I take exception to this because not every woman has a dragon that needs to be slain. There are many of us who are perfectly self-sufficient. For many years, I lived in a very rural setting all by myself and got along just fine; other years I lived in the big city by myself and never felt threatened there, either.

While I can understand Big Mike’s take on the “male role”, it just doesn’t always apply.

There are many things a woman can do to keep herself protected. She can learn self defense, she can buy a gun or a taser, she can own a big dog, and she can get a home security installed for ultimate peace of mind. In fact, Home Security Family offers home security systems for free when signing up for an ADT security monitoring system; if you sign up today at their ADT Security website, you receive a $100 rebate. What could be simpler?

None of these things requires a man in her life. Yeah, men are good for a few things, but they don’t always have to function as our protector. Some of us can take care of ourselves just fine, thank you.

And BTW, we don’t all worry about our butt looking too big…

Women are composed of circles and men are composed of squares. A simple concept we can explore a bit further.

A woman’s life is comprised of a myriad of different roles – wife, mother, the maintainer of the household, an employee (or boss), a creative type, and all the other things we women do and are. Some of us enjoy working on crafts; others like to go hunting. Some love cooking; others love yard work. Whatever the woman’s interests and strengths, she is usually expected to be the one in the household who takes care of lots of different things – paying bills, making sure everyone in the family is fed, taking care of kids and pets, etc.

The center circle is the woman herself. Around her, and overlapping that central circle, are additional circles where she places each of her responsibilities. One circle represents employment, one is children, one is personal time, one is for relationships with friends, one is the family mediator, etc. All of them overlap. So, when a woman comes home at the end of a long, hard day at work, this circle of work is still influencing the other areas, such as family and children. She can’t push one circle outside the arrangement; instead it influences everything else.

Men, on the other hand, are represented by a square. Their additional squares of SEX, employment, hobbies, family, kids, whatever, are all lined up outside that center square. When the man comes home after a hard day at work, he can jump from that square and into the square that represents his family life or sitting comfortably on the couch to TV. Gone are thoughts of the job square, or anything else that doesn’t have immediate significance.

That is why men and women think differently. It’s why women have been so often attributed the old line about, “not tonight, dear, I have a headache”. It’s because we can’t keep those other circles from affecting our mood. Have you ever broken up with a man only to have him ask you for sex one last time? That’s his square personality at work. The sex square is the largest and most powerful and the one he jumps into most often, regardless of what other emotions he just experienced!

So thanks, Sheryl, for explaining it in a way that makes sense.

I had never voiced that trait of the female mind that way, but I had to agree with his observation. I’ve talked to other men who have come to the same conclusion: women have self imposed demons that tug at their spirit, chastise them, make them belittle the wonderful creatures they are. “I’m too fat”, “My fingernails are ugly”, “Was I to slutty last night”, “Was I too reserved”, “Am I a good wife”, “Am I a good mother”, and the list goes on and on. The only voice we guys have is “Is my little buddy sufficient to please her”, and “Did I last long enough”, (you’ll notice they’re both sexual demons, but what would you expect from rutting animals). Everything else, we give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, except if we lose our job or the woman we love, then we beat ourselves up like crazy.

I’m not sure why the difference exists, but it does. Read the magazines tuned to the ladies, or watch the shows like Oprah, Dr. Phil, etc. Many of the topics they discuss deal with the voices that haunt women. In our novel Veil of Deception, I actually had the hero struggling to understand this pain women endure and try to help the heroine stop whacking herself. This is not in anyway a dig on women, just the contrary. I came to the recognition of this reality late in my marriage (about ten years ago) and decided to do everything I could to help the woman I love vanquish her hovering demons. Several times a day, I tell my mate how much I love her, how damn good she looks, how her butt turns me on, what a great job she did or whatever, and the truth is, all those statements are true, but women need to hear them. Now, I don’t do this in the hopes of getting a little more lovin’ (wouldn’t work anyway). I do it, and have mentored my son’s to follow suit, in order to help my wife, my grand daughter, my sister, all the terrific ladies I care about to understand what a gift they are too us men.

I’m not sure why all those voices exist; maybe its upbringing, perhaps hormones, perhaps because of past years of struggling for equality. What ever the cause, I believe as men we have to recognize its not an attempt on our ladies part to confuse us or drive us nuts. It’s just another reason we have to love them all the more and help swat away those demons when ever we can.

See ya soon

Michael Davis (Davisstories.com)

Author of the year, 2008

He made me realize just how different our minds think, and the difference in our writing styles.

