Long story short, I was hanging out with a bunch of book fans — romance fans, in fact — yesterday and the subject of working-class people in books came up.

 

The person talking about how great it is to see working-class heroes who are also billionaires was super eloquent. She cut through my privilege with a well-sharpened sword, talking about how what makes these books so attractive is the idea that billionaire-level privilege will allow working-class people to never have to worry about being taken care of, financially, again.

 

And I get that. I do. It’s a lovely goal, one every single one of us should live as our personal truth. To be taking care of financially. Hard stop on that idea. Every single one of us deserves that. (Well, except for the fascists, of course. They can spend time experiencing what too many of us do.)

 

But I’m also going to argue that if you’re a billionaire, you’re not a working-class person. You’re a billionaire with a working-class job. And that  is something entirely different.

 

So once again — back to the point I’d made that she was responding to — we tend to not see true working-class heroes in the pages of romance. TRUE working-class heroes. People who are struggling to pay their bills and take care of themselves, their families, their friends, their communities. We don’t romanticize the people who get up in the morning and put on work clothes and do the hard labor.

 

And I argue that we should.

 

These people populate the world of my current fiction project, Tales from the Sheep Farm.

 

And I’m glad I made that choice.

 

The past two months — with another on the schedule yet — I’ve been having massive work done on my house. I can talk about the racial makeup of the various crews who’ve worked on the different parts, about how each group has been very different from the last, and more, but the one thing that has struck me, as Freya Cat and I have watched from inside the house as the exterior has been taken down to the studs and rebuilt (fun times in winter, let me tell you!), the one thing that has struck me through this all is how incredibly skilled these various men have been.

 

Even on the days when members of one crew are teaching members of another, or when the original demolition crew showed up and had never done this type of work before, so they took the time to figure it out and learn, what they were doing used skills I couldn’t even imagine.

 

There’s real craftsmanship in what they do. Yes, even the demolition! They’ve had to work around my existing landscaping, on a house built into a hillside, without doing damage to what’s underneath or to each other or to larger parts of my property.

 

And yet… that’s still not represented much in fiction. Oh, you’ll see it in literary fiction. I’ve seen it pretty often in mysteries (Liz Milliron‘s books are phenomenal for that), too.

 

But romance?

 

Nope.

 

I love the genre. I do. So c’mon romance friends. Enough of the billionaires with working class jobs. Let’s see working class people with honor and dignity.

 

I don’t write romance, either. But I see working class people, even though I’m not one of you. But I do respect you and I am in awe of your skills and your various expertise, and I’m well aware of how vital you are to a healthy economy and a healthy society.

 

Pick up some of the Tales from the Sheep Farm books and see what I mean. I’m striving to give honor and dignity to all of my characters, including those we’re set up to not initially like. (Oh, wait until you get your hands on Legacy… talk about a billionaire fall from grace!)

 

If you’d like to go right to the buy links, here you go: http://Books2Read.com/Susan-Helene-Gottfried

 

People are treasures too.

If you’ve looked around the site since the redesign, you’ll know Liz Milliron’s name. Or, you’ll recognize her real name: Mary Sutton, the head of our non-fiction department and one of our e-book formatters. Mary’s one busy woman! On top of writing and being a West of Mars subcontractor, she also has a day job and a family with needs. And I think there are some pets in there, too, but I’m not 100% certain.

She’s here with the first short story in her Laurel Highlands Mystery series. I was thrilled to find a fellow soul sister in Mary, in that on top of everything else, we share a love for Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands. I’m not sure where her love of the area came from, but what’s important here is that Mary shares it.

The story was originally published at Mysterical-E, and she’s got the rights back, so … it was time to let a wider audience know about Jim and Sally. Once you’ve met them, you’ll be glad you did.

So, Mary/Liz… what song reminds you of your book?

I don’t have a particular song in mind for this story. However, thinking of my protagonist, Jim Duncan, always puts me in mind of Bruce Springsteen. Springsteen is classic rock, simple lyrics, just a hard-working every day guy. No punk, no death metal. Just a guy singing about life, usually in a small, working class town. And that’s Duncan, just a guy trying to do a job. He lives in a rural county and likes it. He likes being a cop, being a hard-working guy, doing a job he loves because he wants to do it. And he’s a little working class. But he’s, um, really not lucky in the relationship department. He had a wife he loved and lost her. So if I have to pick a song that represents Jim at this point, it’d be The Boss’s “I’m Going Down.” The song is about a guy who sees a relationship that used to be perfect going down in flames. And that’s pretty much where Jim is in the relationship department – down in flames.

Ahh, Springsteen… I’ve seen him live twice. He truly holds a special place in my heart, and that’s before we get into the really good stories (and the fact that he inspired my own short piece, Keys, which is in Demo Tapes 4).
See? I told you Mary is cool.
Ready for the story’s description?

The Laurel Highlands seem idyllic, but for Trooper First Class Jim Duncan, they’re anything but.

When a young woman from Pittsburgh ends up dead inside a rental cabin Confluence, it’s up to Duncan to find the killer before the event brings unwanted publicity to one of Southwestern Pennsylvania’s most scenic regions. There seems to be a built-in suspect in the local character known as The Creeper, but if Fayette County public defender Sally Castle has anything to say, The Creeper won’t end up in prison without a fight.

Previously published at Mystericale.com, “An Idyllic Place for Murder” is the first story in THE LAUREL HIGHLANDS MYSTERIES series.

This makes me want to read it, and I already have. Don’t be left out.

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