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She returned his smile, her hand skimming the gleaming tabletop as it would the chest of a lover. “Sex is always in vogue, Hal. And there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lonely people out there.” She artfully lowered her lashes. “Not that you would know anything about that, of course.”

His eyebrows peaked in astonishment. But when he broke into a raucous laugh, she relaxed, knowing she’d struck just the right note. “Damn, I do like you, doll!”

“My name,” she added, “is Megan. Or Ms. Morley. Or bitch, or thrill-kill, or ball-buster, or–”

“I gotcha, I gotcha.”

From the very beginning of her (unpublished) novella, Megan declared herself to be a bitch. She made no bones about it. It was her defense mechanism, and she had every right to be. She changed very gradually (and favorably) over the course of her story—but, from the first, Megan Morley assures the reader that she is a bitch.

One reader’s response to this approach?
“I find your heroine to be rather unsympathetic.”
:shock: :shock: :shock:

Let’s talk about
THE BOX.

Yes. THE BOX. You know what I mean. The one with the invisible boundaries. The one everyone encourages us to think and write outside of, “The Matrix” in literary form.
Do the dimensions depend on the genre? On how accepted you want to be? On how successful you already are, or some other factors?
I may have to do more than one post on this, because I’m just not sure about THE BOX, or what constitutes the inside or outside—and exactly how far outside THE BOX you’re allowed to roam (having received a jaywalking ticket or two in my time). :roll: