A Note from Pat on Mad Dash
- Get A Taste of It
- Everyone's A Critic
- Talk Amongst Yourselves
- A Note From Pat
What provoked this Mad Dash?
It’s not that I have a short attention span, and it’s not that I’m easily bored—in fact, I’m never bored. It’s just that I can’t write the same sort of book indefinitely. I run out of new things to say, and I’m terrified of repeating myself—God knows I do that often enough in real life.
So, after four books about either women’s friendships (The Saving Graces) or mothers and daughters (Circle of Three, Flight Lessons, The Goodbye Summer), I knew I needed a change. Women, women everywhere! Help! I was drowning in estrogen!
Don’t get me wrong—relationships among women are endlessly varied and fascinating, and my friends mean the world to me. But let’s face it, this is a two, count ’em, two-gendered world, and I had been ignoring the second one for a long time. Time to go back to my roots.
Yes, my roots. Did you know I used to write historical romance novels? Twelve of them, and I had the best time—what pure fun those books were, all set in different places, different times. Ah, romance. Emotional intensity, larger-than-life characters, great sex, unambiguously happy endings—what’s not to love?
Well, the twelve-ness, primarily, plus that old horror of repeating myself. Frankly, I was dying to get away from Love, capital L, and move into the subtler, arguably calmer world of just women.
That was then, this is now.
Mad Dash, my first new book in three years, is both a departure and a return. It’s a love story between grownups. The main characters are Dash and Andrew, married for 20 years (can’t get much more grown up than that), and when we meet them, she’s leaving him. I don’t blame her: they found a puppy half-frozen on the doorstep, and Andrew won’t let her keep it. (Allergies.) And Dash needs that puppy—her mother died last summer, and her only child’s just gone off to college. For Dash, the puppy is the last straw.
But she’s no picnic at the beach, either, spouse-wise, and I enjoyed writing about her from Andrew’s point of view. And I realized I’d missed writing from the male point of view, something I used to do all the time in my romances. It’s fun and intriguing, keeps you on your narrative toes, and I think I do it well, possibly better than from the female pov. Wonder why? Maybe because my men usually get less screen time, and it’s easier to make a comparatively secondary character’s voice appealing. You can leave more out. You can be coy.
Ultimately, though, Mad Dash is Dash’s book. Her voice is more urgent, her story more compelling. She’s us—women in midlife confronting our failures and discontents, vague longings, leavetakings and abandonments, and let us not forget the dreaded perimenopause. It’s a serious book, but it’s also a comedy, and so the journey Dash takes is a circle. Lessons are learned, some of them hard, and things end the way they should.
All my books were hard to write, and this was no exception. I had quite a bit more fun, though, and I’m pretty sure it’s Andrew I have to thank. My hero. Not a romance hero, certainly—heavens! a romance anti-hero, more like—but all man, and not entirely unlike the one I’ve been living with for the last 28 years.
So—here’s something new from me. I look forward to writing more books like Mad Dash—putting more Love in, in other words—until, that is, I get tired of them. Until my fear of repeating myself paralyzes me again and I go off in a new direction. Wonder what it’ll be? Someday—don’t laugh, now—I’d like to write a book from the dog’s point of view. Wouldn’t that be fun? I’ve already started thinking up a plot.