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Sweet Sorrow 
By Arnold Wayne Jones Staff Writer Life doesn’t necessarily imitate art for Kimberly LaFontaine, but the two are inextricably linked.By day, LaFontaine (a pen name) works as a crime reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Angie, the main character of “Picking Up the Pace” — which LaFontaine wrote — is a reporter at a daily newspaper in Fort Worth. LaFontaine is lesbian and her best friend was a wisecracking gay man. Angie becomes involved in a lesbian relationship and is friends with a sassy gay man. But, she says, many of the similarities between author and creation end there. “I did that because I wanted to write about what I know,” she says. “But I dramatized everything.” That license included having Angie go undercover in Tarrant County’s underbelly to find out who is ordering the murders of homeless people — a bit of derring-do that the author herself would never attempt, she says. The resulting suspense-romance novel already has LaFontaine’s publisher anxious for a follow-up. Not bad for a 26-year-old who graduated from college slightly more than a year ago. LaFontaine’s rise from aspiring novelist to published author was remarkably short. She began writing the book in the summer of 2004 — about the same time she started an internship at the Star-Telegram and while still enrolled at the University of Texas at Arlington. Within six months, she completed the novel. She started looking for a publisher by scouring the Internet and reading up on resources for writers. “But the publishers that popped up in this genre seemed stuffy, with submission guidelines that seemed very restrictive,” she says. “I thought there had to be more out there.” LaFontaine finally came upon Intaglio Publications in Florida, a young company that had already signed some of her favorite authors. And unlike many other publishing houses, Intaglio’s only real requirements were “that it’s in the lesbian genre and it contains good writing,” she explains. Intaglio agreed to publish the book, and within six months, it hit the shelves. (“Picking Up the Pace” is currently available on Amazon.com, but should be available at bookstores in North Texas shortly.) After the release last October, LaFontaine was dancing on air. Only a few weeks later, however, her joy turned bittersweet. One of the central characters in the book is Jimmy, a gay guy who used to be one of Angie’s sources. LaFontaine makes no bones about this character being based on one of her closest friends, Sam Lea. “If you change Jimmy’s profession, name and age, then you have Sam,” she says. “I used to steal all of Sam’s quirky and sarcastic comments. I would give each chapter to Sam as it was finished and he thought it was the funniest thing.” They used to joke that LaFontaine employed so many of Lea’s witticisms in the book, she’d have to pay him a fee as co-author. “I told him I’d buy him a present with the royalties, and he said he wanted black leather chaps,” she says. “Obviously, I can’t do that now.” Lea was the UTA student that police found murdered on Halloween. LaFontaine’s voice chokes with emotion when recalling her friend and inspiration. They met three years ago in a photojournalism class, and both soon worked at The Shorthorn, UTA’s student newspaper. “He forced me to go to class. He’d come down to the office and grab me by the arm. Sometimes he’d have to bribe me with a coffee of something. It was good for me,” she says. Her affection for Lea led her to base a character on him. She even recognized Lea in the book’s acknowledgements as “funny and sarcastic as hell … but terribly honest.” Lea’s homicide two weeks after the release has been especially rough on LaFontaine, who “almost had a wreck” when she drove by his apartment the night his body was discovered and saw police cruisers and crime-scene tape. She intends to donate “a chunk of money” to Lea’s scholarship fund at UTA once her royalty checks begin rolling in. Until then, she’s busy working on a sequel, “Preying on Generosity.” But even that is colored by her strong feelings about Lea. “I can’t do the sequel without Jimmy, so it’s tough. I think every author loves their first book because it’s their first book. But mine is that much more special because Sam is in it so much,” she says. Still, LaFontaine is proud that she was able not just to celebrate Lea’s life, but also the lives of gay Texans like the ones she knows. “I wanted to give my publishers a lesbian book set in our area because there aren’t a lot. Believe me, I looked,” she says. “I also wanted to give some insight into what it’s like to be a journalist because a lot of people have misconceptions. And I wanted to give a story that was written with less flowery writing and a faster pace. I like that it’s a quick read from which you can walk away after three hours and still remember the characters.” |
Bi-Curious? By Dan McGraw Staff Writer No one knows what makes a good novel, but even the most experimental storytellers must meet two main criteria: plot and character development. The characters must be believable, and the plot must be driven by the characters’ reactions. Kimberly LaFontaine is the pen name of an Arlington writer whose first novel, Picking Up The Pace, has just been published. A real-life correspondent for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, LaFontaine is openly gay and has announced on her web site that she will marry her girlfriend next year. She’s said she doesn’t use the pseudonym to hide her lifestyle but to keep her journalism and fiction separate. Funny, because LaFontaine has said that the novel is based on a lot of her own experiences here in town, including but not limited to her friendship with Samuel Jarnigan Lea, a gay man who was found murdered in Arlington a few months ago, right after the book was published. He served as the basis for a character named Jimmy, according to the book’s acknowledgments. Even weirder is that Picking Up The Pace’s main character is a newspaper reporter whose life is changed dramatically by violence. The novel follows the life of Angie Mitchell, a young “hot-shot reporter” who finds herself covering boring city hall for the fictional Fort Worth Tribune. Her editor moves her to the crime beat, and she latches onto a story in which homeless people are being mysteriously murdered. Along the way, Angie’s boyfriend leaves her, and the reporter comes to grips with her attraction to a lesbian rock singer, Lauren Lucelli. The book takes two paths simultaneously: Angie spends a lot of time thinking about whether she’s gay, and, at work, she digs into the homeless murder cases, ultimately finding herself in the middle of a crime drama whose tendrils stretch all the way to the upper floors of city hall. LaFontaine’s writing is decent; it’s not arty or pretentious but simple and easy to follow, which lets the book move along at a good clip. The disorientation comes in the form of poor character development and an outrageously unbelievable plot. The problem with the main characters is that we don’t learn much about them. They don’t have any negative qualities: Angie is trying to save homeless people through her journalism, Lauren is a former Peace Corps volunteer who wants to get back to teaching Africans to read, and Jimmy is the happy-go-lucky gay buddy who seemingly cares only about the two women hooking up, even though he himself isn’t getting any action. Most real people, with fixations and addictions, can’t compare to LaFontaine’s angels. The most we learn about Lauren, for example, is that on one occasion she wears “skin-tight black leather pants and a black muscle-sleeved top, her hair loose.” Angie duly “note[s] that she looked almost dangerous.” Fiction Writing 101: If your idea of character development amounts to merely listing what he or she wears, you need to find a new creative outlet. The only aspect of the book that LaFontaine handles well enough is the tension between Angie and Lauren and Angie and her confusion, mainly because the writer treats her characters as normal folks trapped in very earthly circumstances, not heavenly creatures. That’s still not enough to deliver this novel — or its readers — from purgatory. |