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I was reading Publishers’ Weekly recently, and I came across a fascinating little note about the latest Michael Crichton book, NEXT.  A while ago, a Yale graduate named Michael Crowley, a Washington political reporter, wrote an unflattering article about Crichton in the New Republic.  Lo and behold, when Next came out, it included a minor character named Mick Crowley, a Washington political columnist, a Yalie, and on trial for the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy. Coincidence?  Hmmmm....Crowley wrote a hysterical follow-up in The New Republic called Jurassic Prick arguing that authors generally endow enemies with a small penis, thinking that they won’t cry foul and point to their own characterization.

I didn’t read the original Crowley article on Crichton, so who knows what sent Crichton into such a tailspin of unflattering prose?  In a gesture of loyalty among authors, I want to point out that Crowley’s article might have characterized its subject in an untrue light as well.  But the episode started me thinking about revenge—literary and otherwise.  When I first started writing, I couldn’t create a villain to save my life.  How do I know?  Because I started out trying to write a mystery and utterly failed when it came to the murderer.  The murderer was great.  In fact, you would have wanted to marry him to your daughter, except that he inexplicably killed someone (by poisoning his toothpaste, a nicely removed way to get the job done).  Anyway, over the course of writing twelve romances I have been slowly developing the ability to create villains.

And I’m kind of liking it!

But along with villains comes the need to punish villains.  I think that’s a key part of the pleasure of genre fiction:  the bad get what they deserve and (if we’re talking romance), the good get multiple orgasms.  In my latest book, Pleasure for Pleasure, I happily meted out appropriate punishment and reformation.  The good guy who says bad things about the heroine gets reformed; the bad guy who tries to rape the heroine gets beaten up and shangied onto a boat from which he will not return for years, if ever.  Yes, sir!  I can tell you that one of the huge pleasures of writing Pleasure for Pleasure was the right to dole out literary punishment.

Now in my latest book (so far untitled, but it’s the sequel to Desperate Duchesses, coming out next June, I am crafting a really awful mother.  She’s so awful she’s stealing the show.  She has the heroine running (it’s her mother) and the hero running even faster.  This has all been really fun to create.  But yesterday one of my closest friends anxiously said to me on the phone, “She’s not at all like my mother, is she?  Because I think my mother reads your books.” I laughed.  My Lady Selby is vain, selfish, manipulative, and way bigger than life.  I suppose there are people unlucky enough to have a mother like this, but she came from my imagination, not from life. 

Yet the truth is that my own mother and I (like any mother/daughter) have had tough times, and of course one fuels creative work from one’s own life on some level—though thank goodness, my mother has not even one of the grotesque faults of Lady Selby, my heroine’s mother.

So I have a creative question for you, one that has to do with revenge.  Pretend you’re a writer.  Who (no names, please) would you transform into a character—and what would his/her punishment be?  In the example of Michael Crichton’s book, I presume that the child-molesting Washington journalist probably went to jail.  In the case of my Lady Selby, I’m not sure what to do.  Character traits are harder to “punish” than obvious crimes, like rape attempts.  Go on:  PLOT YOUR REVENGE!