Enough already.

So Jon and I just got back from a three-hour excursion to Half-Price Books on North Lamar. This is where the powers-that-be moved my favorite bookstore on the Drag after it became prohibitively expensive to rent property in that particular neighborhood (unless your store name is Starbucks or Urban Outfitters). Huge, long, tall rows of books - general fiction - encompassed the main floor of Half-Price, which used to be an H.E.B. grocery store prior to its conversion. Yummy tomes to filter through and perhaps take home, smelling slightly musty and unique, of other people's homes.

After three hours of picking through fiction designed to appeal to women, I've noticed that a certain trend has all but taken over in the so-called "chick lit" genre," which is, to wit, flimsy plots featuring a female protagonist who lives in New York City. Oh, sure, I found a handful of London- or L.A.-bound heroines, but the solitary rule of this type of fiction seems to be that the main character must either live in New York City or move to New York City, and she must love it there with a blindered Carrie Bradshaw love as to suggest that the rest of us peons are piddling our lives away somewhere in the unfashionable sticks.

Of course, our girl has a swell job - she's a publicist, a magazine editor, a food critic, a fashion designer; nothing pedantic (e.g., school teacher, bartender, manager of Chili's) will do. Thumb through the pages of any of these books, and you'll see that the pages are peppered with the words "Prada" and "Manolos" and similar nouns connoting serious fashion snobbery. That's what living in NYC is about, making an impression, and it shows in these books. But hush! One is about to read a story about a genuine woman of the world - She Who is to Be Admired - and her fashion sense and decision where to live makes her so.

The secondary feature of New York Chicky lit is the sad, beta-prone fiancee/boyfriend who inevitably gets usurped by a handsome, dashing admirer, and in true metropolitan form, always at the last minute and as a second thought. But since the romantic plotline is such a buried feature of these books, you don't have to listen to me natter on about this. There's usually some kind of career crisis involved, as family matters don't figure prominently in New York Chicky Lit. The additional supporting characters are an off-beat/bohemian best friend, an anorexic sister, a bitchy rival (who wears even glossier Manolos than our long-suffering heroine), and the ubiquitous Boss From Hell, Finally, the protagonist must have an absurd habit, such as routinely maxing out credit cards, failing to show for blind dates and what not. I've unwittingly read dozens of these books, and I have no idea what they're about; the final impression one is left with is that these manuscripts were hastily dashed off on laptops in trendy cafes by bunches of Columbia grad students during Christmas break.

The real truth, I'm convinced, is that there's only one New York Chicky Lit novel, and the rest is done with mirrors.

I don't know about the rest of you gal readers, but I'm craving novels of substance. I want real protagonists without glamorous career accountrements and large closets - women with real problems, not imaginary ones like not having enough change to valet park - and I want them to live in Boise, El Paso, Kansas City, or Duluth. My long-suffering heroines can be baristas, dog walkers, or hospital clerks, but they have to be underemployed with little hope of obtaining a comfortable measure of cash in their bank accounts unless they marry into it. Writer Sarah Bird does an excellent job of creating dynamic heroines that teeter on the cusp of sad-sack. A grad-school drop-out who works as a file clerk at the LBJ Library. An aspiring romance novelist whose rent is three months in arrears. A surrogate mother who took fifteen years to receive her undergraduate degree. Now, these are real people. These are the kind of women I know, the kind I habitually meet here in A-town. The kind who wouldn't know a Manolo from a Doc Marten. The kind that I want to know more about. Bird crafts her tales as such that you feel for her people as you trasverse their fictional landscape. Very few writers to date have been able to do that. Well, maybe the late, great Dara Joy. But that's another story entirely.

As with music and fashion, trends in literature can be dispiriting, particularly if you don't like them, and even if you do. No reader enjoys being faced with an endless stream of similar protagonists and similar plotlines; honestly, if I read another passage about a gal character lusting after a Prada handbag, I feel that I'll pitch it into the bin without further ado. But ... looking on the bright side of things, trends don't last forever. A good story does.

Well, well, well ...

Okay, this is my first blog on Blogger. I'm sort of at a loss as to what to say, so I'm gonna wing it.