I sent out a blanket email asking for help with a tag line for my next Champagne Books release in October, FULL THROTTLE. I included a blurb about the book to give everyone an idea of what it is about:

Samantha Roberts partners with her cousin to run Dr. Doug’s Mobile Dyno, a motorcycle testing and performance tuning business. Spurned by an ex-fiancée and resolved to taking care of her aging father and his medical problems, romance is the last thing she’s looking for while expanding her business is at the top of her priorities list.

Along comes opportunity in the form of Linc Montgomery, a tough, business-savvy, ex-Harley racer and new owner of Full Throttle Custom Cycles in Phoenix. Linc is used to having gorgeous women fall at his feet. When he meets Samantha and agrees to contract her dyno services, he quickly realizes she isn’t one of those brainless bimbos he normally dates before carelessly tossing aside.

The challenge is on for Linc as he sets out to seduce Samantha just to prove he can. However, he doesn’t plan on the interference of his ex-wife and her ex-fiancée – both of whom serve to make him realize that along the way, his ‘love her and leave her’ seduction scheme causes him to fall head over heels in love. But it isn’t so easy to convince Samantha she belongs to him.

Now, Big Mike thought this was just a terrible blurb. However, he writes suspense novels, not light romances like this is supposed to be. He wanted to hear something about the heroine’s inner demons and how the hero would slay her dragons. Yes, Samantha’s got some inner demons, but that’s not the focus of this book other than how it relates to her sex and love life!

His suggestions were very apropos for his books, but not for this one. And it also made me realize that since I am targeting purely female readers, they are looking for something in a contemporary romance that is far different from what a male reader would look for to pick out a suspense novel. My women beta testers loved the blurb and the whole idea of the book; men not so much.

Anyway, I’ve added one more sentence to the top of the blurb: “Phoenix is hot, but the bikers are even hotter”. And so far it looks like the tag line is going to be something along the lines of “A sexy romp of full throttle seduction leading to slow burning love” or “When Linc embarks on a full throttle seduction of Samantha, the last thing he expects is love to throw a wrench in the works “. I’m still working on it, though. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

After three decades of marriage, I’ve concluded that men suffer from what I call “Moth to the flame” syndrome. Even though we’ve been burned by the fire, we always come back again What do I mean? I have been sent out on a hundred assignments by my boss, and every single time I screw up, but instead of just saying, “Oh, no, there’s no way you’re going to get me this time”, I do it over and over again. And it’s not only me. All my buds suffer from the same sad condition.

Case in point. My wife wanted a new floor mat for the front door and assigned me the job of running down to the store and getting it (the old one was too ugly and we had company coming in from out of town). Now, in my defense, I did ask, “What color?”, “Doesn’t matter,” What shape?”, “doesn’t matter”, “What size?” “Doesn’t matter.” Well you get the idea. The kicker is that I ran through the same series of probing questions every time before, but I still always got the wrong thing, and like a moth to the flame, I always raced back into the fire again and again.

As I pondered carefully at the store over a four-dollar purchase, a young man saw me struggling and came over to help the old man examining every single floor mat in the display over and over.

“Can I help you, Sir?”

“Afraid not, Son.”

“Well, I’d like to try.”

“All right. My wife sent me to the store to find…” I didn’t have to finish my thought. With a sad expression and an understanding tone, he slowly shook his head. “I hear you brother.”

“Then you know…”

“Yes, I know. No matter what you do, it will be wrong.”

We both synchronized with lamenting head nods while the young man shared his own experience.

“Two weeks ago, I asked my newlywed wife, ‘Babe, what’d say we drive up the Blue Ridge and afterward stop for lunch. This will be your day, what ever you want.’ You see, I thought I was doing a good thing. I even asked, ‘What time do you want to stop for lunch’ and she said, ‘Oh, I don’t care you decide’ So around 1100 we were passing peaks of otter (a local restaurant) and she mentioned, ‘Isn’t that a cute little place over there?’ I nodded in agreement and kept driving. After another fifteen minutes I noticed the car had become strangely quiet. She was no longer humming or chatting about this and that. All the morning cheer had been replaced by a frown. ‘What’s the matter, Babe?’ I asked. She looked out the window and announced, ‘You don’t really love me anymore, do you?’ Man, I swear, I almost ran off the road. ‘What? Well of course I love you. You mean everything to me.’ ,‘Then why didn’t you stop when I asked you to? I thought you said this trip was about me?’”

I could see moisture forming in the poor boy’s eyes. “I swear man. I never knew when she said that ‘cute little place’ she meant…”

I firmly patted his shoulder and suggested, “I know son. Don’t try to figure it out. Just accept the inevitable. You will always be wrong. As the years go by, you’ll grow to accept your destiny, grasshopper.”

We both shook hands and departed with a profound appreciation for a man’s suffering and willingness to continually return to the flame. Oh, and I did get the wrong floor mat, but you knew that was coming didn’t you?

