Fat Magic Moments

Took me longer to "edit the original ms." than I expected, but I've posted the third "Lewis Baird story" on the Dimensions website this weekend. Entitled "Rachel's Story," it's a longish piece narrated by the wife of the unnamed mystery man who tells the first two Baird tales, "Marianne/Mare" and "Patricia/Pat/Patti," and it provides a skosh more background info about this inexplicably powerful figure. I enjoyed working on the Baird finale, even though it took much longer for me to wind it up satisfactorily than I originally expected.

Some readers (including Dim publisher Conrad Blickenstorfer) aren't much fond of the political themes imbedded in the first two stories, but to my eyes they needed to be there. One of the original impetuses behind this trilogy was my desire to work a theme that appears in a lot of Internet WG stories (perhaps best repped by the prolific Matt L.) of fatness being connected with lower class status. When more than one study shows a clear correlation between size and income levels (with fat workers frequently making less than their equally qualified thinner peers), this strikes me as legitimate material for fanta-sizer fiction. Once you start talking about class, it's a short step into writing about politics.

Reading some of my fellow fanta-sizers' offerings - where the initially haughty heroines' weight gain was tied into their dropping down in social status - I've long been struck by the writers' ambivalent attitude toward class. On the one hand, we're meant to see the character's weight gain as sexy, but, on the other, their diminution in class is treated with a clear measure of scorn. With the Baird stories, I tried to wrestle with this very American inner conflict, and I think I finally got it right in the third 'un . . .