The Novelty Girls

So this week’s theme is about physical insecurities. We all have them; we all wish we could change things about the way we look.

This came to my attention from a recent discussion on Romance Divas about plus-sized heroines. Some people didn’t like big heroines because they felt they had too many “issues.”

Here’s a snippet of my response to that thread:

body image issues and problems with self-confidence are not the purview of plus sized women. There’s no person, no matter what their size, who doesn’t have things they dislike about themselves physically. Two of the most gorgeous women I know, Lillian Feisty and Eden Bradley, have both complained to me about things they hate about their appearance, things that make them feel less confident, less attractive, less sexy than they want to be.

I’ve written several plus sized heroines, some had body issues, some didn’t. ALL of them had issues of some kind or other, because every person has to constantly grow. I just want to point out that not all plus sized women loathe themselves and shoving all your characters into that stereotype makes for cookie-cutter characterization. There’s more to people than their weight, and dwelling on that with plus sized characters is selling them short as PEOPLE, which is what you want your readers to believe, that these could be real people they empathize with.

So I wanted our discussion this week to be one thing we love about our looks and one thing we hate. No matter how gorgeous we are, there’s always one or ten things we’d like to change, and I think that’s important to bring up…and to bring out in our writing. People are people, they have insecurities, they have issues, so I’m keepin’ it real with that this week.

Thing I Hate: I have shelf-butt. You know how you’ve seen women with big booties that really stick out and are almost flat on top, like you could set a drink there and it wouldn’t tip over and spill? Yeah, I have one of those. Also, it makes it a total bitch to find jeans that fit right without having that gap in the back where the jeans don’t come back in to hug my waist because the shelf-butt goes out so far.

Thing I Love: Dude, I have bad-ass awesome hair. It’s curly. Naturally curly. And not frizzy or poofy at all with a little mousse. I have the lowest maintenance hair on the planet, and it looks like I spend hours a day on it and spend a fortune to make it as pretty as it is. I lurrrrrv it.