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​My five kids are the stuff of nightmares, their favorite game: Who would you save? It’s not pleasant. I have to decide which of them gets to live or die if, say, they were all drowning simultaneously or, thanks to The Walking Dead, which one of them I’d rescue during the zombie apocalypse.
 
My stock answer ‘All of you’ (damn their sibling rivalry), breaks the rules, but I don’t care, it’s a horrible game. Though it did seed the idea for my third book Hard to Protect, releasing March 13th via Entangled Publishing, the research leading me an anxious dance through the subject of hysterical/superhuman strength, berserkers and the phrase ‘going postal’.    
 
Anxious dance, because here are just three of the weird and wonderful facts I uncovered: SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH

In 2006, Lydia Angiyou, a slight woman saved several children, including her young son, by wrestling an eight-foot, 700lb polar bear. A mother’s love, or adrenalin? Who knows, who cares—it ended well for Lydia and the children, but not so well for the bear (about which I am sorry—tranquillizer guns before rifles might be the way forward in this gun toting world of ours).   BERSERKING

To go berserk (lovely word) means entering a state of wild and intense fury. It applied to warriors of old who, on the battlefield, were given a wide berth because they tended to cut down any in their path without discriminating between friend or foe. These berserkers, thankfully, were easily identifiable, because as well as howling like animals and chowing-down on their own shields, they wore wolf or bear furs. This bear-warrior symbolism survives today in the form of the high bearskin hats worn by the guards of the Danish and British monarchs.


​'GOING POSTAL'

The slang phrase ‘going postal’ refers to an extreme state of uncontrollable anger to the point of violence, The explosion usually occurring in the workplace. It derives from a series of shooting incidents (20) between1986-1997 during which 40 people died, and all of which involved employees of the US Postal Service. The 1995 film Clueless supposedly popularized the phrase ‘going postal’ and is responsible for is casual usage today.  


So, there you have it. Three potentially useless facts which might just give you an advantage when you’re next playing Trivial Pursuit or watching some quiz show. And no, the life of a romance writer is not all about the love, there’s an fearful amount of the sinister involved too.  


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