What was she thinking?
I bet her book flopped
Welcome to the December edition of Ill-Behaved Women. There are a lot of new people here, so I’ll start with a brief introduction.
I am L.L. Kirchner, reader, unabashed lowbrow culture fan, and author of The Queenpin Chronicles trilogy. Every month I try to bring you insight into my favorite Ill-Behaved Women. Why? Because history is already littered with the untold stories of the well behaved.
This month, I am going to share a special excerpt from my forthcoming book, highlight a news anchor I loved for clapping back at viewer email, and once again, give a shout out to Melinda French Gates.
But first… BIG NEWS! The audiobook for Florida Girls won the coveted, “best narrator 2024” award from Audiobook Reviewer.
Now let’s get into it, starting with my own personal rebellion.
Though I always knew I wanted write, it was because I wanted other people to enjoy my work. I had never had any interest in spending my life tapping away at that great American novel that would be discovered posthumously. So to start, I got a degree in journalism, not English.
I wrote for boatloads of newspapers and magazines well earning a living in PR and marketing. It just so happened that life events conspired to compel me to write to memoirs. Not because I thought my life story was so interesting, but that my experiences were emblematic of an era. My first, American Lady Creature, was about getting a divorce while living in Qatar, one of the world’s most patriarchal cultures. The second one is about the long and twisty journey that was my escape from the never ending hamster wheel of wellness culture. That one’s called Blissful Thinking, check it out.
Again, because I wanted people to read my books, I chose to work with publishers, because in my mind, that was how authors found readers. But here’s the thing. There's a seven year gap between those two books.
SEVEN YEARS.
That’s not a sustainable career.
Yet, for the majority of my life, I was okay with that model. I thought well, I will suffer over here trying to earn a living while writing in my so-called spare time.
But during that 7-year stretch, I got it into my head that I could fictionalize parts of my memoir and write scripts about my experiences. It's probably worth mentioning here that my current day job is in the live television, and I helped launch the Tribeca film festival in Qatar, so this seemingly abrupt shift was actually years in the making.
But here's the thing—those scripts went on to be produced, shown in film festivals, and win awards.
Maybe I was better at fiction?
After seeing a 1940s era picture of women in bathing costumes boarding a bus, I was forever changed. It gave me the nugget of the idea that became The Queenpin Chronicles.
Not long after moving to St. Petersburg, I’d heard about this wacky promotional guru who, back in the 1920s, invented a controversy about the scandalous teeny tiny bathing costumes in Florida, making Florida beaches—specifically in St. Pete—top on the list for pleasure seeking vacationers around the country.
So when I saw that picture I wasn't thinking, gosh, what fun that must've been. My first thought was, what kind of hucksters were behind that promotion? When I started the research, the first people that I came across, were men. Perhaps not surprisingly, my research led me to men, particularly around the mafia, and my initial ideas for the book were based on those men.
As I got to writing and had to sprinkle in some women, I realize there really weren't any that had been written about. So I crafted characters drawing upon memoirs I had read by women of that era. From the moment, Kathleen Young appeared on the page, she was way more interesting. And pretty soon those women took over.
Back to producing the book… When I started, I wasn't even sure I could write a whole novel. When I was done, I gave it to some trusted readers to ask their opinion. Unanimously they suggested I should find an agent and get the book published. The traditional publishing route.
Meanwhile, that second memoir finally took and was on its way to being published. So in my other so-called spare time, I sent out a few, highly targeted emails to agents. There's still an agent out there who requested my book but who hasn't gotten back to me yet. I will tell you, I have heard stories of people who offer up similar experiences as a kind of morality tale, as in, and then, out of the blue the acceptance came years later so don’t give up! (At least two more years would likely follow before said book would come out in that scenario.)
By the time my memoir came out, my novel was also ready to go. Did I want to wait years and years before seeing the book come out? Did I want to earn pennies on the dollar for every copy sold and have zero idea what the relationship was between what I was doing to market the book and what was working?
Was I considering believing in myself enough to put my own work out there?
Would people dismiss my book?
What if it sucked?
Well, it turns out that it's pretty hard to write multiple books that talk about how I escaped the chains of oppression and not see the irony that I was still making myself smaller to fit in. And now, in the space of one year, the second book in my series is about to come out—VEGAS GIRLS.
Not only that, this book has sold more copies in six months than my other two combined have in the past decade. Squee!
If you read Florida Girls, you'll remember Thelma Miles as one of the main characters in the book. In Vegas Girls, she is out for revenge and she heads to Las Vegas chasing after her nemesis, Sal Giancarlo.
Sal is expanding his criminal empire, and Thelma is determined to crush him.
