41 Comments

I want to be part of the librarian/vampire hunting gang in Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. Dust archives! Travel all over Europe! Tea in cafés whilst deciphering old documents!

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Nothing. She lives off her family's money in a Victorian Mansion.

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Lead singer of a 70s band. Absolutely yes! I would make all the typical musician mistakes and I would regret none of them!

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Here's to no regrets!

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I'd be a navigator for treasure hunters.

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Very very cool. And also something I may not be qualified for but you certainly are.

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Hardly! But I always envied the navigators on our ship.

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“It was easy to make a difference to other people’s lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.”

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I love this line, Mary! The little room...I have been thinking about this image of lives...

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I'd love to be "Daisy" in "Daisy Jones and the Six." In one of my still-not-finished novels, my protagonist gets a job as a school bus driver.

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My friend is a school bus driver and the things she hears!!!

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Would I be "one of those who would eagerly seize the opportunity to go spend weeks or months in an Amazon rainforest"? Sure. Beats the crap out of my job : )

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You know, I thought that too but then I began to imagine all the things that could go wrong. I guess I am not made of the right stuff.

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Like leeches!

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My tastes in fiction tend to be all over the map. Sometimes I want to be taken as far as possible from my own reality. Other times, I need stories that speak to the way I find myself moving through the world. I honestly cannot imagine myself having any of the jobs in my current fiction read, Rachel Khong's Real Americans, except maybe unpaid intern for a website.

As for characters in my fiction, they kind of show up with their jobs already determined. Which sounds like a cop-out but it really isn't. I've written a singer and her manager, a warehouse supervisor, a social worker, a sort of mystic forager (long story but hey, it's going to be published!), a few professors. My two favorite characters right now are a writer and an actor-turned-forester (believe it or not, she came to me way before I read Tom Lake...)

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It's not a cop out - I think it must mean that these characters arrive in your writing more fully formed. I struggled with the occupations of the characters in my current WIP. Actually, I didn't struggle with their jobs but with the thing each of them really wants to do.

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Roy Hobbes in Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel "The Natural." He survived a silver bullet to the gut, years of arduous recovery, a corrupt general manager, and later, the shattering of Wonderboy, the bat he had carved himself as a boy, to triumph in the end. (The movie, with Robert Redford, is pretty good, but the book is better.)

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So, a baseball player or a movie star. Both good choices.

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I just finished Knife River by Baron Birtcher. Wow, what a book, his usual deathless prose. The protagonist is an Oregon rancher who was elected to be the sheriff. There is no way I could do the job: I despise guns and can't sit a horse, let alone gallop... I'm highly allergic to horse dander!

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Ha! So better to read about ranchers than to be one. I get that. Totally. I get saddle sores just thinking about it.

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Ross MacDonald in the Moving Target written in 1942

describes his main female character as "suffering from a Victorian hangover".

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Which makes me wonder just what it is this person does for a living! I certainly get the picture of her and how she may approach it.

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I'm reading The Women by Kristen Hannah right now, and the protagonist is a nurse on the battlefield in Vietnam (where I am now in the book). Nope, not for me! But I enjoy reading about it. My protagonist in the Shirley Combs series is a consulting detective. I could imagine myself having done that job in my younger days. Today I read, write, garden, sew, sometimes bake. As I write this I'm enjoying a visit with my sister in Missouri.

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I am so glad you are having a good visit in Missouri. I think you'd be a great detective. You've written novels that require extensive knowledge of how to approach such work. And, with your drama background you would know how to slip into an unassuming part that deceives your targets.

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Oh thank you, Betsy! When I was a kid, after reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes, I used to use Mom's magnifying glass, and my step-dad's pipe, and "solve" the mysteries I could find around the house. Like missing items, etc. It was great fun.

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I've just finished rereading Jayne Ann Phillips Machine Dreams, and I don’t think I'd mind being a secretary in an insurance office in a small Northern California town in the 1970s. I was a secretary briefly in my college work-study job, and I loved the black-and-white quality of typing and filing. My own day job (editor) never feels done, no matter how long I work on a manuscript.

Here's one of my favorite sentences from the book. At once so visceral and visual I had to highlight this sentence to read again. I included the sentence before it because it wouldn't make as much sense without it:

"He’d sat through hour-long Methodist services since the age of six, watching his mother’s gloved hands. If he was fidgety she’d let him work the short, tight gloves off her hands, finger by finger, then put them back on."

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I love these sentences. Just love the detail and the way they put me right there. As for jobs that you can go home from at the end of the day -- that's how I always viewed waitressing. I loved it while I was there and then forgot it when I went home. I also liked the change jingling in my apron pocket.

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Absolutely the greatest thing about waiting tables is that instant gratification of a wad of bills at the end of a long night. And yes, the walking away without a thought, except gettong your uniform washed or ironing your white shirt.

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So easy. Mona in Armistead Maupin’s latest novel, ‘Mona of the Manor’ (he was 80 on the 13th, three days before me). I get the to own a Manor House, albeit falling apart, surrounded by characters I love and a back-story to die for, which includes Mrs Madrigal as my dad! 🐰

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I've never read the Mrs. Madrigal books. Clearly I'm missing something!

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You'll love them.

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Oh how I loved his Mrs Madrigal books! My husband and I read them aloud and I cried at the end of the last book. Glad to know there's more to love.

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I am ashamed of our human capacity to hurt & main one another, to desecrate the body. ("Cutting For Stone" Abraham Verghese)

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A powerful thought and a powerful sentence. I will have to re-read this novel.

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One of the greatest novels ever.

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OK; buckle up! The last book I read was Britney Spears' "The Woman In Me." So I morph into a female and get abused by my father, mother, sister and brother, literally, along with multiple spouses and friends out to take my hard-earned $$ away from me, while I have little or no say in my daily life for years on end with a conservatorship. But, unlike my present life, I would have a decent singing voice and dancing ability. NO thanks; Britney remains a child, in her attempt at penning her memoir, and in her attempt at being a capable adult.

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