BEHIND EVERY CHAMPION HORSE...

Yesterday I took my daughter to see the movie Secretariat for the second time. In fact, if I'd had my way, it would have been National Take Your Daughter to See Secretariat Day.

For those of you who missed the movie (and there are a few of you), or those of you who don't know the Triple Crown from a triple bypass (almost as many), Secretariat was American horse racing's golden boy. A big, gorgeous chestnut to make young girls swoon, he completed his 1973 Triple Crown sweep with a record-setting 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes that, in my opinion, stands as one of the single greatest athletic achievements of all time, human or equine. As a tween, I had a crush on Secretariat so geeky and all-consuming, only a juggernaut force like puberty could break it.

So yeah, I was looking forward to introducing my eight-year-old daughter to Big Red. But I didn't realize I'd be treating her to an even rarer sight: a genuine cinematic heroine, driving the action not by sexual conquest or adorable ditziness or blood-and-guts ass-kickery, but with dignity, perseverance, humor, and the courage of conviction. And even a couple of crow's feet.

Not that I'd forgotten the story of Secretariat's owner, played here with steely charm by Diane Lane. Penny Tweedy's famous coin flip with Ogden Phipps, giving her ownership of the then-unborn champion, is the stuff of Thoroughbred legend. But it never occurred to me what a struggle it must have been, balancing the needs of her family (like me, she had four children) back home in Colorado with the thrill and challenge of developing her promising young colt into a superhorse, all the while facing possible bankruptcy from the taxes on her father's estate. That she juggled all this amid the condescending sneers of the testosterone-laden 1973 horse world (the Jockey Club only began admitting women in 1983, and Penny herself was one of the three who joined that year) gives her achievements even greater luster.

Women complain loudly and justly about the dearth of meaty, multi-dimensional female characters coming out of Hollywood. (Sorry, folks, but after Sex and the City 2, Carrie Bradshaw no longer qualifies.) If you're one of them, stop reading now and stagger off to your local cineplex as fast as your stilettos can carry you, before the big red horse and his heroic owner find themselves replaced by Saw 3D.

Better yet, borrow your nearest 8-year-old girl and bring her along with you.

A TALE OF TWO CONTEST ENTRIES

I heard the other day that only one manuscript in ten thousand gets picked up by a publisher and turned into a book. That's a whole lot of doomed aspiration (and, alas, a whole lot of crappy manuscripts), and it got me thinking: what sets the winning effort apart from the 9,999 also-rans?

As it happened, I had just finished up judging my share of a writing contest, and the answer lay right before me.

Entry 1 was neat and tidy and grammatically correct (more or less). Set in a familiar time period, it featured a cynical alpha hero and a feisty young heroine. They squabble, they bicker, they play petty tricks on each other, all in an attempt to disguise Their True Feelings. All the appropriate mechanics are in place: the laws of point-of-view are obeyed with religious fervor, the five senses are celebrated with due consideration, the backstory emerges in well-judged snippets of dialogue. I really, really wanted to like Entry 1.

There was just one problem. It was boring.

Entry 2, on the other hand, was a mess. It dared to take place in a wholly unapproved time and place, and mentioned icky things like God. The hero and heroine hailed from non-European cultures. Grammar and punctuation took a romp on the wild side. The author once -- oh, the horror -- switched her point-of-view character IN THE MIDDLE OF A SCENE!

I loved it.

So what gives? What made me scribble enthusiastic comments all over the last page of Entry 2, and bite my metaphorical pencil with the effort of bucking up Entry 1? What makes a good read a good read?

For the purposes of a digestible blog post, I'll narrow it down to two things: voice and conflict.

1) Voice. While Entry 1 read smoothly, with serviceable prose and suspenseful scene-endings, it just felt...flat. No wit, no zing, no originality. The usual phrases evoked the usual emotions. I'd read this story a thousand times before, and this one had nothing new to say, as if the author's personality had been smothered under the collective weight of a thousand well-meaning critique groups.

Entry 2, on the other hand, vibrated with energy and humor and wisdom, and breathed genuine life into what might have been a generic character pairing. The author's love for the period and culture burst through all those awkward sentence structures and grammatical miscues, and her use of image and metaphor was occasionally brilliant. Could the manuscript have used another pair of eyes, preferably ones attached to an English major's brain? Sure. But that's not what I mean by voice.