I've done this before, you see. About two years ago, my illustrious now-significant other, a recording artist, convinced me to join Myspace. My disgrace, MyDisgrace, MyDisgraceland. That's how the site evolved, to my mind. At the time I joined MyDisgraceland, I was unawares of its roots; MyDisgraceland was the original groupie site for bands and solo artists promoting their c.d.s and tours and merch (ha! rockstar girlfriend emerges, using the insider lingo, "merch!"). And to this day, that flavor is retained. Despite MyDisgraceland's efforts to expand the content and alter the site's flavor, what you really have is largely musicians and their fans - strippers, cyberwhores - both amateur (Suicide Girls, God's Girls) and semi-notorious (e.g., Liz Vicious) - and flat-out groupie types who have managed to parlay their ventures into some sort of visibility (hey, cool, I recognize these chicks when Jon goes on tour) - as well as a few random handfuls of legitimate publicists, photographers, artists, high school kids, and college students to keep things from getting ickily incestuous. Oh, then there's the ubiquitous Macy's card and porn site spammers (which I'm convinced account for 50 percent of all MyDisgraceland profiles) and the fake musicians who create elaborate vanity pages that take yonks to load, crash your machine, or both. Porn and wannabes are very, very big on MyDisgraceland.

But I digress. I unknowingly stepped into this pit and proceeded to blog, all the while wondering why the rest of my friends didn't have profiles on MyDisgraceland - it's an excellent place to socially network, no? After the first weirdo - a ka-razy!!! female fan one of my blog buddies refers to as "The Talented Miss Ripley" - began messaging my "Top Friends" fishing for information about Jon and I, I understood exactly why not. This nonsense trudged on for six months before she arrived on Jon's doorstep, freshly tattooed and ready to start their life together (...sigh...). Seriously, people. I kid you not. So I learned from my mistakes, and I learned too, that while there are good people on MyDisgraceland, it's not a place where I want to broadcast details of my existance. I still have a profile, private of course, but I'm not very active on the site, and I sure as hell no longer blog there. My Comments and Friends List features are disabled. When it comes to my safety and that of my friends, I take no chances.

Live Journal. Been there, done that, burned the t-shirt. Nothing against people who blog there, but I feel a certain anomie wash over me whenever I log into Live Journal. Putting it bluntly: I'm just too old for most of that shit. The use of pubescent-appealing emoticons that appear straight out of Hello Kitty merchandising scheme indicate that most of the bloggers there are more concerned with zit control and scoring tickets to the H.I.M. concert than Really Deep Thoughts. As such, Live Journal offers a high degree of anonymity; this, coupled with the fact that LJ blog topics spring up dominant in just about every search engine, makes it the perfect forum for nameless groupies and MyDisgraceland escapees to intentionally announce their former groupie endeavors to yours truly and the rest of the world. Sweet ...

There's a message board that I occasionally post on, comprised of smart, world-savvy women who all share an interest in perfume (yes, really!). I noticed that they primarily used Blogger as a format to post their views about life and the love of fragrance, and Blogger does indeed seem to generate a more tasteful, mature-minded crowd. I created this blog months ago, and have been meaning to pop in to jot down a few words. If you're reading this, you know who I am. And if you're not, the name's Melissa, pleased to meet cha. I'm a blueblooded Austinite, and you won't find me living anywhere else in this short lifetime. My significant other is Jon, and he sings in the band VAST - that's an acronym for Visual Audio Sensory Theater. Jon is not only more talented than me, he's more intelligent than me - but then again, Genius Boy is more talented and intelligent than the majority of the population. He's tall and stocky with thick ginger hair; something about his eyes reminds of of a lion, hence my nickname for him, "Lion." (Other variations: Lionchop, Lionflower, Lionking, okay, I'll stop now, it is sickening, yes?).

Jon and I recently wrote a book together called "Bang Band Sixxx," which rolled off the press sometime last week. But I don't generate my primary income from writing, nor have I ever. I'm a big believer in honesty. This is who I am: I am a paralegal student, cramming four semesters into two in hopes that I can parlay these skills into a respectable career at the Legislature. I might go on to law school in the future, depending on how much money I can drag in after my certification comes through. Ideally, I would like to write for a living. But until "Bang Band" sells millions of copies, gets adapted into a screenplay, and made into a movie, I am not a writer. I am a white collar worker. Nothing wrong with that.

Now that the intros are over, I'll try to post regularly and stay sane while doing so. Blogs are meant to inform, entertain, and keep others abreast of life's little trials and triumphs. I'd love to meet fellow bloggers in my neck of the woods or elsewhere, so don't be shy to say "hi."