Michael Davis (Davisstories.com)
Author of the year, 2008

Now here’s my tag as part of the extended network (and I appreciation the inclusion):

Yes, I got tagged by a beautiful and talented author Ciara Gold (or as I call her, Golden Girl). So here are the six things that make me happy:

1.    When I watch my grand daughter hug her daddy (my son), that makes me happy.
2.    When I watch my wife giggle and chat with her girlfriends and I know she’s having a ball, that makes me happy.
3.    When I watch a child at an Easter hunt get such a thrill out of a simple colored egg, that makes me happy
4.    When I watch a wife hug her husband after he’s returned from a tour in harm’s way, that makes be happy.
5.    When I watch my son get excited about spending time with his girlfriend, yeap, makes me happy.
6.    And when a special friend of mind gets healthy again, she will make be very happy.

So here are my six victims:

Mindy   http://www.nitpickyisgood.blogspot.com/
Allison Knight  http://allisonknight.com/
Rose Lerma   http://roselerma.com/
Michelle Pillow  www.michellepillow.com
Patricia Bates   http://www.patriciabates.com
Cindy Davis  www.fiction-doctor.com

Rules: Link to the person who tagged you (http://romancesuspensenovels.com) Write down six things that make you happy. Post these rules. Tag six others. Notify me that you’ve tagged six others–or not.

There, I think I did that right.

Big Mike
Davisstories.com

Believe it or not, when I posted a reply to Candace’s post, I expected her response. Then why do it? Because when she and I agreed to do this blog, our supposition was that we truly wanted to explore gender difference from both the male and female perspective. To do that, we had to be honest and deal with tough issues from perspectives that are created over decades of personal experiences and luggage that each of us bring. In many cases, we will not agree, and that’s OK, as long as we listen and respect the history and perspective of each other. And that’s the case here. Now here’s my take. I don’t post these views to kiss butt to the female side of the audience, and I will admit that I have a soft spot for the girl team, but these are my true experiences and opinions.

I believe we have a definitional difference, but not a disagreement in the difficulty women “can” face in the work place because of a ton of reasons (delta in size between men/women, natural instinct of men to observe pecking order [e;g alpha male], tendency for men to react more physically when frustrated, and a ton of other reasons).  But here’s the rub from my POV. When Candi describes her behavior as aggressive, I see it as determined,  competent, and professional; and I have no problem with it. Now let me describe what I call as aggressive female behavior, which is similar to aggressive male behavior only with less anger. When someone in a work environment tries to disrupt the logical process for no reason but to disrupt the proceedings, or demeans someone, or yells, or acts rude, that’s aggressive behavior to me. Let me give a couple actual examples. I will change names for obvious reasons, but they are all true.

1. I was assigned to manage a Tech Team to develop a series of analytical models to help an organization project how to adapt to a changing environment over time. I was asked to give a briefing before the executive committee with ideas on how our team could help the organization better understand how to survive over the next 15 years. After the briefing I was asked a variety of direct and probing question, exactly what executives should do since my proposals would determine whether they live or died. By the end of the meeting everyone voted and agreed with my proposal except one executive, lets call her Jane. She turned away from me, never asked a question, and wouldn’t even look in my face. Her response was in an extremely demeaning tone. “I’m against it?” All others in the room looked puzzled and the senior official asked, “Why, Jane.” Again without looking at me she huffed, “I just don’t like mathematical models.” I tried several times to interject in order to understand the basis of her concerns but in each case she ignored me. Now understand, this was my first encounter with Jane so there was no history. Finally, I realized she was a “no no.” That was a term people in my profession use for a management that was only comfortable with status quo. Anything that rocked the established mode was a no no. Finally, she informed the senior in the room she was going to tell the Director of the organization it was infeasible to develop models for this project. That was my line in the sand. In a professional but determined tone, I informed the back of her head, “Jane, you may tell the director you are incapable of this task, or even that you don’t agree with it, but you do not speak for me or my team and infer we can’t do it, cause we can. If you do, I will insist on a meeting myself.” Now that to me was aggressive behavior on her part. Needless to say, she was voted down by the committee which actually included two other senior females, we build the model, and we were successful.

2. I worked as a Division chief in a modeling group which was about 50/50 between men and women. One of the managers, lets call her Tammy continually had difficulty with the other women. She always treated them in a demeaning manner, yelling at then in front of their co workers, complaining about their clothes and a ton of other bullshit. She didn’t do it to the males cause they would tell her to go to hell. Finally one day she crossed the line. She accused a wonderful, competent, gentle young female of poor performance and some other stuff that was bull. She demanded she be fired. Now this was a government facility and the only practical way you can fire a civil service employee (other then espionage, stealing, or sexual harassment) is if they are conditional (been there less than a year). I requested the female be transferred to my division on probation and agreed to document her performance over the next 120 days. All parties agreed and after the four months I wrote an exemplary report, because she was fantastic as a team player, her analytical insight was keen as hell, and she was efficient at her job. Tammy was just being an aggressive angry person.

