Running Forward:

A Writer’s Worst Nightmare

November 18th, 2008

Strange story from the Chicago Sun-Times. It’s a writer’s worst nightmare.

Crime novelist attacked while jogging, in scene similar to book

Life was imitating art when crime novelist Laura Caldwell lay face down on a Lincoln Park street holding pieces of her shattered teeth in her bloody palm.

Her upcoming book, Red Hot Lies, portrays a red-headed female lawyer walking at night through the Old Town neighborhood, feeling increasingly uncomfortable as she realizes she is being followed.

On Thursday, Caldwell, a red-headed attorney who in 2005 successfully defended a man who spent five years in jail awaiting trial for murder, was jogging at Seminary and Altgeld in Lincoln Park when she saw two men — one with a hood pulled over his cap and the other who was lifting his jacket over his head.

Nervous, Caldwell felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. Suddenly, one of the men kicked her from behind, and she fell onto the street.

“They smashed my mouth into the pavement and kicked me a few times,” she said. “They screamed about money, but I said, ‘Guys, I am jogging and I don’t have any money.’ They took my iPod and ran off.”

The book hasn’t been published yet but accoring to this blog it features “a sassy, redheaded trial lawyer who turns to sleuthing when her fiance disappears on the same day her big client is killed.”

For Caldwell’s sake, let’s hope the similarities between her and the character in her book end at the mugging.

Entry Filed under: pop culture, writing