My Parting Gift: Secrets

As most of you know, Killer Fiction blog is leaving us. Of course I'll still be blogging but I will no longer be playing the field with my "Killer" mistress.  Instead I'll save my snarking, emoting and promoting for kyradavis.com, the blog I've been married to since the beginning...well at least since Sophie was born. My blog and I sort of had a shotgun wedding.  And of course I look forward to posting on the Killer Fiction Facebook page.

I keep trying to think of how to bring this to a close in a satisfying way...when a television series ends you want answers. Mysteries are supposed to be solved, disputes settled, secrets revealed. My mysteries are in my Sophie books and any dispute of mine that you might be interested in are also enclosed within my novels. But I do have a few secrets I can share...secrets I've never posted anywhere before....

...for instance, for those of you who have read the Sophie books you know that Sophie's on-again-off-again boyfriend is a hot Russian guy who served in both the Israeli and Russian army before moving to San Francisco.

The secret is, I met that guy. I even went out on a date with him. He was Russian and he had indeed served in both the Russian and Israeli armies. I met him at a party in San Francisco back when I was in college. Our eyes locked across a crowded room. He was beautiful, sculpted, intense.  Fair skin with dark hair...I couldn't look away. It was a dinner party and we sat next to one another. The chemistry was so exceptional that even now, thinking back, I get goosebumps.

And then he had to go and screw it all up by opening his mouth.

It was such a bummer. I tried to convince myself it was a language problem. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and went out on a date with him...by the end of the date it was clear, this wasn't a language problem. He was just sort of a womanizing jerk. Even his advances were clumsy. He drank a bit too much and asked if I could drive him home...in his car...which would mean that I would have to take a cab from his place which he swore he'd pay for. I got up to his place to make a call and he said, "What's the rush? Make yourself comfortable and you know, take off your jeans!"

I didn't. I left, irritated that reality didn't live up to the chemistry of that moment. It's really amazing how quickly you can conjure up a fantasy and how suddenly that fantasy can be yanked away. So, years later, I wrote the fantasy, injected it with the permanence of ink and then I gave my fantasy-Anatoly to Sophie. I stretched out that magical moment and now thousands of readers can have him without the messiness of reality(although there are lots of murders in my Sophie books, so I guess that's kinda messy).

It's not the only time I've done that. Mr. Dade in Just One Night isn't entirely fictional either. I did date a man who had a PERFECT body and salt & pepper hair. A guy who came from a lower middle class family and a truly traumatic childhood only to pull himself up by his bootstraps and work his way up in the world, eventually starting a company that now grosses a little over $100 million a year. If I told you what that company was there's a good chance you'd know it. He has the expensive car and the beat-up dirt bike. He wears the cheap t-shirts and lives in a house he bought from Richard Gere...a house that has one of the most amazing views I've ever seen of the city. And he had a fierce, almost pathological individualism...one that didn't always sit well with me. Weakness in those in his life was not tolerated. He strongly believes that we should all be motivated first, last and always by our own self-interests. If we do something kind it's not because it's "right" on a societal level but because it A) makes us feel good and B) it improves our lives. Everything was put in the context of "I." No love should ever be above the love we have for ourselves. The goal should always be to enhance our own lives.

And yet he would express true distress when he saw a homeless person shivering in the cold. He had empathy.  He quoted Ayn Rand and then praised community service. He could be totally light hearted but control was so very important to him. He said he loved life and yet he seemed to have to work so hard to remind himself to be happy. He was full of contradictions and although I didn't love him I found him to be absolutely fascinating. My friend suggested that maybe I was dating him just to figure him out. That might have been the case. But in the end we just weren't a good match. As I said, we weren't in love.  Our world views were simply too different, our connection not quite strong enough...and part of me was in love with another man. Unlike Kasie, I didn't cheat. But I did choose that other man over him. That didn't work out either but I don't regret my choice. My Mr. Dade wasn't the man for me but I still thought he was fascinating so I wrote him for Kasie. And in some ways Kasie, with all her contradictions and her attempts to be one thing but suppressing other aspects of her true nature...well she was somewhat inspired by my Mr. Dade too.

So those are my secrets. I'm only revealing them once, here on a blog that is about to disappear. I may erase it at the end of the weekend. I'm not all that interested in having Mr. Dade read this and track me down again. Like I said, he's never been in love with me (I didn't break his heart) but I intrigue him and when something sparks his interest he can be a very persistent guy.  I just don't think I want to go down that road again.  And I sure as hell don't want to be tracked down by Anatoly.

So this is just for you, my Killer Fiction readers, during our last days here. Thank you for letting me share my writing adventures with you over the years. It's been an enormous amount of fun and I hope that you'll keep the fun coming by joining us over on Facebook. We've all shared to much to become strangers.

--Fashionista Fatale