2) Conflict. Entry 1 takes place in a time of war and opens with a fight scene, so you'd think the story would rattle with conflict. You'd be wrong. Good romance feasts on the meat of the forces keeping our couple apart, and in this story, every possible external factor ENCOURAGES them to unite. So why don't they leap straight before the altar and into bed? Oh, blah blah need to be true to myself blah. You know, stuff that plagues the minds of pre-Enlightenment couples during the throes of war. I'm being a little harsh, of course, in order to make a point: Nothing's at stake. These two are just going to keep on bickering for a few hundred pages, denying Their True Feelings and junk, and then get married. A writer with a really brilliant voice could make this interesting, but...see #1 above.

The author of Entry 2, on the other hand, puts all kinds of barriers between her protagonists. They're from different cultures, different classes, different regions. Their goals lie far apart. In order to come together, one or both of them will have to give up everything. Who will it be? How will it come about? I want to know.

Now, I'm not saying that Entry 2 is ready to be shelved in your local bookstore. But if I had to lay my money on one of these two manuscripts to beat the ten-thousand-to-one odds of publication, I'd pick the second.

At least, that's the one I'm rooting for.

MORE SEX, PLEASE: WE'RE BRITISH FOOTBALLERS

Whenever my vulgar curiosity needs satisfaction, I turn to the Daily Mail website. What, you've never visited? The DM's intrepid squad of reporters fans out across the globe, leaving no Dumpster unsifted in the quest for sordid celebrity gossip (or, as the DM delicately names it, Femail), so readers are kept up-to-the-minute on which celebrities are too skinny (Angelina!) and which are too fat (Jessica!) and which have just been outed for cavorting with prostitutes while their wives were pregnant.

The latest in that illustrious line would be 24-year-old footballer Wayne Rooney, a star player for Manchester United and the England national team, whose response to the scandal is that he's "not prepared to take any s--- off the wife and her family" and "if she can't handle it and it's over, so be it." If this sounds a bit jaded, well, Rooney's been there before: he's already well-known among football fans and Femail readers alike for his teenage encounter with a 48-year-old hooker known (affectionately, one presumes) as the Auld Slapper.

At least wronged wife Coleen can take comfort in the fact that she's not alone. From Elin Nordegren to Sandra Bullock to Silda Spitzer, the wives of high-profile men have put up with a lot of high-priced competition over recent years. Or maybe the cheating was always going on, and today's offenders are just unlucky to have come of age in a time of instant news and transparent privacy. The Rooney affair came to light when Juicy Jeni -- one of the ladies involved -- sold her story to a tabloid, prompting a wave of disapproving website commentary that she was dishonoring her profession.

Whether it's the reap-the-rewards mentality of successful people, or our modern capability for rationalizing and entitlement, or the diminishing sacredness of sex in Western society, we've heard any number of reasons for the infidelity epidemic. Rooney's petulant comments suggest that he knows he did a bad thing, but can't summon the moral fiber to blame himself for it. As an athlete, he ought to be well-acquainted with self-control and physical discipline; apparently, though, he chooses to save all that effort for the football pitch, where it's appreciated by legions of worshipful fans rather than a single nagging wife in the yucky throes of pregnancy.

Anyhoo. The Daily Mail will feast on the story for a week or two, and then the Rooneys will probably reconcile and have another baby, and Femail will move on to obsess over the speed at which Coleen loses her pregnancy weight.

Which means the next celebrity cheating scandal can't be far behind.

GOOD FOR THE GANDER?

With the Franzen vs. Ladywriters dispute in full kerfuffle last week, I thought I'd better start reading me some Jennifer Weiner over Labor Day weekend. (I'm saving Freedom for the kind of late-autumn evening in which the yowls of sociopathic songbird-eating cats drown out the sound of acid rain beating against the roof of the nearest corrupt Halliburtonesque corporation.) So this post was meant to be a serious examination of women's fiction and its place in the modern literary landscape.

Alas, my feeble ladywriter brain is easily distracted by trivialities, and instead I found myself thinking about fat.

Cannie, the brilliantly-portrayed heroine of Good in Bed -- I began with the earliest of the Weiner oeuvre -- spends much of the novel battling the demons of body image on the way to her happy ending, and reminded me in many ways of Min, the heroine of Jennifer Crusie's more comic-toned but still weight-obsessed Bet Me, which I'd also read recently. In fact, I've come across a lot of books featuring curvier women in the past several years, all of which celebrated the beauty of ample endowment and the men who appreciate a well-rounded figure.

