Write It Up
by Mary Leo, Elizabeth Bevarly, Tracy Kelleher

Welcome to alternative dating . . . the tenth circle of hell DATING RULE #1 Keep an open mind . . . and your phone number handy. It started simply enough. The editor of Tess Magazine demanded an assignment about dating practices for the urban set. Something fun. Something sexy. Something that the three women working on the article -- Julia, Samantha and Abby -- could research and really get into. DATING RULE #2 Engage your reader. If he's hot, buy him a drink. Suddenly Julia seems smitten with a stranger she met during a speed-dating session. Samantha's research into coffeehouse dating is less engaging than the naughty e- mails she's been getting from her "pen pal" in Italy. And Abby is too busy dealing with her new "roommate" -- an Irish photographer who looks like sex in pants -- to get much work done. So how do you write about relationships when your own love life looks like something caught in the garbage disposal?

Mary Leo's Bio

Photo by: Ann Collins

When I was growing up on Chicago’s south (east) side, only a couple bridges away from Indiana, I dreamed that one day I would live in a house with central heating. Not a very imaginative dream, I know, but when you continually wake up in the dead of winter to radiators that have turned into metal popsicles and your mom is keeping the kitchen warm from the open door of a four-hundred degree oven, central heating is all you can think about. That and the beaches of Southern California and maybe the ability to pull Daffy Duck out of the TV through a tiny hole I would magically discover in the picture tube. I always thought it would be great if Daffy and the gang could spend some time at my house, just for laughs.

By the time I hit high school, St. Peter and Paul, I was ready to give up my California dreamin’ and marry a Beatle, but only if he could promise me central heating. I’d heard that England could get very cold during the winter months and I wasn’t taking any chances. I still had visions of Daffy and the gang, but I’d given up looking for the magic passageway in the picture tube.

Instead, I started writing my own stories when my kids were all grown up, and my husband told me I needed to focus on one art form (I was into several at the time). We now live in beautiful San Diego, where central heating is optional, and where Daffy lives on in my heart when he’s not “yucking it up” inside my flat-screen TV.