I could give another dozen examples, but the point is, to me aggressive behavior is negative, non productive, unnecessary and causes frustration to other people. The behavior Candace describes is not aggressive, but determined, competent, and professional. It’s interesting that often when women use the term “aggressive” in reference to a woman’s behavior; it is in the context of a positive necessary trait. Yet aggressive behavior from a man is negative and unjustified. The truth is, aggressive behavior is negative regardless who does it, and unnecessary.  Being determined, being resolved, maintaining your cool, being professional, those are characteristics that everyone deserves to encounter in the work place, and that’s what Candace described, at least in my minds eye.

And even being the size of a moose, I have experienced aggressive behavior from men as well, just not as often as professional women, and in each case it was a ploy to cover their own insecurities by attempting to demean others. I recall a case when I worked in the pentagon where action officers (of which I was one) were briefing a group of both civilian and military executives. One executive, we’ll call him George, made an effort to openly demean and chastise each action officer with nasty derogatory comments. When it came my term to brief, and he started chewing on me for proving his office had screwed up the study of a weapon system, I explained that I would be treated with respect or my briefing was over. He yelled at me that I needed to remember my position, or he could have me fired for insubordination, etc. I greeted his aggressive behavior with aggressive behavior myself and told him I’d be glad to continue the discussion in the parking lot. Fortunately, the senior General Officer stepped in, other wise I’d probably still be in jail. Point is both aggressive behaviors were wrong, and his demeaning treatment of all the action officers in the room was to obfuscate his own Napoleonic insecurities.

I do realize as a big male, I never suffered from the crap Candace and other women had to deal with. I also recognize that there are men that dislike women in the workplace because of their own insecurities, but there are women that exhibit the same behavior only its not as physical or threatening, but its wrong just the same. Neither should be tolerated or is professional or beneficial in the workplace. Point is, most people adapt their behavior to what they experience across their life. If they are fair and compassionate toward others, they do not prejudge how they will treat people based on there gender, race, etc. Unfortunately, many of both genders do this and react in an unnecessary aggressive manner to hurt others or appear better then they really are.

I consider Candace’s reaction reasonable, appropriate, and professional to the situations she voiced. I do not define it as aggressive. Course, that could just be me, my baggage, and my experiences.

Wow, that turned our longer than I expected. Bet its full of typos. Proves this is an important topic, you think. I’ve got to get back to actually working on two manuscripts that are due, so Candace, no more comments this week that stimulate me to reply (g), and I’m skipping two weeks since this is my second post this period, so there.

Big Mike

Davisstories.com

“Why?” you may ask.

I tell you, writing a book with a man was a real eye-opener. I can only hope that if you ever get the opportunity to read what we wrote as a joint effort, Veil of Deception, it will greatly enhance your understanding of male-female interactions!

I was going to point up here the likenesses between a man and a woman – the areas where the two can meet in the middle and possibly identify with each other. Instead, I got this funny ad in my Email inbox one day and just had to share. Honestly, I laughed my a$$ off!!!!

Unfortunately, I wasn’t only laughing because I thought it was a funny instance happening to other people; I was laughing (in that pitiful, making fun of yourself sort of way) because I could relate. Honestly. Get this: the second serious boyfriend in my life (one whom I was living with and planning on marrying) for our first Christmas got me as a present….a vacuum cleaner. Really. A Hoover. Upright. Cheapie model. I was the ripe old age of 18. Is this what I had anticipated all year long? A vacuum? Really? Not so much…

For chrissakes, what man out there believes he can get a vacuum for his significant other for Christmas and not end up in the dog house? Or, like the video proclaims about the ‘lifer’, an ab exerciser? If there’s any man out there who would ever consider buying his wife a stomach crunch device cuz she needs it – here’s your sign: S (that’s an “s” for “stupid”, in case you didn’t know).

Now, you may ask, what is an acceptable present for a husband to get his wife or a devoted boyfriend to get please his special gal? The answer: jewelry.

Can’t go wrong there. You really can’t, men. C’mon, think about it. Even if your significant other isn’t really girly like, she can always wear an ID bracelet so’s they know she belongs to should the need arise. And if she’s more Paris Hilton than Jodi Foster, diamonds are always a girl’s best friend. No lie.

So this year, take my advice. Don’t screw up. Stay away from the appliance aisle. Ditto the physical fitness equipment department. Unless you went to end up in hell on earth: the dog house. Think about it.