I couldn't be happier. I love reading about women of all body types, from dainty to athletic to lush, and it's about time that fiction recognized the beauty of diversity. A woman is loveliest when she's in tune with her natural shape, and both Weiner and Crusie tell this truth with aching eloquence.

But what about the dudes?

In each of these books, and others playing the same theme, the heroine ends up with a man of about one-percent body fat. He doesn't always have a pretty face, and he may not be muscle-bound, and he may measure in a shade shorter than the requisite six-two, but by God he hasn't got an extra ounce of padding on him.

Now it's great that our curvy women end up with what American society considers attractive men, but just how far are we pushing back the fat-is-ugly stereotype if it still applies to guys? Why, Cannie herself dismisses one man as "paunchy," and every fellow she's attracted to happens to be stick-skinny. What gives?

Biology might answer back that softness is womanly, and hardness is manly. Fine, but aren't we supposed to be beyond biological stereotypes? Or maybe a publisher would argue that these books are all supposed to be fantasy anyway, and novels without mantitty wouldn't sell. But doesn't that just misjudge so-called women's fiction, and women in general?

What do you think? Have you come across a novel with a less-than-lean but still-desirable hero? Would you like to see a guy with a love handle or two?

(And as for that serious post about Franzen and Weiner and literary vs. commercial fiction, I might as well forget it, because Ron Hogan has a much better version over at Beatrice.com.)

HOW I SURVIVED MY SUMMER VACATION

We have this glorious first-day-of-school tradition at our house, in which we scorn the big yellow bus and trudge uphill en famille through the late-August heat to arrive sweaty and exhausted at the schoolhouse door. (It's delightful, really; you should try it sometime.) This year our third child donned the ceremonial kindergarten backpack and joined his older siblings, and as my husband and I walked back out into the heavy sunshine, pushing the stroller that contained our last remaining toddler, a part of me wanted to howl in sorrow at the passing of summer and playtime and youth itself.

The other part wanted to bolt down the sidewalk shouting, "FREEDOM!"

Don't get me wrong. I love my kids. My husband and I both work from home, raising them without a nanny or part-time babysitter. I'm a hands-on, roll-around-on-the-floor, tuck-'em-into-bed kind of mom, and I wouldn't have it any other way. And that's the problem.

Come summer, I can't get any work done.

Now, I know it's a problem I share with millions of other moms. And I'm luckier than most: not only is novel-writing an extraordinarily fulfilling career, it also fits neatly into the nooks and crannies of suburban motherhood. While folding my way through a Himalayan mountain of laundry with my Sherpa guide, I can imagine an entire character arc into vivid detail. Racing past yellow stoplights in the Sticky Minivan to deliver my nine-year-old to soccer practice, I can solve the most intractable plot conundrum at very little risk to other drivers.

But the whole system depends on having a few hours a day to myself, in which to imprint all these magnificent thoughts onto something more permanent than my overloaded short-term memory. And when my day is filled with feeding, cleaning and adjudicating my own marauding band of restless youngsters, plus a couple of stray neighbor kids wandering by at lunchtime, the only imprinting around here occurs when I bang my head repeatedly against the kitchen counter. (It's just so soothing.)

And yet somewhere in the middle of all that sand and salt water and ice cream and sidewalk chalk, we managed to have a pretty good summer. Our five-year-old learned to ride his bike without training wheels. Our nine-year-old finished the Percy Jackson series, and his seven-year-old sister climbed Mt. Washington by his side in her ruffled pink hiking shorts. The baby turned two and started demanding her own Happy Meal box at McDonalds. I wouldn't have missed a single milestone, even when it marked one more step in the journey away from the nest.

Now the big kids are in their classrooms, and the baby's napping, and I'm sitting in front of the computer at last, being myself. And you know what? I can't wait for my gang to come home and toss their backpacks over the clean floor and tell me all about the first day of school.

As long as they go to bed early.

KING OF THE MOUNTAIN

My husband made several attempts to kill me while we were dating. First, he dunked me in the Connecticut River, during the course of an early-April canoe ride against both tide and current. Next, he took me home to meet his mother, who made me a pot of soup thick with wild mushrooms, which everyone knows are poisonous.

Then there was Mt. Moosilauke.

It's just a quick forty-five minute hike to the summit, he assured me. A mere stretching of the old joints. No need to weigh ourselves down with unnecessary items like windbreakers. Or lunch. Or water.

