Last week, while reveling in children, I heard my favorite twelve-year-old ask one of the adults in the room, “Who’s your favorite supervillain?”
 
That’s the kind of unexpected question that would give me pause before answering. Roger didn’t hesitate. Without hesitation, as if he’d done his research in advance of such a query, he responded, “Doctor Doom.”
 
The twelve-year-old didn’t ask why Roger had made that choice. Roger didn’t explain himself, either. He didn’t have to: Doctor Doom. Great answer. The doctor’s name alone tells the audience that he’s All Evil, All the Time. If he wasn’t All Evil, All the Time, he’d have done something to soften his name’s impact.
 
“You can call me Vic,” the leader of Latvaria said. “Although, officially, it’s Victor von Doom-Markovich. I was willing to take Fruzsina’s last name, but she insisted we hyphenate. Such an angel.”
 
(If you’re wondering if Doctor Doom has ever fallen in love, he absolutely has. Fruzsina was only one of the lucky ladies that caught Doom’s eye.)
 
In fiction, names are often the telltale clue to someone’s soul. Prince Charming? Of course, you can pet sit for my cat. Professor Sinister? Fluffy Foo-Foo will not be left in your care.  
 
During our long drive home, I had time to reflect on this. I told Glynn about the exchange I’d overheard in Yuma, then asked if he thought we should change the name of the baddie in our next story. “Instead of Charisma,” I said, “maybe we should use something stronger.”
 
“Like Cruella?”
 
“Perfect example.”
 
“The Evil Empire would sue us.”
 
“I didn’t mean –”
 
“Who’s your favorite supervillain?” he asked.
​

​And, by now, I’d had time to think about that. Without hesitation, as if I’d done my research in advance of such a query, I responded, “Sideshow Bob.”
 
Robert Underdunk Terwilliger Jr., a.k.a Sideshow Bob of The Simpsons. The brilliant but easily distracted nemesis of Bart Simpson. Bob’s also a big fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, and someone who often bursts into song with little provocation. I’m not saying that I can relate, but, like Bob, I grew a little tired of Bart Simpson some twenty years ago.
 
“Not exactly a name to inspire fear,” my car partner told me.
 
“Who’s yours?” I asked Glynn.

​“Lasso,” he said immediately, which leads me to think that maybe all guys keep those kinds of lists in their head. Favorite food, favorite sports team, favorite supervillain. Women keep mental lists, too, but our lists aren’t like theirs. Not even close.
 
If you haven’t heard of Lasso, join the club. The character first appeared in Flash Comics #85 (1947), where he attempted to take down Hawkman and failed. Decades later, he was updated as one of a team of malefactors (2005). Once again, he was an enemy of Hawkman. It was this version that Glynn liked.
 
“Lasso dresses like a cowboy,” he said, “and the only thing he can do is throw a lasso. Not a super lasso, or a magic lasso, just a regular rope with a noose on the end. The same kind of rope that anyone can buy at a hardware store. Over the course of several issues of Hawkman, he talks big, does a little gambling, and hits on a woman. Just lingering in the background. He throws his lasso one time. Once. The rope is immediately taken from his hand by a more powerful baddie.”
 
“Then why is Lasso your favorite supervillain?” I asked. “He’s a weenie.”
 
(Look, I’d just spent several days with kids. It takes a little time to get back into adult-speak.)
 
“That’s why he’s my favorite supervillain. He makes me laugh.”
 
If you’re wondering why our writing royalties have never approached five figures, that’s the answer, right there. We’d rather laugh than create a memorable super foe.
 
But Charisma Treadwell is going to overcome her name and be a great baddie. Wait and see.

 Fully vaccinated and comfortable at the idea of entering the outside world once again, the first thing I did was… make an appointment to get my hair cut. Doctor visits, dentist visits, that stuff can wait. After fifteen months of isolation, I’m not going to try to fix the sad, flyaway stuff on top of my head. Glynn volunteered to help, but that wasn’t going to happen. I saw what he did to his own hair.
 
Six months into the pandemic, my guy watched 15 minutes of a YouTube video and decided he had haircutting down. It turns out, he’d overestimated his abilities. Holding the hair clipper in hand, he came out of the bathroom and told me, “Guess I have a mullet now.”
 
