people can move between income levels and social classes, most people earn $1.33 for every dollar their parents earned, so having high or low earning parents has a significant effect on a person’s economic well-being. (Business Insider, 2014.) Karma proposes a way that all these differences make sense. It also allows a greater feeling of control over life. If what we do has specific and predictable effects, we can make better decisions and achieve more. We won’t feel so blown about by each random wind.

The trouble with karma, though—or at least one problem I have with the concept—is that it can feel a lot like blaming the victim and can lead to a lack of compassion for yourself and others. If you are diagnosed with cancer, or your spouse dies, or you suffer from depression, it’s easy to start feeling you must have done something wrong to deserve it. Often other people and our culture reinforce this idea. There are tons of books out there on positive thinking, choosing and directing our thoughts, and positive energy. I’ve found many of them extremely helpful, including Think and Grow Rich and Awaken the Giant Within. But the idea that we always get what we deserve or even that we draw everything around us into our lives can be hurtful. We all know people who help others, have good values, and generally have a positive attitude about life who still have awful things happen to them. In my own life, I think of my mom and dad. All their lives they volunteered with organizations, including ones that aided veterans, tutored recent immigrants, and provided financial help to people in difficult circumstances. They did their best to treat others well and donated to several charities each month despite having limited finances themselves. Yet they died in a violent, tragic way because one evening as they crossed the street on their way into church, they were hit by a drunk driver. I can’t imagine anything they did to deserve that. Nor can I imagine what children with cancer did to deserve it in this life or any other.

Which brings me to another issue I have with the way karma is often thought of. It can undercut the concept of responsibility. If my parents’ deaths were due to karma, or to “God’s plan,” for that matter, then the man who drove drunk is absolved of responsibility. That’s especially disturbing to me because he had two prior DUIs. Further, if we believe that people who are poor or uninsured or ill are that way due to karma, we as a society might be less motivated to change circumstances that contribute to that. After all, it’s all their own fault, right?

For these reasons, I am not a fan of the idea that we always get what we deserve, that good is always rewarded with good, and that people who have bad things to happen to them have always brought that into their lives in one way or another.

Despite all that, in a certain way, I do believe in karma. I believe that on an emotional level, to some extent what goes around comes around. It seems to me that the people who, for the most part, treat others well and try to be fair and kind are usually happier than those who spend a lot of time talking and thinking about how to one up others, or undermine them, or get revenge on them. For one thing, how we treat others often dictates how they treat us. In all my jobs, from working as a cashier at a discount store to representing large corporations in lawsuits, when I’m courteous and treat people with respect, nearly all of them eventually respond in kind, even the ones who started out rude and belligerent. Of course there are a few exceptions, but they really have been few.

In contrast, in my first year as a lawyer, I worked with a more senior attorney who held grudges. If anyone slighted him, and he often felt slighted, he went out of his way to make their lives difficult. Though he was smart and a good lawyer, he found it hard to get enough work because people didn’t like being around him and so didn’t tend to ask him to be a part of their cases. He also had trouble getting much work done because he spent so much time fuming and plotting. Both meant he was always on the edge of losing his job. That fear reinforced all his negative feelings, creating a vicious cycle of unhappiness and insecurity.

Being kind to and caring about others also makes it easier to have friends and close family-like relationships. There are studies showing that the more friends and close ties people have following heart surgery, the better their recoveries, regardless of other health factors. And while behaving in a positive way toward others doesn’t guarantee us good health or good fortune, it does affect how we deal with difficulties and how much we enjoy the good times in life. So my conclusion is that karma is less of an actual force or a determiner of the events outside our control, such as accidents, serious illnesses, and death, than it is simply a cause and effect in personal relationships.

What about you? Have you seen karma operate in your life?

The post The Trouble With Karma appeared first on Lisa Lilly.

During the first draft, rather than get distracted by the Internet – not that I ever am, of course – if I need to research something I put a bolded note in brackets to check it later. For instance, when I wasn’t sure what the national language for Turkey was, I used “Turkish,” then in brackets said [check this]. (Turns out it’s Turkish.) 

