Girls Who Punk Rock

Recently, I've been diving into the brave new world of punk rock, or at least the female half of it. The ladies of punk rock are loud and powerful, mesmerizing in the way that anything explosive, dangerous, and slightly unhinged can be.  Check out this photo of The Slits. Don't you envy the lavish mascara use? 
I do. 
But why? you might ask, is a now middle-aged school administrator interested in the wild, lovely ladies of punk rock. Well, when your protagonist is the bassist in a fictional punk band called Once Upon a Crime, it's important to get the details right. So I rolled my shirtsleeves up (or in this case put my headphones on), pushed my glasses further up the bridge of my dorky nose and listened to Luna-Chicks, Gore-Gore Girls, Sleater-Kinney, The Raincoats and several other female punk bands who I did not pay the slightest bit of attention to when I was 20-something and supposed to be raging against the machine. 
In my twenties, I looked like this:

Not the most punk of girls was I. And yet now, at the rusty old age of thirty-five, I love punk music. (Although I still don't wear that much eyeliner.)

Meanwhile, Hubby, in the midst of reading my most recent draft of the new novel, last left this comment on the clean white page ". . .opportunity to sound punky and make rude gestures." I laughed and reminded myself that as writers, our job is to IMAGINE. There is the old comment in author circles that one's first novel is always autobiographical, even when it's not. Second time around, I'm happy to write about someone who is decidedly not me. Right now, my protagonist is a jet black short-haired fairy princess named Pia who plays bass and lights things on fire, and I LOVE HER.

Point is: Research is such a big part of writing. . .and it's not always easy, or fun. But often, it can be. So put those scholarly glasses on and do a guitar solo in the air while screaming "She's a fox in a box and she likes to rock. Let her rock! Let her rock!" The experience might lead you to lands you've never been before.