READERS GUIDE TO THE MERZ BOOKSHELF
By Merz  


Having hit a milestone of sorts and having accumulated several years worth of stories on 
the shelf, I want to offer readers some help in finding their way through all these titles.  
First, the things you might find here: some violence but not much in the way of brutality; 
romance but the sex doesn't get a lot of detailed description; humbling of men but no 
lengthy humiliation.  There are no growth stories, and I prefer my women to get strong 
the old fashioned way through hard work and good genetics rather than magic, science 
fiction or spinach.  Except sometimes.  I tried to structure all the stories to have a 
beginning, middle and end so parts of multi-part stories might be read on their own 
without going through the whole series, but I find reading the whole thing to be more fun.

MAIN CHARACTERS
About half my stories involve some recurring characters. Here are the ones who show up 
in multiple stories.

ALICE  The first four stories deal with Alice and Johnny, and the twenty-five years it 
takes them to finally get together.  Their story is a romance involving a strong woman 
and a pretty ordinary guy who each has to overcome problems in life before getting to a 
happy ending.  I think the stories held up well as I have reread them over the years.  I 
borrowed the names from characters in good stories written by DanboyII and 
Dreamspinner as a gesture of respect.  Alice's body goes through some changes in the 
four stories in the series, as happens to all of us.

SYLVIA shows up five times, three times in her own life story and twice as a supporting 
character.  I picture her looking like Christa Bauch based mostly on her age when we first 
meet her and her lean muscularity.

BETTY HUNT was created because a sightless muscle woman seemed like an interesting 
character to build a story around.  Her first outing, "Blind Date #1" worked out pretty 
well, so I did a sequel where she goes off shopping for clothes.  There is a third one in the 
Blind Date series that lacks the drive and spark I like to see, so it languishes on a Misc 
shelf rather than here.  Betty is heavily muscled along the lines of Annie Rivieccio, but 
blonde.

KATHY DAVIDSON  Kathy owns the clothes shop Betty visited in Blind Date #2.  She 
narrates her stories and teams up with Betty several times.  In her first two outings, "Girls 
Night Out" and "Kathy and Sylvia Get Dressed Up" I pictured her as being vaguely 
English and used a rather detached narrating style.  "Kathy and Sylvia" has some of the 
best dialogue I think I have written as Betty and Kathy banter back and forth.  "Country 
Living" puts Kathy together with Sylvia again and lets her give more insight into her 
character.  She acknowledges having a fierce temper and having had problems when she 
was growing up.  She is aggressively bisexual, and her sexuality plays a bigger part in 
this story than in earlier ones.  She and Betty go on a road trip in "Belles on Wheels", a 
motorcycle adventure, and the story "Two Women Talking" is told entirely through 
dialogue as Kathy describes an encounter to Betty.  I describe her as older, taller and 
more slender than Betty, and pretty ripped.  Picture Mary Lynne Mackenzie with shorter 
red hair, unless she has changed the color as she threatened to do one Christmas.

JULIE HUNT I gave Betty two brothers.  The older, Ernie, was the instrument for Betty 
and Kathy meeting some years before but he seems like such a lump I haven't bothered 
putting him centrally in a story.  Kathy had dated Ernie.  Then I wrote a story around the 
younger brother, Joey, where I introduced him to his future wife JULIE ("Joey Meets 
Julie").  Betty was referred to but didn't appear.  Writing within the emotional range I set 
for Julie was interesting, so I wrote a story, "Julie in School" with her kicking the crap 
out of three guys in an off-hand way because they hadn't respected her husband rather 
than anything they said about her.  Next she co-starred in a four part African adventure, 
"Jungle Fever" along with another character I have trouble writing for, Renee.  Julie's 
husband Joey made a good foil so I wrote "Face the Fear" to throw him in with Kathy as 
a contrast of opposites.  She is short, particularly short in the legs, with a powerful upper 
body perhaps on the lines of Collette Guimond.

THE STONE COLD WOMAN I spent a year writing stories mostly about a tough 
woman just out of prison who would be living a shadowy existence on the wrong side of 
the law.  I ran her through eight stories on her own ("Stone Cold" appears in the title or 
summary line) before introducing her to Betty and Kathy.  I concluded "Clash Reunion" 
with the Stone Cold woman heading in a different direction so I may be done with her.  
Or maybe not.  The Stone Cold stories are mostly written in a hard-boiled style similar to 
pulp detective stories or the Frank Miller Sin City comics (and movie).  I enjoyed the 
style and might dip into that line again sometime, picking up the character from her 
venture into legitimate business.  No specific body model for her, just extremely 
muscular with a very distinctive hair style.

There are also multi-part stories with women called Grandma Muscles, La Granita, and 
the Mighty Marvel Weights Woman.  I don't plan to do more with them because their 
stories felt complete with nowhere else I could see to develop their characters.  That is 
the point of my writing: to put characters in situations where something happens that 
changes them or the people around them.

ORGANIZING
In 2002 I wrote a story titled simply "Christmas" so I could stir Kathy, Betty and Julie 
into some trouble together and let each respond in character.  It's a good story, so I set 
out to do a bigger Christmas story for 2003.  I set that one on the shelf next to the original 
Christmas story for convenience, my first attempt at bringing order to the shelving.  
Dickens' Christmas Carol offered a useful framework and I stuck in a twist where I link 
in my all-time least favorite Christmas story, It's a Wonderful Life.  "Kathy's Christmas 
Carol" is in three parts and includes a scene from Betty's life well before she met Kathy 
as well as Kathy describing her own hand to hand combat with the spirit of Christmas.  
Betty got involved with two shady characters, Honeycutt and Marlowe.  In good Betty 
fashion she took care of the problem they caused and went on her way.  But Kathy is not 
the sort who would leave an insult or threat unrepaid.  I started thinking about how she 
could get at the present day Honeycutt and Marlowe.  I missed my Christmas 2004 
deadline with "Clash Reunion" where I put the Stone Cold Woman in a boxing ring with 
Betty while Kathy pursued her own agenda in a long two-part story, but got it posted in 
January.  The adventure is emotionally trying for Kathy and strains her relationship with 
Betty.  Because its plot flows out of events in Kathy's Christmas Carol, I put it next in 
line on the shelf.  The ending of  "Clash Reunion" provides a lead-in to Kathy's next 
outing, but it took me a year and a half to put that story together while I worked on other 
things.  

Starting with "Anger Management" I plan to slot any more stories involving Kathy and 
Betty at the bottom of the bookshelf so all of us can find them more easily without a lot 
of hunting around.  A reader could burrow through the sequence at the bottom of the 
bookshelf starting with "Christmas" and continuing on in order to the latest and they 
could all flow together as a single long story as well as each standing on its own.

Comments on the stories can best be sent through the Readers and Writers Message 
Board, so more of us can learn what readers are thinking and writers can share their 
perspectives.  Or send to mrmerz@yahoo.com