My romance novel No Way Out (now in submission), features a main character, Molly Donovan, who has a physical impairment -- limited use of her left arm due to a rare stroke that occurred when she was in high school. This inhibits Molly not at all -- in fact she's one tough woman, and her love interest, Miguel, has his hands full keeping up with her.
All my stories feature characters with disabilities, because, from my point of view, fiction contains few characters with physical or mental disabilities -- or hearing and vision impairments. Often, such characters are villains (which I find deeply offensive) or are the object of great amazement because they don't just stay home and watch television.
Really -- it's ridiculous. And this lack of representation exacerbates the cultural attitude towards persons with disabilities. "They" are different -- scary, embarrassing, to be looked away from, kept separate, not acknowledged accept for pit. They are, as we say in New Mexico, pobrecitos.
In the course of my career and my life, I have known many successful persons with mental and physical impairments. In fact, these people taught me that life is about making the most of the choices I do have. Believe it or not, that wasn't clear to me before...I felt sorry for myself because I had passed up certain opportunities or failed at others. My work with people with impairments who were successfully managing families and careers taught me that I simply had to wrong attitude.
And I've never been the same. But, to the books. I have two published series. My very first is the Cinnamon/Burro New Mexico mysteries. The very first story In Dulce, Disturbed, is about a missing boy with autism. One of the detectives is living with schizophrenia.
My second series, is part of the Cotton Lee Penn historical mystery series. In this series, Cotton Lee Penn fights the stigma of a polio impairment in the 1970's rural south. Readers tell me that like Cotton Lee because of her grit and honesty, and because she doesn't allow others to define what she can and can't do. I set Cotton Lee in the 1970's to make the prejudices against her working and having a love life believable, but these same prejudices are out among us today.
My latest book, No Way Out, is a romantic suspense, and I'm submitting it now. I hope to get the book in good enough shape so that readers can enjoy it. Readers get it that we all are vulnerable to physical or mental impairments. It's a matter of luck and time. And, so far, my readers respond positively to my characters who manage their physical and mental impairments quite well, overcoming the functional limitations of their disabilities, and overcoming the attitudes of others to persevere and wring a good amount of success out of life.
Bravo to you, my fair readers.
Things remain, as ever, mysterious in New Mexico.
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