Turns out, that forty-five minutes represents the record time posted by the Dartmouth ski team in its annual race to the top. For those of us hiking without the benefit of months of intense aerobic conditioning, it's more like three hours. Each way. By the time we scaled the final monstrous New Hampshire boulder, wind flattening the alpine vegetation, my tongue was furry with thirst. By the time we staggered back into the lodge, my so-called boyfriend's trachea remained intact only because I was too weak to lift my hands.

So when my husband proposed taking the family up Mt. Moosilauke for a bit of a summer jaunt, I resisted. After all, this was the same man who once cheerfully suggested I slake my thirst in a mountain stream clogged with Giardia. But eventually his persistence wore me down, and I agreed with two conditions: one, we update our wills before the attempt; and two, we carry enough water to float a minor navy.

About a mile into the hike, I regretted my cave-in. Our five-year-old, after an enthusiastic start, sat himself down on a rock and refused to continue. My back was aching from a night spent on the plastic slab of mattress provided by the lodge bunkhouse. Plus, all that water was getting kind of heavy.

And then I looked over at my husband. Spine still unbowed, despite last night's granite mattress and the twenty-four-pound toddler strapped to his back, he took our five-year-old's hand and coaxed him onward with a bribe of yogurt-covered raisins. Our other two kids followed along in agile leaps, already veterans of New Hampshire hiking trips with Daddy.

So I took a drink of water and trudged up the trail behind them, watching out for little stumbling feet and smiling with pride when the older two, playing a game of "favorite things" to pass the time, never once mentioned TV.

Two hours later, I stood on the wind-whipped summit and watched my nine-year-old son point out the peaks he'd climbed with Daddy in previous summers. They reared up around us in acute angles and forested slopes, the weather shifting uneasily about the crests. I put on my windbreaker and sat down to eat my lunch, and though it took the unprecedented lure of a full can of Sprite, all to himself, to drag our five-year-old all 3.6 miles back down the mountain, I wouldn't have traded a moment.

Even if it killed me.

THE AMAZING SISTERHOOD

A few years ago, just after I woke up in the cold sweat of my early thirties and realized I'd better get serious about writing, I had lunch with an acquaintance of mine who works as an editor at a well-known science fiction publisher. I told her about my writing plans -- historical fiction with romantic elements -- and she immediately suggested I join the Romance Writers of America.

I cast my mind back to the romances I'd devoured in high school and college. All fun and games, I thought, until you have to write the words 'turgid manhood' with a straight face. "Well," I said doubtfully, "I'm not sure if romance is my thing."

She shook her head. "RWA has a big tent. If you've got a love story, you're in. And the resources are huge. Workshops, conferences, contests. There's no better way to plug into the publishing network."

At that point, I wasn't in any position to be ignoring advice, and a few months later I walked into the hotel lobby at the RWA National Conference in Dallas. I didn't know a single soul, and until I opened the freebie paperbacks in my registration totebag, I hadn't read a romance in 15 years. Worse, the women around me were gathering into cliques, squeeing with delight, gossiping and texting each other. High school flashbacks began to explode in my brain. My right foot poised in midair, ready to flee for the elevator and lock myself back in my hotel room.

Luckily, I didn't. I stayed, attended workshops, ate chicken lunches in cavernous ballrooms. I gathered courage and introduced myself. I saw brilliant and accomplished women like Eloisa James and Lisa Kleypas lead sessions and give speeches. I saw a soaring variety of books being promoted, from classic category romance to hardcover historical fiction. I thought, maybe I do belong here. Maybe I can join a clique. Maybe I can even start a clique.

By the end of the conference, I was inspired. I'd read a few of the books in my totebag and discovered that romance had come a long way from the early 1990s, and I'd met a few of those texting women and found them full of welcome and enthusiasm for newcomers. I came home with notebooks full of storytelling techniques, and -- though I didn't realize it at the time -- the germ of an idea that became my first novel, OVERSEAS.

More importantly, I'd found a community. Whatever these women (and a few dudes too, it must be said) are writing, from sweet Amish love stories to kick-ass urban fantasy, they encourage each other through every step of the road through publication. They cross-promote with blogs and Twitter, they whoop and cheer and share information over email loops, they critique each other constructively through local chapters and contests. This is RWA's finest legacy: the unflagging and democratic support for all our fellow writers, published and unpublished.

I don't know if I'll ever manage to produce a true genre romance novel, but I'll always be a proud member of RWA and a devoted fan of its fabulous authors.

None of whom, by the way, would ever write the phrase 'turgid manhood.'