That being said, I don’t care what my authors look like or what their age is. It’s about the words. My love for my favorite authors comes from passages that moved me, one liners I never forgot and quote often, characters that haunt me… Age, to me, is only relevant in what it helps bring to a story — perspective. But it certainly doesn’t hinder the process or the writer.

We have lived in a society that seems to fight to the death to look youthful and I don’t understand why. Instead of the elusive youthful beauty they seek, these same people mutilate themselves into grotesque masks that mock their intentions.

I laughed at the comment but clearly I never forgot it. Were romance authors supposed to reflect their heroines? (At thirty-two, it wasn’t much a stretch. At 58, it is.) Or more disturbingly: did she believe romance authors were supposed to go quietly into that good night of “whatever happened to” oblivion after a certain age? I wish I’d asked her exactly what she meant.

Does there come a time when a writer should just stay home and write and leave the public appearances to younger authors? The aging process hasn’t kept (the wonderful, fabulous, seventy-something) Robert B. Parker from getting out there and meeting readers but I now have two female writer/friends who claim their conference/book signing days are over because they’re afraid their sixty-something faces aren’t what their readers expect and that it will negatively impact sales.

Is there an unconscious bias in the industry (the romance industry, in particular) against first-time authors with the aforementioned AARP cards? If a publisher is looking to launch an author’s career, are they more likely to buy the highly promotable thirty year old with her whole future ahead of her or a sixty year old who is well past the halfway point?

Is there a market for books that reflect the lives of fifty- and sixty-something men and women or are we Botoxing our fiction as well as our faces?

I don’t know the answers but this time at least I’m asking the questions.

Age wasn’t/isn’t a problem for Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym, Agatha Christie, Maxine Hong Kingston. A.S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble –

It’s too bad that you didn’t have the financial and artistic security at the time to answer, “I’m sorry you’re a dumbass.”

Disguising yourself as a vampire is a great idea, by the way: aren’t they both ageless and seductive?

Personally, I think we all ought to disguise ourselves as vampires.