This approach to first drafting means I spend a lot of time rewriting.  I start with the various plot lines. I did a Find in Word for Ray – Tara’s biological father, who has a small role to play. I read each scene involving Ray in order, skipping over everything else, to make sure his story fit together, then did that for the other characters.

I’m now pretty much done with that, so my next step is to look at the overall plot to be sure it makes sense, is consistent throughout, and has high enough stakes. Next, I’ll rewrite from beginning to end on the laptop, asking myself what each scene’s viewpoint character sees, tastes, smells, hears, and feels (both tactile feeling and emotion). Finally, I’ll look at the lines and words themselves. This includes lengths of sentences, paragraphs, chapters. Also actual words – is the same word used too many times on a page or in a chapter? Can I say anything more succinctly? As in, can I use fewer adverbs like “succinctly”?

Then I’ll print the whole manuscript out, wait a couple weeks, and read it. I’ll particularly look for any scene where the characters are sitting and talking or sitting and thinking. Or standing and talking. I don’t cut all those scenes, but if there are a number in a row, or one is very long, I’ll try to intersperse the dialogue with action.

I also look for too much action. Sometimes a reader needs a break to just breathe and be with the characters. After I’ve made those changes, and I feel like I’ll throw up if I look at it one more time, I’ll send it on to first readers. (That’s Mr. Bird reviewing some of my writing. I don’t always takes his suggestions, but don’t tell him, he’s very sensitive.)

So, not-so-short answer (I do like to write novels, after all), The Unbelievers (Book II of The Awakening series) is on its way. I’m hoping it’ll be ready by Christmas, more likely it’ll be somewhere between Christmas and Easter.

In the meantime, if you join my email list by 11/30/2013, you’ll be entered into a drawing to have a character in The Unbelievers named after you. Just email me at lisa@lisalilly.com with your first name and say you want to be in the contest.

Feel free to join the email list after 11/30/2013 as well. No spam, I would never do that to you. Just a short monthly newsletter discussing books in the mystery, occult, suspense and thriller genres and an occasional update on new novels or short stories I publish in between. (And as you can tell, it could be Easter before you get one of those.)

The post Anatomy of (Rewriting) a Thriller appeared first on Lisa Lilly.

Why the bias toward men still survives is puzzling considering the success of Frankenstein, as well as of works by other women horror writers like Shirley Jackson (The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House). But something Carrie pointed out on our panel is that when women write horror, suspense or thrillers, it’s often called something else. I read The Lottery in English class, and a lot of people read Frankenstein in school as well.  So these horror tales are called literature, not horror.  (I don’t know why there needs to be distinction between the two, but that’s a whole other post.)  Happily, when I asked the audience of about 40-50 for our panel what they thought, most did not seem to care if authors were male or female, they were just looking for good books.  One young woman said she hoped women would not use pen names or initials because she actively looks for women writers.  She believes they are more likely to develop the characters’ interior lives than are men, and that’s something she likes in fiction.

Another thing we talked about is the portrayal of women as victims. Based on a lot of popular movies, TV and fiction, one would think strangers are a great danger to women. Curious about how reality and fiction match, I checked the FBI website. It turns out over 75% of homicide victims are men, not women.  (There is one exception. Serial killers, who are rare in real life, are more apt to target women.)  Even more interesting to me was that men, not women, are more likely to be killed by strangers.  Women are more likely to be killed by people they know. Specifically, husbands, boyfriends, and relatives. Which led me to comment that despite what we see on TV, the most dangerous thing for a woman to do probably is not to walk down a dark alley, but to get married.

The Comic Con panel attendees, many of whom are Buffy fans (as am I), were great to talk with on this point. These readers want to see strong women characters. They love reading about and watching on film girls and women who are portrayed as three-dimensional characters in all type of roles, including as heroes.

And the more such books and films and TV shows sell, the more of them there will be.

________________

The Awakening for Kindle:

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