Somewhere in her book of advice for writers, Starting from Scratch, Rita Mae Brown says something about writing a story from the point of view of a character other than the author’s own sex. I don’t remember the exact words, don’t have my copy with me, and can’t find the quote online. But she says something like this: “Until and unless you can write convincingly about a protagonist who’s the opposite sex from you, you can’t say you’re a mature writer.”

I thought this was challenging, to say the least. Who doesn’t want to be a mature anything? Who wants to believe they’re not already mature?

So I tried a couple things. For one, I made the protagonist of Crossed Wires a woman. I also did a handful of short stories from a woman’s POV.

“The Iron” is one of those stories.

It also is one of those stories which has been workshopped and revised to within an inch of its life — some would say beyond, probably. Agent X (whom I spoke of here) hated one element of the story, which unfortunately was the central element: a steam iron’s place in a position of importance in a story about a married woman.

(Agent X’s point, as she explained it, had something to do with the iron as a symbol of the oppression or outright enslavement of women, and hence an unsuitable vehicle as an object of a wife’s wonder. Something like that, anyhow.)

As you will see, the steam iron in question has many features unlike those of ordinary appliances. Hope you like reading “The Iron” — regardless of your (or the author’s) sex. Here it is.

Update, 2008-10-08: Thanks to Marta’s gentle prodding in the comments on this post, I finally managed (thanks, Amazon!) to find exactly how Rita Mae Brown’s Starting from Scratch addresses this subject (emphasis added):

You must create men who love women and women who love men or your books will be lopsided. In the beginning of everyone’s work the dice are always loaded toward one’s own sex or sex preference. Learning to unload those dice, to throw the bones honestly, is what maturity as an individual and as a writer is all about.