OK I did a little fudging with the timeline because I wanted the action to be fast-paced and follow the previous book immediately. In fact, construction in Las Vegas did not get underway until 1946. But otherwise? They are besieged by the elements that would have been problems for them during that era. Let me just show you what I mean with the prologue:
Excerpt from VEGAS GIRLS
The Prologue
1945
At the start of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized the need for foreign intelligence gathering and so tapped General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a decorated veteran of the first World War, to head up the Office of Strategic Services.
The son of poor Irish immigrants, Donovan was, somehow, an Anglophile. He modeled his agency after British intelligence, right down to recruiting citizen spies. Like Britain’s Baker Street Irregulars, his roster read like a Who’s Who of cultural elites: film director John Ford, chef and author Julia Child, baseball player Moe Berg, and Henry and John Ringling North, of the Ringling Circus family.
Perhaps this is why J. Edgar Hoover, head of the United States’ internal security, found the department a threat. He was all about appearances and playing politics. To undermine the influence of the OSS, Hoover used the news media to leak false allegations that the rival agency was creating an “American Gestapo.”
Wild Bill was not in it for the publicity. More content in a war zone than deskbound in DC, he didn’t want to see his agents constrained either. With the demise of President Roosevelt, however, even Donovan could see the end coming. But he would not go down without a fight.
Believing that his agency’s ability to collect and analyze intelligence was key to the country’s long-term stability, Donovan borrowed from another British technique. To undermine Hoover’s influence, he instructed Special Agent Theodore Nelson—on the heels of his success in Florida—to expose organized criminals working openly within the US, unaware of just how deeply they’d infiltrated the system. The OSS was shuttered by the Truman administration less than a month after the war’s official end.
His mission in Las Vegas, however, was not a failure. Not if you were Thelma Miles or Kathleen Young, taking up the fight as Vegas Girls. Hired as pawns, they became the ultimate power brokers.
This is their story.
This button goes to a page with all your favorite retailers. THANK YOU for preordering! It gives a boost to books that helps Amazon know what readers to show the book to!
What I enjoy is writing what I imagine could be the story behind the story. Was there competition between these two agencies? Absolutely. Was it as cutthroat as I make it out to be here? Yes, that too. Did British Intelligence authorize mayhem operations just to shake things up? They did.
As for wild Bill Donovan trying to set up an American crisis in a power grab for his foreign intelligence agency? That is made up. Based on my experience working for a government agency—I can't say which one—but I can say that's exactly the kind of bureaucratic in-fighting that goes on.
Anyway, this DIY book comes out January 3 2025 and will be available everywhere books are sold. Don’t see it on the shelf? They can order it.
One thing I'm doing at in-person events is offering a "blind date with a book" to people who sign up for my mailing list. I'm picking winners through a bolita-style lottery—bolita being the illegal numbers game that drove the Tampa mafia to the top of all Florida mafia between 1920 and 1989 and also plays a big role in my book. I’m also considering doing this live on social media. What do you think?
Here's a video of me picking a winner on Instagram. I didn’t do it live because I haven't done anything live yet, and I'm not sure how that even works, but I'm starting to come around to the idea of giving this a shot.
The Leslie Horton of it all…
I came across this story only yesterday on Instagram, about a news anchor out of Calgary. One of her viewers actually took the time to send her an email congratulating her on her pregnancy, adding, “if you're going to wear old man bus driver pants like that you've got to expect these kinds of emails.”
No sir. No she does not. I would say keep your emails in your pants in your own bus driver pants..
Her response was next-level withering. She was absolutely brilliant and I invite you to look on my at Instagram stories or Google it!
Again, this probably struck me so because I work in TV, and I would bet there were behind the scenes meetings about this. If I was going to write this as a story, of course, I would make sure that the executives supported her talking about it but not quite in the way that she did. Like Apple TVs, The Morning Show, the event provides an opportunity to write into a lot of juicy hot topics for women. Maybe I will write a fictionalized short about it…
Melinda French Gates does it again!
And finally, I want to talk about another Melinda Gates initiative. She is also clapping back, at backlash against DEI, that's diversity equity and inclusion. I don't know why people have such a problem with this concept, but anyway, she's not gonna take that. And as a wealthy ass lady, she does not have to.
She’s doing God's work as far as I'm concerned, bye putting money into DEI programs specifically aimed at artificial intelligence. Again, this is something I feel is a personal relevance as I talked about in my Ill-Behaved Women posts about how writers can use AI and also my video post on how I used AI to come up with promo ideas.
I cannot express how important I know this is, because the patriarchy has already embedded itself into AI. Check out my posts for more, or just know that spellcheck tried to take “French” out of Melinda French Gates’ name. WHY?
And that’s it for this month in Ill-Behaved Women. Until next time, stay bold, stay curious, and never apologize for your ambitions.
YOUR food for thought, I’d love to hear what you think?
Where do you think Melinda French Gates should put her $$$
Have you ever written a letter to a celebrity? If so, what did you say?
Comments here are for paying subscribers only, but you can always reply to my emails, you just won’t get to interact with the community.