I so wish I’d thought to grab my cellphone.
 
Since my face is all wrong for a mullet – here’s how you know: Do you have a face? If you do, it’s all wrong for a mullet – I called Heather, my hair stylist. She didn’t have any openings for a couple of weeks, so the second thing I did was to fuel up the car, drive for hours across the desert, and went to see babies. I’m still with the babies. As soon as I’m done with this note, I’m playing with the little ones again. If the babies weren’t so far away, I’d be tempted to do this EVERY week. If this particular blog is a little short of sauce, you now know why. I’ve been distracted.
 
Because I almost never think of grabbing my cellphone, I failed to take a picture of the desert as I crossed it. Instead, I borrowed this image by Simon Maisch from Unsplash. It’s not unlike “my” desert.
 
I do have this to share: I set up an Amazon Author Central page a couple of days ago. I’m not a fan of Author Central pages. I find them to be awkward-looking things, not unlike a mullet, but a very nice person has offered to help promote one of my new releases and asked I set one up. Since I had to include an author’s photo, I used one from a few years go. You know, back in the days when someone else was cutting my hair. And coloring it.
 
It’s not my best picture. My best picture is in my head, which is where I imagine I look better than what my evil, lying mirror shows me.
I also discovered an interesting site, How Many of Me. The website uses Census Bureau data to estimate how many people in the USA share whatever name you enter. We’re not talking exact numbers here, but it’s definitely in the general vicinity. When I plugged in “Anne Glynn”, for example, the HowMany team told me there are 13 people sharing the same name in the States. No idea if any of those names are pen names, though. There are 36 people named “Renee Harrell”, our other pseudonym.
Last week, I used their calculator to see how many real people shared the same name as the villainess in our next story. HowMany said, There are 1 or fewer people in the U.S. (with that name). That sounds a lot like “none” to me. This fictional bad girl is a really, really awful person. For no real reason, I’m pleased there’s only one of her.
​ 
Now, if you’ll excuse me, babies!
​

​The mouse on the left is a field mouse and, as long as the mouse stays in the field, the two of us are good. Come into my house, we might have a different conversation. I could use this picture because it's in the public domain.
 
No, I’m talking about the Walt Disney Company, whose most famous mascot is a cartoon mouse. Why aren’t I showing a Mickey Mouse image on the blog? The character’s not in the public domain. Despite Mickey having been created almost a century ago, WDC keeps pressuring Congress to extend their copyright protections well past what the law originally intended. Congress being… well, Congress… is only too happy to help their big money donors as long as the big money keeps flowing from palm to palm.
 
Which doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies about either of these two groups, but what are you gonna do? It’s not right, but it’s not technically evil. You know what does seem to be an act of evil? The way big money Walt Disney decided to withhold royalties from little money authors. Allegedly.
 
This first came to my attention when the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) posted this notice. If you don’t care to read the entire thing, it comes down to this: The Disney Company purchased LucasFilms and, with it, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, an Alan Dean Foster novel. Then, gobbling everything in sight, WDC picked up 20th Century Fox and the rights to three other novels that Foster had written. According to the writer, a gentleman who lives in my community, the company appeared to have taken the stance that they had the right to profit from the sales of the novels, but they were no longer obligated to pay the guy who wrote those novels. Because… they’re Disney. With Congress in their pocket, they weren’t too concerned that a small-town author had the muscle to go up against them.
 
Fighting an aggressive form of cancer and caring for a medically-fragile wife, Foster had a lot on his plate. He’s also a fighter, so he went public with his situation. The SFWA helped spread the word. Glynn and I decided, until WDC met their legal obligations to him, we were done with those shysters. No Disney+, no Disney movies, no Disney toys. We formed a two-person boycott and shared the news pretty openly. We were pleased recently when, many months after the royalty statements stopped coming, Foster posted on his website this May that all was well. “The issue with Disney regarding back royalties has been resolved.”
 
Just in time, too, because Disney+ will be releasing the Loki television series in June. I really want to see the Loki television series. Tom Hiddleston as a megalomaniacal Trickster God? Yes, please.
 
