What they got was Russo who is picked out of a crowd of crazed reporters by, yes, the clone of Jesus.Īnd she wasn’t picked out to get that “get” because she looked like Emily Ratajkowski either. What these editors and agents didn’t want was my protagonist,(who has since been called “beloved” by the way), Alessandra Russo, realistic, hard-nosed NYC reporter. Male protagonists can and are often very flawed (the more flawed the better) short, drunken slobs who can knock off four burgers and ten whiskeys at sleazy dives with hot girls all around them. That was what they all wanted-a plasticized woman- which I felt was a prototype that needed to be killed off-in the consciousness of readers. What these editors and literary agents wanted was a “realistic” female protagonist that fell somewhere between Lara Croft Tomb Raider and Anastasia Steele, victimized pansy.įunny, in my years as a reporter investigating everything from mobsters to mayhem and natural disasters to political ones, I’d never actually run across a beauty queen/karate expert/masochistic love slave/reporter. Shockingly these old school, sexist and disturbing comments were not made decades ago before people knew better, but in 2011-12.
Those were just some of the critiques I got from book editors and agents-many of them women-to whom I’d submitted the manuscript for my first novel, The Sixth Station. Why does she eat so much? And that wine-seriously? We’ll buy it if you made her 25 and sexier.įemale protagonists should NOT be flawed. She’d just be more appealing if she were thinner, taller and younger. Forty-two year old women don’t have adventures.
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