This, That, and Another Thing

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. ~ Mark Twain, Following the Equator

I spent a good part of the day thinking about Dirk Benedict because of my blog from yesterday. I also thought about how fast time passes and how quickly we grow older.

First off, I think that Mr. Benedict is looking really fine for being sixty (yes, I Googled for current photos):



I only hope I look so good in twenty years.

I watched an episode of the A-Team in his honor (I would have watched Battlestar Galactica, but it apparently isn't on the sci-fi channel anymore) and remembered why I bought Tiger Beat and cut out his pictures for my wall. Mmmm....

I got to thinking about age late last night while I lay in bed wishing I could sleep because I was so tired. I thought about the fact that I have a seven-year-old daughter and I only feel about twenty. Some days I look in the mirror and am shocked to see me -- I have a picture in my head of what I looked like twenty years ago, and in my head, that's how I look.

My NaNo project is about a woman who is forty, and is forced by circumstances to rethink her entire life. It'll be the first time I've written about someone close to my age (I won't be forty for a few more months) though my heroines have gotten a little bit older as time has gone by.

When I was little, I always wanted to be nineteen. It was the perfect age. Then I hit nineteen and thought, "Nope, not the perfect age." and I wanted to be twenty-one. Oddly, the world didn't change that year either. I went into a tail-spin at twenty-five ("I'm a quarter of a century old ! I'm old !") No other age has made me do that. Yet.

In having my niece here over the summer -- she is nineteen, almost twenty -- I realized how unbelievably immature most folks are at the age. When you're going through it, you don't feel that way of course, but I wonder about all the old romances with twenty-year-old heroines. I suppose there are exceptions, but still...

It's good to see that most romances feature ladies who are a little bit older -- at least in the later twenties. But maybe I'm just biased.

I have an old fantasy novel that I completed when I was in high school. I still love the characters, and plan on revisiting it someday (in fact, I thought about using it for NaNo but that's against the rules). My "perfect" heroine is nineteen. And the mystery I submitted to the Avon Teen Writing Contest when I was seventeen? I have twin heroines who were... nineteen. I think I was stuck in a rut.

Now I write about late twenties heroines. I wonder ... when I'm fifty, will I write about even older folks? I mean, some of the most famous authors aged while they wrote, but their heroines haven't.

What age are the ladies you write about? Why? What age of ladies do you like to read about? Why?

Have a great weekend!