I’ve been looking forward to March, 2019 for the last eighteen months, because that’s about how long I figured a story like Beauty Pill would take. I didn’t think a contemporary novel would require much world building – now is already here, isn’t it? – but all the pieces have to be put in place for the reader to find it believable, and I wanted to believe it too.

“This story has everything,” the narrator says in her best Pussy Riot accent. “It has corruption, politics, faux science, and sex. It plucks at the deepest hearts of women in Southern Oregon.”

I’ve been writing novels since the last millennium, and got serious about it in 2010. Three of my books are science fiction: Halcyon Dreamworlds, Savage Genesis Book One, and Next History. I also wrote an amateur sleuth mystery, Angle of Attack, which is closest in style to Beauty Pill. I have another novel nearing completion. It’s sci-fi, The Hidden Perils of Suicide. That story examines issues around immortality, a post-biological future, and a robot AI that takes over the world. You can find more on these stories at Baldwin-Books.Com.

Beauty Pill is not from my science fiction mindset. I made sure the title was no magical promise, and to center it in the here and now, I gave the lead character a serious dilemma: she fears what happens after love. The story became the character study of a damaged protagonist, Cathy, and why she’s drawn to the promise of everlasting beauty from a pill. It’s about how she handles the times in her life when she is fooled.

Mostly the book is aimed at the cruelest fiction perpetrated on American women: personal beauty as a measure of human worth.

In the end, I really liked Cathy and Ferg. I was sorry to say goodbye. I wish them well, and hope you feel the same.