Except *sigh* it appears that there was worse to come. According to Publisher’s Weekly, multiple writing organizations are now saying that the Mickey Mouse organization has shafted lots of other writers. Some of them for years. Romance writers, mystery writers, science fiction writers, horror writers… the WDC has been an equal-opportunity offender. The hashtag #DisneyMustPay has been established, so keep an eye out for it.  And if you, by chance, are one of the casualties, the SFWA wants your information. You can contact them here.
  
Oh, and I’d like to share a little advice with Tom Hiddleston ‘cause I know he’s checking this out. Tom, get your money upfront.

​We were still talking about writing serial fiction when my friend, the Good Witch, asked me that. It was an unfair question, because it’s all about context, isn’t it? When my college roommate first discovered poison oak, then discovered that evening that she was highly allergic to poison oak, she sent her boyfriend away when he came to our door. That night, generic Benadryl was ranked much higher than true love.
 
There are times when true love is the shiniest star in the heavens. There are other times when I will absolutely abandon a hug and tickle for a pair of Café Rio’s fire-grilled chicken tacos. I enjoy hugs and tickles, but I haven’t been to my favorite Café Rio in almost two years. At this point, it’s not about desire. This is lust.
 
But Good Witch had a point to make: “What’s better than finding true love is finding a true love with a massive bank account.”
 
I disagree with her. The only person I’ve personally met who has a massive bank account – lottery winnings, who says there’s justice in this world? – is a gigantic hemorrhoid of a person. Which is what I shared with G.W.
 
“First of all, ---- is barely a multi-millionaire. Does ‘five’ count as multi-millions? Secondly, he’s a douche. He’s nobody’s fantasy lover,” G.W. pointed out, quite accurately. “I mean, for this new serial fiction thing, you should write a billionaire romance story. They’re so popular.”
 
I vaguely knew that “billionaires” are a romance trope. The heroes (because it’s usually a man who has the money) are often emotionally-damaged and uninterested in commitment, which is in keeping with what I’ve read about the super-rich, they tend to be gorgeous, unlike every other billionaire anyone has ever seen in person, and they end up falling in love with the story’s extraordinarily ordinary heroine, which seems so unlikely to me. But I enjoy reading and writing romance, where the unlikely is what makes the motor run, so I was okay with that.
 
“Maybe I should use a trillionaire,” I said, because if an ungodly amount of money is good then a massively obscene amount of moola would seem to be better.
 
“It’s been done. Didn’t go over well,” G.W. told me. “It’s not realistic.” As if realism is the defining feature of any serial I wrote in this genre.
 
“How about a multiplujillionaire, then?” – which is when we learned that Glynn had been listening in to our conversation. “Mr. Scrooge McDuck. From the way he acts, I’m pretty certain that he’s emotionally-damaged.”
 
(Before I wrote this blog, I did a little research. In 2011, Forbes magazine estimated that the avian multiplujillionaire’s fictional money vault held over $44B in gold. Also, although McDuck’s been in love before, he’s currently single. On the downside, he’s a duck. But what man is perfect?)
 
“You promised me fire-grilled chicken tacos,” I told Glynn. In less than a minute, he’d gathered his books and left. Not to get me my tacos, just to escape from sight.
 
If you go online, you’ll see there are over 50 pages of listings for billionaire romance books on Amazon alone. Going by the cover photos, the world’s wealthy spend an inordinate amount of their time at the gym. There are bad boy billionaires, gangland billionaires, billionaires with babies, billionaires who want babies, vampire billionaires, and werewolf billionaires.
 
Overwhelmed by so many options, I didn’t see anything new I could bring to the genre. And then, out of nowhere, a new story title popped into my head.
 
I shared the name with G.W.
 
“You can’t use that,” G.W. told me. “It’s obscene!”
 
But it’s my working title or, it will be, if the Amazon Vella folks approve it. If they don’t, I think I’ll pass on writing big dollar romance – or maybe I’ll use The Bad Boy Multiplujillionaire’s Surprise Werewolf Baby. It’s not dirty in the least, it covers a few of the bases, and, as of this morning, no one else has used it.
 
I can hear the cash registers ringing already.