Personally, nothing will put me off a book faster than a baby or toddler on the cover.  And yes, before anyone decides to count – that would be seven of my own books – including one book with not one but two infants.  Cool aside on that one though – every child featured on my books was drawn from a photo of my own children.  Here endeth the fun facts.

Now we’re taking personal taste here and my personal reading taste does not include baby stories.  You love them?  Read ‘em (feel free to read mine – I’ll take that royalty). 

Babies and toddlers present logistical problems for me.  Probably because I write mysteries and romantic suspense.  It’s not as if the heroine can yell “Duck!” to a three month old while bullets go flying overhead.  Toddlers talk.  Toddler dialogue is horrible to write and usually painful to read – they sound like either precocious sitcom kiddies or grunting Neanderthals.  It’s like writing dialect – a little bit gets really irritating really fast.

I actually like writing teenagers.  I like the biting attitude they can bring, the comic relief, the characterization they reveal and hell, just like in real life, you can always count on them to do something stupid.  A good thing in a mystery or a romantic suspense.  Oh, and they duck when the bullets fly.  They even have great villain potential (at least for me) – a warped teenager mind can be a powerful tool in creating a well-motivated but not obvious villain. 

Oh, except for that lady from Des Moines who wrote to tell me teenagers would never plot a crime, they are too young to craft a plausible plan.  Ironically, she sent me that email on April 20, 1999 - the day of the tragic Columbine massacre. 

Going off topic . . . Happy 68^th Birthday Bob – Thank God I have an SUV to cart all the candles home.

R